The Final Blue By Laura J. Oliver

It takes Earth 365 days to complete one circle around the Sun, while it takes Uranus 84 years to make that trip. Even that isn’t a lot of time compared to Neptune’s orbit. Just one revolution around our parent star takes her 165 years. How lucky are you to get a new start, to celebrate a new beginning every twelve months?

When I was in my twenties and thirties, the Eve of the New Year required planning. It might be a reservation for the set dinner menu and dancing at a popular restaurant, complete with noisemakers and a party hat you were not going to see me wear. I was never that drunk, except perhaps, on the first New Year’s Eve of my married life—at the Hotel Oriente in Barcelona, Spain.

My new husband’s ship had finally docked after days of delay chasing a Russian sub, and overnight leave had been granted. That evening, we opted to join the hotel’s celebration, which, in Spanish tradition, included eating 12 grapes, one at a time, in the final minute before midnight, as the old year took its last breath. Then, (you can only do this in a foreign country with a round-trip ticket), joining a conga line of celebratory Spaniards doing the bunny hop. (Stop picturing this.)

In my thirties, the New Year arrived in the company of beloved friends, as we prepared and enjoyed a gourmet dinner together, celebrating the well-being that is the gift of deep familiarity—friends whose presence felt as intimate as family. 

More recent celebrations have included dinner at home with friends, where we each wrote down our wish for the new year on a tiny scroll, rolled it up, and tossed it into the crackling fire in the fireplace. The Chinese have a similar tradition of writing down all you want and hope for in the coming year on a beautiful sheet of embossed paper, then setting it aflame. All your prayers are sent skyward, up and up, to disappear into the cosmos, where it feels as if there is a place they might be answered.

Maybe those atoms rise to the tropopause–not a fixed boundary but a fluid one–where weather becomes atmosphere. All turmoil ends, and chaos yields to order. The upper boundary where air forgets itself. 

Or the Karman Line, 62 miles up —the leaving line– the place where the atmosphere of earth becomes space. Where the air is too thin to fly, so flight becomes orbit, and orbit becomes falling, falling, falling. 

I wonder if, as you enter the New Year, your wishes are new, or whether you pray the same prayers every year, and what tradition enfolds them. 

Mr. Oliver’s parents were from the South, so New Year’s Day dinner featured Hoppin’ John, a mix of black-eyed peas, rice, and pork, symbolizing wealth, luck, and prosperity. My mother and a few close friends jumped off a low step on the stairs into the family room to symbolize leaping into the New Year together. They did this until it was no longer prudent to stick a landing in high heels.  

Then came the years when I asked myself whether finding something pretty to wear, securing a babysitter, braving drunk drivers, and 29-degree weather was fun or simply stress. I suspected this wasn’t me; it was me acting out society’s idea of a good time. That’s when lobster by the fire and Netflix started looking pretty good, and the New Year blessed the world with its appearance while I slept.

I did not have a plan for this New Year’s Eve. My idea was for you to come over, bring the champagne, and I’d build the fire. As the New Year takes her first steps, let’s write down our wishes for ourselves, for those we love, for the healing of the world, knowing the line between wishes and prayers is as thin as the seam between air and elsewhere.  

Perhaps they will rise to the tropopause, where movement turns to stillness, where storms flatten out, not gone, but no longer rising. 

May the New Year bring peace on earth, and may it begin in me; may it begin in you. May love prevail at the leaving line, the hem of heaven, the final blue. 

Happy New Year, beloveds, Happy New Year!

---

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.