At least January is much better in California
By Carl Heintze
T.S. Eliot once started a poem by writing "April is the cruelest month ... ." That's funny, I've always thought it was January.
As another pundit, W.C. Fields once said, "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."
Or even Hawaii.
Let's face it. Few of us think of January with affection. The year has just begun, the weather is cold, dark and wet; winter is at its height or, as I think of it , at its depth, and with its arrival has come at the least a cold or at the worst the flu.
So it's hard to find much redeeming in January. But let's try.
Alas, not many will admit they were born in January (although, yes, I know, Martin Luther King Jr. was). Instead, conception seems to favor other months because they are either hot or cold. Babies may be conceived in January, but they're not often born then. There's some kind of a message in this, although I'm not sure what it is.
Well, you may say January is a beginning and not an end. One year's over, another is starting. I don't seem to find a lot of joy in this. In fact, I've never been sure why people celebrate the ending of one year and the beginning of a new one.
In January, Christmas and the joy of giving is past. Instead it's time to pay the credit card bill for all those gifts. Bills for pleasures past usually arrive sometime in darkest January, about the time when you wonder where all the money you made in the year just passed has disappeared.
But after a fashion, January is a beginning.
It's time to tote up things just past in preparation for the coming of April 15 and income tax time. January is fiscally and financially a low time. One makes budgets, unsure of keeping within them and is perturbed by the excesses of the year just past. Resolutions seem a good idea, although by March we've forgotten most of them.
That's hardly a season of celebration.
In fact, it's hard to find anything worth celebrating in January. The land is barren, the trees are empty of leaves and fruit, the sky is often cloudy or rainy. Hardly any flowers are growing. Well, in California there might be a few, but eastward living things are under the snow.
One rises in the dark and goes to sleep in the same gloom. The days seem to get longer so imperceptibly that they don't really. There's not much to celebrate in January, even though tradition places Epiphany there. I suppose we should be thankful for that.
And, if we are skiers, snowboarders or snowshoers (which, alas, I'm not), the season is at its height. There's probably more snow than there is going to be all the rest of the year.
In some parts of the world, Buffalo, N.Y., for instance, that would not be a boon. Snow is something Buffalo often has too much of.
Not so in California. Here snow falls where you can take it or leave it. Most folks, including me, leave it, but I do faintly remember a time when I was excited by it, went to it, plopped around in it and then, thankfully, departed from it.
You couldn't do that in Buffalo. Or Chicago. Or South Dakota.
So we can be thankful that at least in California in the midst of January, we can sort of ignore some of the season if we want, we can at least take the snow part or leave it, depending on how we feel.
But we're going to have to wait until April for daylight saving time to show up again, for more light and less dark, for a more equal balance between night and day. Passing through January, as we are all wont to do as rapidly as possible, will make this possible. So I guess we ought to be thankful for the beginning of a new year.
But I have some reservations about that, too. Turning the corner into 2001 also means we are a year older. It means you can't take back the year you just lost (maybe you don't want to).
You have to gird up your loins figuratively and plunge on into the new one.
But at least you don't have to do it in Buffalo, New York.
Or even in Pierre, South Dakota.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
