Season Finale

I'll bid farewell to 2009 with a New Year’s piece, published some years ago. It first appeared in my local paper and was then distributed by the Washington Post – Los Angeles Times syndicate through much of the USA.

A warm farewell until next year, and Happy Holidays to all.




NEW YEAR'S EVE WITH SOME NEW ACQUAINTANCES


For many years, my wife and I have saved an empty champagne bottle from each New Year’s Eve celebration.

These old Korbels and Andres and Taylors sit dust-covered in a corner of our basement. Occasionally, when I’m in the mood to reminisce, I’ll go downstairs and wipe the dust from the labels.

“Byron Drive, 1990” – the place and year are always in my handwriting. I’m the one who gets the ball rolling each year, the one who starts the empty bottle around so that everyone can sign it.

Scattered over the label are the scrawled names: “Curt…Nancy…Don…Sybil.” These are the friends and acquaintances who shared our celebration that New Year’s Eve.

The signing of champagne bottles started as a whim, but we kept it up over the years. I’m glad we did. There’s a story in these old bottles that is not told in any of our family photo albums. They capture a thread in our lives that might otherwise be lost.

The memories they hold are not, for the most part, of family or even long-time friends. Fittingly, they are memories of old acquaintances.

In most years, the labels tell us, we have spent New Year’s Eve with people we’ve known only a short while. We’ve raised a glass with new neighbors, colleagues on new jobs, members of community and social groups we’ve just joined.

Only a few of these relationships have survived the years. The names on the labels keep changing.

It’s curious how the milestones of our lives can be tracked in the changing names on these bottle labels: new jobs, new neighborhoods, new interests and commitments. They’re like the logbook of a journey. And they’re a reminder of something that lately we’ve forgotten – that there’s a valued part of our lives that has always been measured in acquaintanceship.

In recent years, there have been fewer names on the labels, and they are often the same names. We’ve taken to spending New Year’s Eve with a few close friends. We’ve settled down, become less active; we’re not into acquaintanceship these days.

If these recent labels are a logbook, it appears they are logging a journey’s end. This bothers me. When I compare these recent labels to earlier ones that are covered with so many names, I feel a sense of loss.

It saddens me to think of those old acquaintanceships that we carelessly let go. And it saddens me to realize that we have let a part of our life’s journey shrink away – the part that was charted in our new acquaintanceships.

Recently we joined a new group for the first time in years. We’re going to celebrate New Year’s Eve with acquaintances this year. We’ve invited our friends to join us. There should be room on the champagne bottle for everyone’s name – if we all write small.


~ Robert Brault

Some Final Observations for 2009

"A eulogy is where you're actually dead and rumors of your life are greatly exaggerated."


"The only standard of perfection most of us insist upon is the one our parents fell short of."


"Like it or not, people judge us by first impression -- the better our first impression of them, the better they judge us."


"When a country is headed for wrack and ruin, wrack is often mistaken for a recovery."


"I don't usually make a bad first impression, but I make a lot of good first impressions that nobody notices."


"You don't realize how little accuracy there is in network TV reporting until they cover a story in your hometown."


"For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth. Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise."


"Getting someone to like you is not hard. It is either easy or impossible."


"Parenting is a stage of life's journey where the milestones come about every fifty feet."


"One suspects that man will still be pondering God as First Cause on the day He appears as Last Effect."


"My only New Year's resolution this year will be to skip the hog jowls and just have the black-eyed peas."


A holiday cocktail party is where --

-- every year you have the same conversation with the same people about who you both still are.

-- some stranger will learn more about you in an hour than your spouse has learned in a lifetime.

-- you will always be sorry you wrote anything on a napkin.

-- the host and hostess attempt to bring compatible people together by separating married couples.

-- there is a rotation that brings married couples back together every twenty minutes.

-- nobody knows it was this late until the first couple leaves.


~ Robert Brault