Now We're Here: The Best Essay to Read as You Tumble Into 2024

Notes on the life in front of you. Fresh starts! Brooding, et cetera. MONEY SHAME. Scocca obv. Roger Angell. James Tate.

I had this moment last week while walking the dogs with my three-year-old son where I lost complete track of where I was and felt for a few seconds like I was in a strange half-dream state. Did you ever get that way? I’ve had it happen to me a couple of times on vacation; I’ve woke up in a fancy hotel bed with a sunbeam on my neck and, for a second or two, have entirely forgotten who I was, as if I’d been transported into a different life, some freaky body swap or a time jump. (This sounds like an ad for a hotel company or an airline, but I don’t have any specific experience to call upon other than in almost 50 years on earth and many travels. I know I have felt this cozy delirium more than once.)

But this past Thursday, an ordinary, wettish California day, it happened again.

The dogs were all tangled up in their leashes, curiously sniffing around the tree lawns. My son was picking up dandelions and waving to the neighbor’s dogs yapping out the windows of other homes. We were in no hurry at all. When we were about a block away from our house, my son confidently dashed ahead. The dogs didn’t move, and I gave them a yank, thinking that I maybe should catch up to him, in case he decided to run into traffic or someone backed out of their driveway too quickly.

I called his name, but he was far ahead and close enough to home that I decided to stay back and watch him run. I became hypnotized by the back of his green, puffy dinosaur coat. His tiny Saucony shoes. His brown drawstring knock-around pants. I held my breath and blinked my eyes three times—my lame, desperate attempt to preserve the moment, paint a quick picture to hang in my mind’s museum.

It was then that I went under. I saw this little boy running, and then I saw him 20 years from now and realized I could very well be lost in a memory I’m briefly inhabiting, maybe something I fell into while under anesthesia. Then I look down at my beautiful snuffling dogs and the scattered brown palms the size of rowing oars up and down the street. I looked up, and there was no sun, only gunmetal clouds. I look ahead and see that jacket. “Remember this forever,” I said to myself, just in case it wasn’t real. But also, “Stay present,” because that’s all I could come up with at that time.

Then I remembered an essay – one of the truly perfect essays ever composed – that’s required reading for me every new year as it should be for you:

“Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die” by Tom Scocca

These two parts, in particular, are stuck to me forever:

IN APRIL, IN a small town on a small island in a small string of islands trailing down from the main part of Japan, the world’s then-oldest person died. Nabi Tajima was 117 years old—the last surviving human being born in the 19th century.

Maybe the year 1900 sounds far away, to you. It comes closer. My father was born in 1940. Right now, I am 47 years old. Everyone who was 47 years old when my father was born is now dead. All of them. That entire group of middle-aged people, who made up the adult world when my father was a child, is gone.

My father is dead, now, too. He smoked, and it shortened his life. But I lived with him, grew up with him. I was an adult with him. We drank coffee at the dining room table together, read the newspaper, talked on the phone. He sat and talked with my firstborn son when he was little. He held my second-born, as a baby, while he could. The older boy remembers him.

The younger boy is seven now. When my father was a boy of seven, Nabi Tajima was 47. I keep sliding the numbers around, and as I do, they shove each other out of the way. The people don’t all fit.

And then there’s this part—the first day of school lines killed me.

This world devours every person and moves on. It does not stop moving, even as we pass through the middle of life telling ourselves it is the front end. Before the children arrived, there was not much difference from one year to the next. In some ways, in the adult, professional sphere, there still is not much difference. In a chair, at a computer screen, 47 doesn’t feel that far from 37. A little trouble in the lumbar region, that’s all. Some wiry gray at the temples in the bathroom mirror.

This is the illusion of adult timekeeping, and children make it unsustainable. Life moves along at an unexceptional, unexamined pace and suddenly it’s the first day of school, and then it’s the first day of school again. The jeans I remember just buying him are up above the ankles. The younger boy kisses me back when I kiss him good night, but by last year the older boy started to twist away from holding hands a few yards before the school door, to dart off ahead. Now he just walks to school on his own. There’s time still for him to circle back for a hug at day’s end. Someday, though, a hug will be the last one.