Starting a New Year

Starting a New Year
With a New Battery and Insight

There I was during the day of New Year’s Eve getting a new battery for my watch. I have had the exact watch for several decades. It isn’t a fancy or expensive timepiece. Nonetheless, I really like it. That being said, I know of only one store that can take the back of the watch off to replace the battery.

While having my watch’s battery replaced on the last day of the year at a local mall, I went to a bagel place at the other end of the mall. While munching on my toasted asiago bagel, I pondered the irony of my watch running out of energy to tell the time and 2023 ran out of days.

New Year’s Eve

Times like this are fortuitous moments for me. There I sat, writing notes about a napkin. I jotted down several things before returning to pick up my watch. My old watch was ready for 2024, and I returned home.

Later in the evening, several hours before the New Year arrived in Crown Point, IN, I thought about being in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the fireworks on New Year’s Eve of 1969. I lived in a flat in Ramsey Garden, which is a large apartment complex on the right side of the castle’s esplanade. It is the best place in all of Edinburgh in which to live. This is the New Year’s Eve fireworks in Edinburgh. It wasn’t like this a half-century ago.

Late at night, I started this essay. The last article in 2023, What’s It All About, addressed living and creating memories. Some crucial memories aren’t remembered or can’t be retrieved by everyone. That is haunting and raises the question, what should be done?

This first essay of the New Year of 2024 addresses how we should function in the coming year and for as long as we are on our yellow brick road called life. I learned that lesson about life from a part of a poem I memorized for Mrs. Davis in my 12^th-grade English class. Everyone had to memorize a hundred lines of poetry or prose each semester while in high school. While I wasn’t enthusiastic about that assignment of memorizing, I benefited from it all my life.

One of my favorite poems is The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell. It is based on an Arthurian legend about King Arthur sending his knights of the Round Table in search of the Holy Grail. One of the knights was Sir Launfal, who spent much of his life looking for the chalice used during the Last Supper. Interestingly, Launfal rides out of his castle in his bright, shiny armor in search of the Holy Grail.

Launfal and the leper

During his quest, he sees a leper for which he has contempt. Nevertheless, Launfal failed. He is now a broken man and has nothing.

Launfal, the broken man

What is fascinating about Launfal is that, amid his own suffering, he gives a stranger a drink of water from the steam and shares a piece of his bread. The following is one of the stanzas that I memorized six decades ago.

His words were shed softer than leaves from the pine,
And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine,
Which mingle their softness and quiet in one
With the shaggy unrest they float down upon;
And the voice that was calmer than silence said,
“Lo, it is I, be not afraid!

In many climes, without avail,
Thou had spent thy life for the Holy Grail;
Behold, it is here, – this cup which thou
Didst fill at the streamlet for me but now;
This crust is my body broken for thee,
This water His blood that died on the tree;
The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another’s need, –
Not that which we give, but what we share, –
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who bestows himself with his alms feeds three, –
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me.”

Lowell’s poem presents the manner we should follow for this New Year and all that follows.

This is a reading done by LibriVox of The Vision of Sir Launfal.