Auld Lang Syne

 Auld Lang Syne

“It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world” 

• Mary Oliver, Invitation 

I am trying to describe what I feel when I look at a painting I love. Specifically the first glance, when my stomach drops and my breath stops for only a moment. It is like the love at first sight written about in romance novels, the realization that my life has been irrevocably changed by only a glance. 

I have experienced this with other art too, when a statue is so much bigger than I expect it to be, its presence in a space indisputable. Or, when a sentence is crafted with such attention to emotion that I feel like my own mental fortitude has received cracks from at least a seven on the Richter Scale. 

This year, in recovery from my previous year, I am very intentionally spending time with art. (It helps that I am currently employed by two art museums). My favorite moments are the unexpected ones, like when I walk into a gallery and all of the lights are off. The art feels more alive in the dark, like it too needs sleep. 

I spend one hour a week cleaning cases in galleries and it has become precious time. There is a great intimacy in cleaning, of taking care of something with gentle affection. I latch on to all of the striking objects I would not have found unless I was assigned to that gallery that day. Objects crafted as proof of life and I am lucky enough to be grounded by them. 

Since the new year, I have been thinking a lot about the meaning of the song “Auld Lang Syne.” The direct translation is “old long since” but is more colloquially translated as “times long past.” It was written by Robert Burns, a Scottish poet who I have been familiar with my whole life. In the 1920s, my hometown dedicated a sculpture in his honor. I am not sure of the connections between Burns and Quincy, other than a high Scottish population 100 years ago, but I have always appreciated his stone existence in my little world. My mom quotes his poetry every time we drive past the statue. 

Times long past have been on the brain a lot recently. Mostly because I deal with historic objects on a daily basis, but also because I am nostalgic to a fault. (Not a new fact, I basically walk into a room with a sign on my chest that says “NOSTALGIC TO A FAULT”).

More than anything, it is because I am spending a lot of time with my oldest friends. More time than I have spent in years, not since we were teenagers and hopelessly hormonal. These dear people, friends I have shaped so much of myself around, keep making me pause in the same way art does. 

Sometimes it is because I remember that they are real. That even though the last six years of our lives were captured only in catch-ups every six-months, I get to see them regularly now. Sometimes it because I realize I am out of practice. That hanging out with these old friends makes me feel like unlocking old muscle memory, like putting on a former favorite pair of shoes. It takes a second to remember, but once I do, I know it all so well. 

Sometimes it is because I remember falling in love with them the first time (and good friendship certainly is love). At fourteen, my head full of stories, each of them fit so neatly into my own design. 

It seems like time is existing simultaneously now, like I am watching two parallel stories, my youth and my new adulthood overlapping and blurring in the realization that as much as we have grown and changed separately, we still know each other well. We still react to each other in familiar patterns and yet we are somehow better friends. Like all the building we did in our teens was actually so we could be closer in our mid-twenties. It makes me feel like I am standing very close to my favorite painting, my breath caught, and my life changed forever.