Happy New Year

When I met Richard, he said, “I’m not a Cartesian. I don’t feel a separation between my body and my mind. I don’t even think my mind is limited to my brain. I think it’s everywhere in my body and even outside me.” I said, “Me too.” That was nineteen years ago. He said, “The right hand cannot give gifts to the left hand.” I think it can, although maybe you have to be an octopus. He said, “You can’t jump into the same river once.” That’s clear.

On New Year’s Eve, you look back and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the moment. You make resolutions you can’t keep—on purpose. You promise to be reborn, but you love your funk. And it’s much easier to disappoint yourself than it is to disappoint others. Richard said, “Every promise invites a change of heart,” and when he said this I felt a wave of love for him rise, or a wave of love for the human mind and the pleasure it takes to maintain its form.

I made Richard sound like a wooden fortune teller at a penny arcade, where you put a coin in a slot and he spits out fortune cookie sayings. This is a credit to Richard. The fortune teller knows a thing or two. Every promise certainly invites a change of heart. Last year, when we got married, we didn’t promise anything.

What you learn when skiing is that you have to point your skis down the mountain. This is scary and true. On New Year’s Eve, gravity stops, and you fall upwards. Actually you always fall up. That’s why you can float. When you ski, you hear a clicking sound like a gear shifting into place, and you don’t necessarily understand it. All you have to do is point the skis down. You should reduce the weight of your downhill skis. There must be downhill skiing, even if the skiing appears to be parallel. One ski at a time, you shift the weight and edge slightly, but you have to level the ski for a moment before edging. You have to let the mountain carry you to feel the fall of flight.

Often I think of Valentina Tereshkova, who on June 16, 1963 became the first woman to undertake a spacewalk. The mission lasted almost three days. He’s uneducated, but he’s strong, and he loves jumping out of planes. We shouldn’t want to fall, but he feels good about not being attached to anything.

I once visited the home of a famous novelist, who was a friend of a friend. I am thirty. My friend and famous novelist was older. The famous novelist was making chicken soup when we arrived. He is a shy and quiet type of person. He thought he could make chicken soup with water and chicken. I should have kept my mouth shut. A famous novelist asked how long chicken should be boiled. My friend knew he didn’t really want to know. I said, “You need stock. You can’t make soup with water and vegetables and chicken. At the very least, you need gold bars and spices.” The famous novelist looked back at me and said nothing. I’m glad I didn’t mention the thing about roasting the bones. My friend regrets taking me. However, our friendship fell apart. I’d love to tell you that I’m never offering unearned cooking advice again, but I can’t tell you that. You know how resolutions work. I think about this story often. I know you’re not surprised.

When, at eight years old, I learned to do a back dive, I thought I could learn to do anything. It doesn’t matter that I was wrong. On New Year’s Eve, as the clock disappears, you remember the time you learned to levitate. That was my first sip of a margarita. It’s an amusement park ride, where you spin so fast you lose your shape. Easy-to-erase chalk lines. We really hope for change. We want to believe that the past never happened, even though it still happens. Do you remember the breakfast tray left outside the door of the little hotel in Paris where you were staying? What exactly is a float? Suspension comparison.

From time to time, the idea of ​​moving to England came up. Richard lived there until he was thirty-four years old. When he left, he knew it was the wrong body for his accent. If the place you are in is not a place where you can live, you will be no matter how old you are and small enough to fit on a paper boat and sail away.

When we were considering moving, I suggested Edinburgh, as neither of us had ever lived there and in the TV series it looked cool. He said, “In winter, Edinburgh will be cold and dark. I think we should go to Dorset.”

One summer we visited Dorset. We were climbing on top of a giant cliff, and Richard had low blood sugar. While he was recovering, we lay down on the grass and made a little tent with our umbrellas. On the beaches in Dorset, everyone finds fossils. We didn’t find anything. It was as if we were cursed. I said of Dorset, “We can always look for more fossils.” Richard said, “It is better to find a fossil than to be a fossil.” No argument there.

I love the scent of perfume on my neck. How do birds know there are seeds in a frozen feeder? Last year, I spoke on the phone with my former psychiatrist. I’ve been reading my notebooks from the seventies and eighties, and I feel a wave of love for him rising. I told him he had helped me. I think he knows that. Getting to know me is a job for him, and he gets paid to put up with me. I wish I could have paid someone else I knew back then.

A few weeks ago, Richard’s brother died. He was ill, but his death was quick, and Richard could not get to England in time. A week later, on the day of his cremation, Richard was overcome with anger that was easier to feel than sadness. The sadness of having had another pint in the pub, another memory of riding a donkey on a cold beach in Blackpool.

In a recent article Richard wrote entitled “Piano,” he recalled a Christmas morning when he was twelve and Roy was fifteen, and his father gave them both a record album. Roy was given Moonlight by Bill Evans. The family visited Richard’s grandfather’s pub in Lancashire, where old pianos from the pub were kept. Richard was stopped by the music. He wrote,

I find it hard to say how it affected me. I know I forgot about the Beatles, forgot about the jazz version My Fair Lady I have been given. I was really amazed at what Bill Evans did with his chords, or undoing them, or redoing them. Years later, I dreamed that I was in a giant room with eleven pianos. In the dream, I played the chords like Bill Evans, but my fingers grew stiff, and I couldn’t finish it, even though it was in my head if not in my hands. One day, at my brother’s memorial service, guests entered the track from Moonlight. It is the first song on the album entitled “Re: Person I Knew.” In 1990, I bought an electric piano that I’ve carried around with me ever since. Now it’s up there, and I promise myself, once again, to learn how to play it.

Take a guess? He did. He went up and down the stairs practicing the first bar of “Ode to Joy” and chose “Frère Jacques.” It turns out you can resolve to change your life, even though resolutions are a kind of magical thinking. Like a promise or vow—the idea that if I say it, it will come true. Why does this sometimes happen? Richard didn’t want to die before he could live as fully as possible. Apart from that, learning to play the piano is good exercise for the brain.

A lot of things happen in my life, I didn’t plan them. “Text me when you get there,” everyone said. I love this quote from an interview Sarah Bernhardt gave shortly before her death in 1923, at the age of seventy-eight. The other day I read it on Facebook, posted by Charles Busch: “Life is short, even for those of us who live long, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and forgive us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence.

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards of What’s Happening, long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Essay Arts. He often writes for Paris Review on line, and Substack is Everything is Private.

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Gaming center adalah sebuah tempat atau fasilitas yang menyediakan berbagai perangkat dan layanan untuk bermain video game, baik di PC, konsol, maupun mesin arcade. Gaming center ini bisa dikunjungi oleh siapa saja yang ingin bermain game secara individu atau bersama teman-teman. Beberapa gaming center juga sering digunakan sebagai lokasi turnamen game atau esports.