Procastinations

Yesterday was the first day of the year. On the previous night, following my mother’s tradition every eve of a new year, I woke up near midnight to turn on the lights in the house and in the garden. My mother said a lighted house will draw the new year into the home, make it welcome. She did the same for Vishu and in later years for Chinese New Year. I have tried to observe that ritual wherever I lived, even in those years of my life when I attended the New Year countdown with friends in their houses or in restaurants. Only my wife and I were home this New Year’s Eve. We would have had friends as we did in past years when the home was where we counted the hours to the New Year. This last was a bleak year, of people dying from the pandemic, of restricted movements, of livelihoods lost, and in the last weeks of the year, as if all that which happened were not enough, the waters rose in a typhoon that took more lives and those lives that were spared had their homes and belongings taken from them. Any celebration would have been out of joint with the time.

Tayler’s barking woke me up as I knew it would before I knocked off to bed early for the night. Tayler hated the sound of crackers. Even a single cracker going off in the distance would get her excited. Monty, the other dog in the house is not bothered by the noise and would sleep through the night even when the crackers and fireworks reached their crescendo at midnight.

I turned on all the lights in the house and the lights on the garden wall. Fused bulbs reminded me of my procrastinations. I remembered that some of the bulbs had not been working the previous New Year’s Eve. I must get to change them I had promised then. Before Chinese New Year, I had said to myself, which is always about a month away. My life, I felt was lived in two spheres. In one, the imagined life, everything was neatly ordered, bulbs replaced, leaking taps repaired, bills and credit cards paid on time, friends and relatives visited regularly. In the other sphere, tardiness prevailed. Most things that needed doing were rushed and done at the last moment. I can’t count the number of times my car ran out of petrol or found a car tyre that I knew needed air flat in the morning when I was already late for work. The second sphere is where I have lived.

It was course not the first time such thoughts had dawned on me. They were the depressing part of every summing up in the dark, noisy hours when the clock turned its needles to measure another year waiting to be counted. Maybe by nailing those failings with these words I can this time get rid of the jinx of procrastination and change those bulbs before the next year.