What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

“What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”

It’s a song that has no special meaning or memory associated with it…but it always makes me cry.

There—I just heard it for the first time in a long time and the tears are streaming down my cheeks. Again.

The question is fraught with so much possibility, yet laden with so much disappointment. And that’s where I live my life: at that intersection where hope is too fragile to dare to show its face and a million paper cuts of heartache are too real to do anything but shut it down.

Like my every dream and every fantasy, it’s a washed-out watercolor of how I’d hoped my life would be. Of how I still hope it could be.

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

I’m in a fourth-story French loft with a gathering of friends and wine and wonderful bread and cheeses and there’s jazz on the stereo and we are all cracking each other up with our chatter brilliant and outside the window are the rooftops of Paris. Paris—for goodness sakes!

I’m sitting in a circle around a roaring fire deep in the canyons of Arizona, on ranch-land the ranchers let a group of Viet Nam vets and their spouses camp on every year at this time. One of them is a POW and his story is sobering but otherwise, there are raunchy jokes and lots of Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels to pass around and coyotes singing in the distance and the sweet fragrance of burning wood and I don’t worry if we’ll know when to say “Happy New Year.” Then it hits me that I’m in a time zone two hours distant from where I live and it’s already the new year there and it slipped in to little fanfare and that’s just fine with me.

I’m with a group of Morris Dancers at Anne and Peter’s house on Oak Street, with Anne and her sisters and brother and musicians playing fiddle and concertina and platters of fruit and nuts and food and goblets of egg nog and wine and we all get bundled up in quilted coats and gloves and hats and scarves and boots and go out into the freezing Binghamton chill to listen to our feet crunch on the snow and see our breath drifting past soft snowflakes as we walk the three blocks to Memorial Bridge minutes before midnight just in time to see the fireworks lighting up the sky where the two rivers meet downtown.

First Night, they called it for so many years, until they ran out of money and had to sell the oversized puppets that made up the parade downtown.

All over the country, small towns and cities had First Night celebrations that started on New Year’s Eve and lasted until fireworks at midnight.

It was a way to take drunkenness out of the New Year celebration. Arts and performance groups signed up to entertain at certain venues in and around downtown Binghamton. There was stuff for kids, too. Each venue was marked by a number made from white lights hung at lampposts outside the location where they performed.

I remember being buzzed on wine one First Night and being driven home, with those ridiculous numbers flashing by me in a random blur: “23” “8” “17” “24.” A crazy string of numbers with no rhyme or reason.

They paid for the event by selling buttons that would admit you inside. They were ridiculously inexpensive and oversized and each one each year was a work of art.

More times than not, it was frigid weather, and choosing what venues to visit had us walking all over the blocks of downtown shivering against the unforgiving wind, zig-zagging past the buildings and trying to take in as much of the more than two dozen performances as possible, only to realize, after arriving late at the last three, we’d be better off indoors sipping something warm.

That’s when Anne and Peter started inviting friends and acquaintances to their house a block and a half off the heart of downtown.  This gathering was more subdued than their Christmas Eve parties which were legend.

First Night Binghamton always ended with those fireworks emanating from a basin-like patch of empty land in back of the Veteran’s Memorial Arena which we could enjoy just by walking over to the bridge with Anne and Peter and company.

The group that coordinated all the activities changed its name from “First Night Binghamton” to “Southern Tier Celebrates” but it didn’t help. They still mismanaged their finances and went out of business. I know because I joined the Board of Directors in their penultimate year.

And that’s when the bigger than life-sized, seven and eight-foot-tall paper mache puppets were acquired by art lovers in the Town of Windsor who tried to stage their own version of the event but like everything else was shut down by COVID.

I settled for a quiet start to 2022, seeing it in with a friend and sushi plus a bottle of Malbec given to me a few years ago I’d been saving for that Special Occasion.

The present moment is as special as it gets.