1975 + 50

     To welcome 1975, my mother threw a party. At our home on Carteret Court in Berea, Ohio. Exactly 50 years later, I remember only a few things about the event. My Aunt Diane's tunnel of fudge cake, a chocolate bundt cake with a gooey center, the latest thing at the time. I made a sign on construction paper to hang at the doorway to our TV room, which we called "the play room." It showed a Maurice Sendakish monster with curled ram's horns stepping tentatively off a cliff. "WATCH YOUR STEP!" it said. I remember the sign well, because it was up for the next dozen years, until my parents sold the house and moved to Colorado.

    The next half century was the arc of my adult life. High school. College. The struggles of a first job, establishing myself, getting married, having children. Now that I'm in the waning years, it seems odd to think of something that happened 30, 40, now 50 years ago.  While the past is there — between my ears, mostly, not in the living world — it is best not to dwell too much upon it, to try to stay in the moment, now, and the future, such as it is. 
    So happy 2025! Did you have a fun New Year's Eve? We did. Usually we stay home, make little hot dogs wrapped in dough, watch television. But that gets dreary — New Year's Eve television is notoriously bad, with low end of the totem pole hosts trotted out to guffaw and time fill. We stand up for the Times Square countdown, chanting along — "Five, four, three, two, one, HAPPY NEW YEAR!" We kiss. We go to bed. Another year in the bag.
     This year, we joined friends in the city, went to a comedy show at Zanies.  The headliner was a handsome young man from the cast of Saturday Night Live, Michael Longfellow. He had a gentle, easygoing manner, and I enjoyed his routine well enough. For the first time, I heard a comedian and thought of the gap between his lived experience, at 30, and mine, at 64. Then a late tapas dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba on North Halsted Street, an excellent choice, in that they served their regular menu, and the food was tasty. As a nod to New Year's, they passed out party hats and champagne, and that was fun too. 

     Quite surprising in fact — New Year's Eve, like Valentine's Day, is typically amateur night in restaurants. Half the options at double the price. Crowded. I don't think we'd gone to a restaurant on New Year's in the 21st century before last night, but Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba makes me wonder if we were being too timid. The service was good too. We tipped 30 percent.
     2025 is a nice round number. A quarter century since the year 2000, when we so worried about society shutting down because of a computer glitch — programmers in the 1970s hadn't thought that fourth digit would have to roll over, from 1 to 2 as 1999 became 2000. Systems would fail. Power grids collapse.
     Nothing bad happened except we all had to work. At a quarter to midnight, I looked out over the busy, brightly-lit, crowded Sun-Times newsroom at 401 N. Wabash, and thought, "I'm not ushering in the millennium in this fucking place," and walked outside, to the middle of the Wabash Avenue Bridge, and watched the clock on the Wrigley Building slowly advance toward midnight, when a wan generalized cheer went up from all around and fireworks popped in the distance. It was a nice, if solitary way to usher in the new year, century, millennium. 
     There we are, back in the past. It's very easy to do, to slide into that ditch. The present New Year's, not a font of fascination. We'll all at the top of that first roller coaster hill, waiting for the plunge, and to see if there will be track veering away from the bottom, or just a crater.
     Maybe the past is a trap we set for ourselves. The napkin at the top of the post, for instance. I didn't pull that off the internet. I found it this way: by walking to the black four-drawer Hon filing cabinet in my office closet. Pulling open the second drawer. Scanning the manilla folders to the Ns. Finding one labeled "1975 Napkins," just where I knew it would be. At first I thought the plural was inappropriate. But then I lifted up the napkin and discovered there were indeed two.

     Should I be proud of accessing that napkin so quickly, so immediately? For knowing it was there? Or ashamed? I'll go with proud. Be who you are — one of my usual resolutions — while all the time trying to stamp down the little fires of who you certainly are but really don't want to be anymore that flare up now and then.
     What possessed me, at 14, to tuck these napkins away? As keepsakes. Remembrances of the adult party I was allowed to attend. Not sent to bed, the way I'd be during bridge games, listening to Dr. Gitlin laughing from the living room. It didn't work — I don't remember anything besides the bundt cake and the sign. I don't think I drank — the last dry New Year's for 30 years, until I entered the time of my life where they were all dry, like every day of the year. I accepted my champagne at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, held it high at midnight, clinked it all around, then set the glass down, unsipped.

     Now that I've photographed the napkin, and written about it, the thing to do would be to throw it away. I have too much of this stuff. Files and boxes, shelves and drawers.  Two tall Hon filling cabinets, two short ones.

     Of course I didn't do that. I carefully placed both napkins back in their folder, and returned them to the filing cabinet. Old habits die hard. Perhaps in the new year I can work at learning how to better shed these talismans of the past. Save my kids from the burden. I am nothing if not a work in progress. Trying to be, anyway.