Fern and Joe: New Years Past

Looking Back...and ahead

FERN AND JOE:  New Years Past

Fern: Happy New Year, my love.  Though not my favorite time of year. 

Joe: What? You like a party. Too much forced gaiety?

Fern:  Yes, that. And people who are alone feel alone more.  Everyone wishing for peace in the new year and there’s never been.  Can be depressing, don’t you think?

Joe:  For someone who’s really a lot of fun, you are not a barrel of holiday laughs.

Fern:  I’m just glad December is over and we don’t have to listen to Little Drummer Boy in the mall.  Also the days are getting shorter.

Joe:  Since we didn’t get together until we were in out forties,  tell me about your New Year’s Eves past.

 Fern:  Well, my parents went to parties.  As a little girl, I loved watching my mom dress up and put on high heels and sparkly jewelry. She had a fur coat. Did your parents go out on New Years Eve?

Joe:   My parents? Please.  My mother barely left the kitchen.

Fern:  When I still lived in New York I went to Times Square to watch the ball drop.  Crowds of people, many drunk, pushed against each other like a wave. There was little security.  It seems dangerous to me now. Everyone was cheering at the countdown. My feet were freezing in vinyl fashion boots and I couldn’t wait for the ball to drop so I could go home. Well, I crossed that one off a bucket list.

Joe:  When I was little we did have  a family New Year tradition.  At the stroke of midnight, my mother would swing open the door to let out the evil spirits of the past year; we kids helped chase them out by banging spoons against kitchen pots.

Fern:  Tradition? Sounds more like superstition.

Joe: In my family, there was not a distinction.  New Years is a time of facing the unknown, a time of both opportunity and of risk, and for us, that meant heightened superstition.  At least superstitions make you feel you’re doing something to control what really, you can’t control. One New Year’s superstition in the old country was starting the year with a white dish. 

Fern:  White? 

Joe:  I mean white as in food the color white.  The Lebanese serve something white, as an indicator of starting fresh, blank slate, and the meal could be shish barak—velvety dumplings in a minty hot yogurt sauce—or, my favorite, mouhalabiyeh, a dessert similar to panna cotta.  The French Crusaders who brought the dish home with them called it Blanc du Siriyeh.  Or white Syrian stuff. 

Fern:  You’ve made that. I love mouhalabiyeh. Didn’t one of the kids say that it was the most delicious thing she ever put in her mouth?

Joe: Yes.  And her sister said it tasted like someone spritzed the dish with perfume.  The mixture of rose and orange blossom water actually made her gag. It’s a thankless job, cooking for children.

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Shish Barak – the ultimate Lebanese comfort food.

Fern: One winter in late December  -- I was newly married to my first husband --I totaled our car on a snowy highway. The car spun 180 degrees, hitting the guardrail. We both survived with only a couple of bruises and lacerations.

 That New Years we were invited to a “progressive” dinner party. Appetizers at one house.  First course at another.  None of us had children yet, but it seemed like a very grown-up thing, this sort of dinner party.  People had been drinking at each house. By the time it got to dessert at our apartment, I was crying and in full panic mode. We didn’t have the name for it then: PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress from the car accident. There are  issues we recognize today only because we have names for them that we didn’t have back then

Joe:  Back to New Year’s memories that you and I didn’t share. I (barely) remember a college frat party where I drank way too much. Since that night I haven’t been able to tolerate the smell, much less the taste, of Southern Comfort.  (No wonder they lost the Civil War.)

Fern:  I lost my virginity on New Year’s Eve. It seems a strange locution: losing your virginity. As if virginity is something you can “lose.” Like an umbrella.  I remember thinking after: What’s the big deal?

Joe:  You’ve always been such a romantic.

Fern: How about resolutions? Did you ever make new years resolutions?

Joe:  No. Well, I never would drink Southern Comfort again, but that was more a dictate of nature.  How about you?

Fern: When I was in high school and kept a diary, I promised in the new year to write in it every night.  I didn’t follow through.  I always put off writing.

Joe: And here we are, writing this column on the eve of.

Fern: Being a writer is like having a term paper due for the rest of your life.

Joe: How about regrets?  You have a few? Too few to mention?

Fern: Well, selling my parents’ condominium in Florida after they died?  New Years Eve in Florida was warm.  They had that cute condo built around two man-made lakes.  A pier and an artificial covered bridge. Like a geriatric Disneyland.

Joe: Yeah, we shouldn’t have sold it.

Fern:  My brother wanted to. He said only old people lived there.

 Joe:  And now we are old people. 

Fern: Except we don’t have a condo near the beach. 

Joe: What I remember best about going down to your parents’ place in Florida was the deli around the corner, its refrigerated case displaying lox and whitefish, and, oh the chopped liver sandwiches!  You know—if I may briefly mansplain . . .  

Fern:  Briefly mansplain? That’s an oxymoron.

Joe: I read that smells and tastes can bring back the past so vividly because smell and taste receptors are positioned so close to the brain mechanism that stores memory.  There’s a name for it: the Proustian Effect.

Fern: Speaking of memory, remember the New Year’s scene from When Harry Met Sally? I loved that. How it’s new years and she goes to the party alone and he runs and runs to find her, and then just before midnight  . . .  

Joe:  Ah, maybe you are really a romantic.

Fern: I’d like to watch that movie again some time.

Joe: What else would you want? Wish for?

Fern:  I don’t know.  Good health. More time together.  And world peace is always a hope. That’s what I want.  And maybe Trump to go to prison?

Joe:  Well, happy New Year, my love.

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