Happy New Year

New Year’s Eve is the one day of the year where we can get away with reflecting on the past while simultaneously focusing on the future.  For that reason, it has always struck me as odd.  Probably the strangest part of it all, though, is this embedded belief that somehow the world will be different once that glowing ball hits the bottom of the pole in Times Square.  This belief was never more in vogue than on December 31, 1999.

Ringing in a new millennium is momentous, I suppose, particularly when it seems that’s all the media talks about for a solid year.  Then there was the whole Y2K scare.  I remember the first video images of people ringing in the new millennium, starting in Sydney, Australia.  Every hour, there was a new feed – fireworks in Bangkok, New Delhi, Jerusalem, Athens, Berlin, Paris, London, and eventually New York City – and news stories about the impending doom of our computer systems crumbling.  But what I remember most about New Year’s Eve 1999 was sitting in bed next to my sleeping wife, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was about to be a father.

Emily was exhausted.  Being just a few days away from your due date will do that to you, I suppose.  She didn’t it make it much later than 10 p.m. before she started dozing off.  At first, she apologized, but after a half hour or so, she couldn’t fight it anymore.  I stayed up out of a sense of obligation.  The volume on our bedroom TV was barely audible, which was all the same because I never cared for Dick Clark anyway.  As the hour approached midnight, there were the obligatory interviews with overly excited weirdos wearing those “2000” eyeglasses – and all the talk was on the future.  As if a couple of ticks on a clock would mean we somehow traveled the gap between reality and some separate world where the future waited to reveal itself.

Of course, nothing would change.  The ball would drop and everyone would sing and most everyone would kiss somebody, just like they do every year.  The computers wouldn’t crash.  The world wouldn’t be any different.  Deep down, I knew it really wouldn’t be any different than any other year, any other night in the history of the earth.  We wouldn’t travel the gap between the present and the future.  It would always be the present and time’s mathematical equation would continue to compute as it always has and always will.  But I did wake up Emily.  “There’s 10 seconds to go,” I said.  She stirred awake, shifting her weight slightly.  We kissed at zero and she went back to sleep.  I turned off the TV and lied next to her.  I could feel her belly, hard and stretched thin and full of bones. 

Nine days later, the world did change.  I held my son for the first time.  My hands shook.  All that talk about the millennium being a new beginning, a new era was just nine days premature.  In that instant, as I held him, all slippery and flailing arms and legs, I realized that I’d never be the same person I’d been the second before.  In that instant, I traversed the canyon between the present and the future.  It had nothing to do with a dropping ball or Dick Clark or even the measurement of time.  It was the first day in my son’s new year.  I haven’t been the same since.