January 1, 2000
Monday

There’s a saying my mother used to repeat at this time of year: A bayberry candle burned to the socket brings health to your body and wealth to your pocket. Although the rhyme does not specifically refer to New Year’s Eve, I’ve come to think of it as describing a good luck charm for capturing the last of December’s golden glow before encountering what Maryland poet Linda Pastan calls “the vacancies of January.”

At left you see a picture of the bayberry candle I burned last night. I wasn’t quite sure what precisely the spell demands — how big a candle, burn before or after or merely through the midnight hour, etc. I chose a ten-inch taper, set it on a table beside the television, and lighted it about 9:00, just as Ron and I settled in to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Earlier in the evening we’d gone to dinner with Lynn at a country hotel a few miles up the road. This had been a last minute decision, and when I called for reservations all they could offer us was 4:30. That suited us just fine. Afterward we dropped Lynn at a friend’s party in the next neighborhood south of ours, accessible by a back road with no need to go out on the main drag.

Quiet New Year’s Eves have been the norm for Ron and me since we met. He abhors crowds under any circumstances, and is especially wary of travel when more idiot revelers than usual are out and about. Usually we choose a long, classic movie like River Kwai, timed to end just before the televised ball dropping festivities. This year I knew I’d have to go out anyway at 12:30 to fetch Lynn and her friend Kim, who would be staying at our house. This was Lynn’s first New Year’s Eve party with her own friends, at a home where I felt confident that a dozen 14-year-olds would be appropriately supervised, and it was fun to watch her be excited about it.

So we watched the contest of wills between Colonel Nicholson and Colonel Saito and saw the bridge blow up in time to switch to the stroke-of-midnight hoopla in the Eastern U.S.time zone. There was a little more of the candle left, but with Auld Lang Syne sung the spell of the evening was broken and there seemed no real point to further burning.

Near midnight we heard firecrackers going off up the hill. When I left to get Lynn and Kim all was quiet. It was warm and windless and I liked driving along the hushed streets, seeing which houses had lots of cars in their driveways. Most people’s Christmas lights were on, and their window candles made little points of white and red that glowed through the fog that was beginning to accumulate.

We awoke to a misty moisty morning that felt more like a Sunday than a Saturday. I read yet another editorial page diatribe about which century we might be in, and when I relighted the bayberry candle to photograph it I wondered about the origin of my mother’s rhyme. It sounds vaguely 19th century American, but it could also be a remnant of her very distant Celtic past, roots so remote I doubt seriously my mother ever thought about them.

But I do. Somewhere on a rocky beach in Ireland two thousand years ago there walked a woman who is my grandmother to some astronomical power. She gathered wood for her fire, lighted candles and spoke spells to ward off evil spirits and encourage friendly ones. If she thought about the date, she’d say she was two months into Samhain, the winter season. She lived and breathed and had her being there on the misty moors, unaware that great forces would soon be set in motion that would one day see her culture twisted and reshaped and all but eradicated.

I believe that a little of her survives in me. It’s expressing itself right now in a call to be more grounded, to work some nourishment into my roots, to know more fully the place where I stand. I’ll need a good deal of the health the candle promises if I’m to plant both feet firmly anywhere. But I look around at my life this first day of a new year with its magical round cipher and know I already have the wealth.

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