55 years ago tonight, six of us convened at a fraternity house at Muhlenberg College where we were students to see in the beginning of a decade, 1970. The group included my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife. To the best of my memory, Sly and the Family Stone and Three Dog Night were on heavy rotation on what was most assuredly an inferior recording system. We drank from paper cups and ate pretzels, budgets being what they were in those days.
Jim Gaffney, my old news editor at the Bethlehem Globe Times, used to jokingly refer to New Year’s Eve as “amateur hour,” and in a way, he was right. But our tradition continued. It was important to us.
The group expanded and eventually peaked at a dozen or so. In the ’70s, we brought to the parties our infant children, carefully laying them down in portable cribs amid all the noise. In the ’80s, the kids arrived with their own games and agendas, and even into the ’90s, they would sometimes drop by on their way to another gathering, mostly to make fun of their parents singing and dancing and acting the same way they did in 1969.
55 years later, we’re still together to see in the New Year, though tame would be the proper word to describe the goings on these days. Things changed definitively about 25 years ago when, yes, we still stayed up until 4:00 AM, but we filled and emptied the dishwasher before we went to bed. That was a clear turning point.
But we continue to enjoy the ritual, the companionship, the idea of preserving friendships, which isn’t easy. And there’s always a matter of reviewing good times and bad times from the departed year, and the more important matter of drawing hope from each other. Death, divorce, issues with kids, medical maladies — way too many medical maladies — dominate the conversation these days, but everybody has those problems, and there is strength in numbers, and out of that evolves that thing called hope.
Some years are tougher than others, and heading into 2025 — well, this is a tough one. Things didn’t go the way that most of our group anyway planned in November, and sometimes hope is at a premium. But that’s what New Year’s Eves are for: hope.
Now, it’s not hard to find expressions of hope in our culture. Martin Luther King, who god knows, needed to reach into a reservoir of hope at many times, said, “I know somehow that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” Even some real depressives have weighed in with hope. “There is a crack in everything,” sang Leonard Cohen, the songwriter best known for Hallelujahbut also responsible for acknowledged downer That’s How the Light Gets In. And a certified existentialist more than familiar with despair, Mr. Dostoevsky, wrote, “Without hope is to cease to live.”
But at our New Year’s gatherings, we don’t talk in aphorisms. We find our hope the old fashion way; through family and friends. That’s what we’ve been doing for 55 years and counting.
I asked someone close to me to pull out his instrument and bring in the New Year with a song; that Scottish language tune we all know that translates roughly to, “long, long ago, days gone by,” phrases like that. But I hear Oliver McCallum, the oldest of my five grandkids, play it on his viola, and I hear something else. I hear hope.
