Happy or Not, It's Here

An unaccustomed calm over San Miguel this morning. The sun shines across the rooftops, the streets are disarmingly quiet, the usual prevailing racket of some infernal foundry eerily silent - no one hammering on a piece of sheet metal, no one's auto alarm going off, the fireworks spent, only the occasional buzz of a passing motorbike, the toll of a bell and the voice of the dove is heard in the land. Even the municipal dogs are asleep, mirabile dictu. And little wonder, since the entire populace was in the streets all night. They take Feliz Ano Nuevo seriously in Mexico.  Even the toddlers were out at three a.m.

I don't think I've been awake and upright to usher in the new year in two decades, jaded as I am of resolutions, excessive noise, contrived expectancy and fresh starts. But San Miguel from a rooftop on New Year's Eve, looking out towards La Parroquia and waiting for the fireworks to commence at midnight is sufficient to remove the dust from the weary traveler, thirst from the parched soul, mist from the rheumy eye, and to raise the gout-ridden from his solitary cot of woe. The old parish church is lit in its own surreal pink glow, a wierdly elaborated candle shining across the entire city. As the church bells begin slowly to boom away the old calendar year, its wild roccoco belfries are lit again in sudden blooms of incandescence. Firework blossoms in green, red, and blue flare upwards from the pavements around the steeple on glittering stalks of light, the illuminated cross at its finial engulfed in wreathing smoke, all the surrounding colonias looming about like a city under siege - sparkling, smoky, crackling with small arms fire and the boom of heavier ordnance, all the incendiary commotion carried along by the diapason of the bell tolling midnight. 

The custom of the country, as the bell sounds the new year, is to eat a single grape for each toll of the bell, and to make a wish as each grape goes down. After wishing for world peace, I wished for a pony, to be able to play Kachadourian's "Fire Dance" on the piano, to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven's Ninth, to be able to memorize the entire table of the elements and Martin Luther's 95 Theses . . . and then I just couldn't think of any more wishes. I suppose, all things considered, not being able to think of anything else isn't a bad start to the new year.