A New Year

I remember the first time I watched the big red ball go down the side of the Times Tower in New York City. I was probably in my early teens. Since then, I've tried to mark the end of each year doing the same thing. I've watched Dick Clark change from an incredibly handsome young man to a close to embalmed creature that no one under thirty remotely recognizes outside of his  yearly TV appearace each December 31. I've watched the dance of the day shift from classic rock 'n' roll to The Swim and The Mashed Potato (which always made me feel more like eating than dancing) to the wild flailing around of the eighties to the amorphous moving of today. To quote Don Ameche, "Things change."

Boy, do things change. I haven't gone out on New Year's Eve in twenty-five years. The last exciting New Year's Eve I had was in 1994 when my eight year old granddaughter Cassie and I visited my son Matt's family in San Antonio for Christmas. Matt and his wife went out to a New Year's Eve party leaving Cassie and I to watch their eighteen month old twins. The babies went to sleep around nine o'clock. Cassie and I watched TV, and like the rational people we were, we planned to watch the big red ball slide down Times Tower and then go to sleep.

Texas is an interesting country. I say country because it feels like one. I suppose all states are like countries with their own special traditions, foods, cultural styles and celebrations. But Texas was the first place I ever spent New Year's Eve where the tradition was to sit in a lawn chair on the roof of your house and shoot off shotguns and pistols to bring in the new year. 

At the first shotgun blast from the guy across the street, I pulled Cassie off the couch, and we ran to the babies' room. We each grabbed a sleeping infant and carried them back to the master bedroom where we all lay on the floor as flat as we could. Cassie asked if we were going to die. I assured her that dying was not part of my plan for the evening. I sounded in control, but I think she knew I was as frightened as she was. The two of us prayed out loud as the babies slept and gunfire resounded in repeated volleys outside.

Not since the Guns Of Navarone have I thought so much about firearms of any kind. The wild shooting seemed to go on for hours. In reality, it was probably forty-five minutes or so, which when you think of it, is a heck of a long time for crazy people to sit on their roofs at midnight for any reason, but especially if they're blasting away their shotguns like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western.

We survived. The shooting finally stopped. Matt and his wife came home. Cassie and I and the babies slept til morning. Life went on.

This New Year's Eve I plan to sit in my quiet little TV room and with my husband watch the big red ball go down the side of Times Tower. I may fall asleep a few times before that actually happens because I am a lot older than I used to be. Gary and I will reminisce about past New Year's Eves, about days gone by and people, sadly, no longer with us. We'll eat a few gluten-free cookies, drink some caffeine-free tea, and talk about the good old days.

But this year, there will be an air of expectancy in our voices. Because life doesn't stop when we get old. It continues in the lives of our children and grandchildren. This year we'll talk about our twin grandchildren Nico and Bella in Texas who will graduate from high school in June. We'll talk about their younger brother Danny who at fourteen just carved his first deer last weekend and hopes to shoot his first deer before the season ends. We'll talk about our thirteen year old grandson Steven and our eleven year old granddaughter Nina in New Hampshire who are getting ready for another year of soccer and baseball and running in marathons. We'll talk about our fifteen year old granddaughter Sami in Indiana who will be taking driver's ed soon and how it seems like yesterday that we held her in our arms as a new baby. We'll talk about how our twenty year old grandson Jake in Indiana is going to buy a boat, works hard, is getting good grades in college, and is the one we call when things break around here. And we'll talk about our lovely Cassie, the little girl who hid on the floor with me and her baby cousins that New Year's Eve all those years ago, who is twenty-four now and who on Christmas Eve this year became engaged to be married to her Matt, making us all very happy even if we do feel pretty old.

Things change. Some things get worse, but mostly things get better. And they get better because we relive yesterday in the lives of our children today, and in the lives of our grandchildren tomorrow. Browning said, "Grow old with me; the best is yet to be." He didn't sit on a chair on the roof to make his thoughts be known. He wrote them down in simple and true words that speak to us today, a hundred and fifty years later. That's the thought I leave with you for this new year: "Things change," but "the best is yet to be!"