A new year always puts a perspective on time, I feel. The breaking point that a new year signifies is both happiness and anxiety, hope and regret, new beginnings and old ends. Looking back at the past year, looking forward to the one coming up, thinking about all that we have experienced, have not done, had wanted to feel, together with our hopes for the new year, our dreams and wishes, is like looking with one eye through a telephoto lens compressing distances, making far things come near, all while having the normal life shining in trough the other eye.
Having a baby in the family makes time’s very existence even more tangible. When last year started, our baby was just seven months old and could not do much by himself. Fast forward a year, and our baby runs around, climbs on everything he sees, repeats words in Swedish as well as Japanese and English, and shares his personality in all it wonderful expressions with us. One year ago we took long walks with our baby in the pram; this year he runs ahead to get to the playground as quickly as possible. It feels like yesterday when I was carrying a little tiny baby in my arms, and it also feels like a lifetime ago, like that baby was me forty odd years back, growing up with my father playing with in front of the Christmas tree, running around with me in the snow outside.
In Sweden there is a traditional box of different kinds of chocolates that is commonly found in peoples homes on Christmas. It is a red box called Aladdin and when I was a child there were a few pieces of chocolates that I really really liked, and many kinds I rather avoided. Then there were the few that I could not even think of eating, something I shared with everyone else in my family except for my dad. When the box was nearly empty, there were only liquor and rum and raisin chocolates remaining, all of which my father happily ate to my bewilderment. I had tasted them and could not understand how anyone by his own will could eat such an abomination. I was sure that filling them with spirits was the best way to destroy an otherwise fine piece of beautiful chocolate.
I have been living with image of my dad eating those chocolates this new year’s holiday, wondering at myself, at how small life is in the greater scheme of things; how easy it is to be so sure about something only to, a few blinks of an eye later (or rather as in this case a couple of dozens of years), find myself sitting in a chair in front of the Christmas tree savoring the very same kind of chocolates I could not understand that my father would put in his mouth. How sweet those evenings have been when my wife and I have had a little quiet time together, watching a movie, eating chocolate with chocolate destroying stuff inside; poor dad the next Christmas we spend together – he will find himself with serious competition for his favorite chocolates then.
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