Post Graduate Party Pooper

The end of the Christmas season is nigh.  Tomorrow is the feast of Epiphany and soon ornaments, lights, displayed greeting cards, a creche and other tokens of the holidays will be stored away until the "rolling year" has completed another roll.  There is something ineffably sad about these tasks, the pangs made perhaps a bit more piercing because of the failure to begin the process of decorating nearer to the days immediately after Thanksgiving than to the days just prior to Christmas day itself.

The melancholy, it must be made clear, begins to intrude even before the old year is chased into the shadows of immutable history along with the unwanted piles of used up wrapping paper, tossed confetti and lipstick stained champagne glasses.  Too many strikings of the clock at midnight and too many ambivalent stirrings about the old year and the uncertain new one, conjoined with more than a few unpleasant events in the wee hours of the first day of more than a few Januarys, have afforded, if not wisdom, then a certain great reserve and prudence about embracing the giddiness almost demanded by twenty-something revelers who, oblivious to their bladders and arthritis free limbs, fear not their choices or their even already rutted paths, as they stand for many an hour jammed along The Great White Way to note deliriously a manmade delineation between our past and our hopes for what may or may not come.

There is no good reason to dismiss these youthful bands as misguided or foolish.  May as well separate frolicking puppies and scold them for their antics.  Play is for the young and their celebration is for life itself.  There is no need to darken their light.  They will discover the clouds on their own and a contemplative mindset may not necessarily dim their ardor for childlike joy and merriment, nor should it.  But for we of a more somber nature, demarcations between commencement and cessation somehow remind that finiteness is the commander of the universe, much like the summer solstice announces the longest day of the year and the beginning of summer while it simultaneously yet declares the unstoppable waning of summer's sway. Or as a pre-Vatican II priest of my early youth proclaimed the title of more than one of his homilies: "Every Cradle Is a Coffin".