What if and What is of a New Year
With each New Year, we pretend to look forward to the "what if," while really looking back at the "what was" and comparing it to the "what is."
My childhood New Year's Eve memories center primarily on home, sitting in front of the TV with my folks watching Dick Clark broadcast from Times Square. Sometimes there was a small party with a few of my parents' friends. Their kids tagged along, and we were relegated to the game room to play or watch TV while the adults imbibed and jived. New Year's Eve itself, though, was largely a non-event -- a relaxing pause after the Christmas rush.
However, my wife's family had a wonderful tradition. Her maternal grandfather gathered all the grandchildren for New Year's Eve. As midnight grew near, Grandpa Ancona put water to boil for pasta. The tradition was that the grandchildren would be the first in the New Year to eat spaghetti. You can imagine how that was important for Italian youth.
It also meant the kids stayed up past midnight because "Grandpa said that was okay." And if he said it, then so it was because he was the patriarch and first-generation Sicilian.
That evolved into a gathering of friends and family at the home of my wife's parents for dinner and champagne at midnight that I have been part of since I began dating her. Now it's held at our house and remains an intimate get-together of extended family, neighbors and a few out-of-town friends for dinner.
We rock the house with loud music and dancing in the family room, the kitchen and the garage.
On New Year's Day, I hang with my boys, and we may get in a little work on Pinewood Derby cars for the upcoming Cub Scout races.
Growing up, the first day of a new year was a delight. We spent it with my dad's only sister and her husband. They lived in an old cottage off Kirby Drive and it was full of all sorts of curiosities irresistible to a small boy.
Uncle Phil's office was an addition off the back of the house. In it he kept an incredible collection of antique weapons in a case hung on the wall; and I do mean antiques. These were muskets, long rifles and flintlocks. He even had a Tomahawk, Spanish swords, and the knife my dad made when he was in the Navy. The case also sported old shot and bullets, coins and arrowheads.
His office was a repository of electrical tubes, switches, this and thats, whatsits, whatchyamacallits, geedunks, ramafrants and other oddities. (I once needed a vintage hard hat from the wildcat oil days for a prop in an annual report photo. Sure enough, Uncle Phil had one. Of course I had to climb way back into a crawl space in the garage to get it -- wrestling it from rats and critters. But he had what I needed.)
My brothers and I all remember that tucked in a little room off Uncle Phil's office was an old-style, white enamel cola dispenser. We loved opening a small door in the top, turning the side handle to line the bottle up with the port, and then reaching in for a 6-ounce single, popping the top with the opener on the side.
I never finished a whole bottle. Mom drank the rest, but I got to run the bottle back to where the empties were kept in stacks of wooden bottle holders. They were worth a nickel in those days.
No one in my or my wife's family measures up to the fun quirkiness of Aunt Mig and Uncle Phil. Nor is there any New Year's attraction that rivals their collections of stuff.
Still, I'll bet my sons will have memories of their grandfather off in a corner of our home locked in deep and animated conversation with one of our neighbors while sipping his vintage wine.
They'll likely reminisce about their mom rolling out dish after dish of delectable food and desserts while carrying on intense family discussions with aunts, her sister and mom.
A smile or two is likely to break as they remember their dad and an uncle playing air-guitar to a song blasting on the stereo. One of them may even sit down and write about it some day, in the future, before a New Year to come.
Copyright 2009 by David Falloure
