“…still it is you, your mind picking endlessly over the splintered glass of a mirror dropped and broken long ago. That is all time is at the end when you are old — a splintered glass.”
-Loren Eiseley
All the Strange Hours
New Year’s eve, 2020. My long-time friend, Joe Albert, sent a holiday remembrance today. “Our house was always the party place,” he wrote. “New Year’s eve was no exception.” After this long year of isolation, Joe’s memory triggered the New Year’s eve experiences of my own life. This is my 73rd New Year’s eve in this realm. Not much of what I recall seems worth space in the memory banks, but a few things stand out. Most lives are probably that way.
As a child, New Years was an adult event. We kids had Christmas; a week later the adults went at it. Dressing up, parties, drinking, midnight kisses, bizarre behavior, banging pots out in the street, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians on the TV. The most favorite New Year’s eves of my life, and still the most treasured, were the ones when I was a youngster — and living up the night with my grandmother, Catherine Cullinan. My parents were out partying with the extended family (the only partying they ever did) and grandmom was the designated babysitter. In a house where any dessert had a strict two-cookie limit, New Years eve was an orgy. All the cookies, soda, ice cream you wanted. In those days you could still get real ice cream from Breyers, and the peach variety had huge chunks of frozen peaches embedded, a culinary treat I’ll never forget. A lot of peaches lived frozen in ice cream until New Years eve in those days, but no farther. This was also the only night of the year I ever saw midnight!
The wildest was 1967-68. War might slow down, but it doesn’t stop for New Year’s. I was on an alert pad in Viet Nam. Whenever an alarm suddenly went off we all ran to the F4 fighter aircraft on the ready line and got them into the air in seconds. Some U.S. troops somewhere in country were under attack and needed the “fast movers” to come in and save their asses. At one point I had to take a utility truck (picture the old bread trucks of yore) over to the main flightline to arrange for another aircraft to be brought out to the alert pad. In a moment of pure and perfect insanity I decided to go by way of an active runway — so around midnight New Year’s eve there I was racing at 80 mph down an active runway in a bread truck. I could certainly have been court martialed for such outrageous breach of security and safety; more likely I was lucky not to have been shot — it was a war zone and an unidentified and unauthorized vehicle on an active runway should have invited at least a small arms response. To my surprise, when I got back on the alert pad, all I got were a bevy of nurses who had come out to give us kisses and wishes for long life in 1968 and the coming years. If nothing else, war is bizarre!
One year later Vietnam was a memory. I was now a civilian with a nine-to-five, suit and tie job in the city. The lady I was seeing joined me for a nice dinner in a good Philadelphia restaurant. Then we went back to her place to bring in ‘69 in what we thought the most appropriate way. That was the last memorable New Year’s for a long while.
It’s the mid-1980s when New Year’s again intrudes on memory. Life had become more sedate by then. It became the custom to join with friends Mary and Jerry Standley for an overnight stay at a small cottage in Stone Harbor, NJ. We arrived in the afternoon, prepared a nice dinner and sat talking through the evening. At midnight, we walked a block or two to the beach and had a champagne toast to welcome the new year. Then it was back to the warmth of the cottage and sleep until just before sunrise. When the sun rose we were nearly in the surf, again toasting the new year’s first sunrise and first day. Then it was back to the cottage to pack up and go have breakfast at a classic New Jersey diner over on the mainland. From there we headed home and into a new year. It was a convention in those evenings to share something we had found meaningful in the past year. I recall one year reading aloud “The Talking Cat.” It’s a later chapter in Loren Eiseley’s autobiography, All the Strange Hours. It’s a story of his hearing a cat one night, taking it home, caring for it despite not being allowed to have a pet in his apartment, finally finding a home for the cat with a nice co-worker. Like all great stories, the plot is simple, the meanings are deep, nearly unfathomable. One thing he’s talking about is our connection with the natural world around us, how it so depends on our willingness to hear and see and feel. That same year Mary and Jerry announced her pregnancy with an audio recording of the fetal heart. The next year a beautiful baby joined us in Stone Harbor. That same heart beats today, as does Mary’s. Sadly, my friend Jerry’s is now at rest. A pulse-oximeter says mine tonight is at 78 bpm. And the beat goes on.
Memory again retreats for some years. When New Year’s eve next pops up I’m sitting on a sofa late December 31, 1999 — wondering if the world will end soon. “Y2K” was all the rage that year. For so many years no computer people had thought much about time, and all programming had been done identifying years by the final two digits. So, 99 meant 1999, but no one knew how a computer would interpret 00. Would it see it as 1900 instead of 2000? No one seemed to know, and all our infrastructure had been programmed this way. We feared the electric grid might go down, nuclear missiles might launch — all sorts of craziness. In the year before this night lots of people with old fashioned COBOL computer programming knowledge made a lot of money reprogramming lots of business computers. In the end, the only craziness was watching the ageless Dick Clark oversee the New Year events in Times Square, New York. Since that anticlimactic night, I feel like I’ve been in retreat from New Year’s eve.
Now I mostly spend the night at home, hoping for quiet. Unfortunately, fireworks have become the fashion. I don’t so much mind the distant, organized displays; they’re not so noisy and can be reckoned with as background noise. The treacherous business is the immature “adults” who need to rock the world with the biggest and loudest noise makers they can obtain — setting them off just outside my window. The first time that happened a few years ago I came out of my chair scrambling for an M16 to go out and defend the perimeter. That’s when I knew something was wrong. I immediately got a good set of noise-canceling headphones to protect myself.
Despite my having to cower here in the bunker every New Year’s eve, I still appreciate it as a marker of time and our passages within that framework. My fascination with Loren Eiseley is our shared awe of time and its impenetrable mysteries. In the coming year, I recommend becoming acquainted with the man. His autobiography, All the Strange Hours, is a good place to begin.
A year ago we wished a good year to everyone alive; now over 300 thousand of those folks, just in this country, are no longer with us. We expected them to be here with us tonight. Let’s hope for better numbers in 2021.
Dead Reckoning 
Loved the essay, especially the tone. Just seemed to fit this year’s turning. I hope 2021 is kind to you. Deb Fox
By: deborahlargefox0764 on January 1, 2021
at 1:25 AM