He Came Home New Year’s Eve

The Boston Herald

He came home New Year's Eve. I looked up and there he was, standing at my neighbor's door all ready for a party. 

I didn't expect him. He'd spent Christmas in Scotland with his wife - her family's turn this year - and though she'd stayed the week, he'd had to fly back to work. I thought he'd be spending New Year's with friends in Manhattan. But instead he'd come home.

Before he arrived, I was thinking how there is always someone missing.  How when your kids are grown up and gone, it gets rarer and rarer to see them all together under the same roof, even for the big occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's. And how this is a shame because the best times are when everyone is together, at home or at a restaurant or anywhere, for no matter how short a time.

My daughters and their husbands and my husband and I were all going to the same New Year's Eve party this year - a neighborhood thing - and that all by itself was a joy. Not too many years ago they wouldn't go anywhere near a party with their parents. Especially on New Year’s.

But there they were, the daughter who lives in New York and the daughter who lives down the street. And then my son arrived, unannounced, unexpected, and it was one of those moments when all I wanted to do was lock all the doors, press a pause button and stop time.

In a way, this happened. That night, I watched my family the way you watch a favorite television show, an old one that you haven't seen in a long while. I watched them talking to each other, telling stories, laughing. And then later, after the party, I watched them, all under the same roof, the bedrooms changed to accommodate mates, but together, all of us. And in the morning, there they were at the kitchen table, my husband, my kids, my sons-in-law, my grandbaby and on the floor under the table and in everyone's way, Molly, the dog I didn't think would live to see another New Year.

For Christmas, my son-in-law gave me a record player that looks like one I had when I was a child. It's bolted down in a little suitcase and it's not heavy the way those record players used to be because this new one is made of plastic, not metal. But it works beautifully and it plays 33s, 45s and 78s. 

On New Year's Day we listened to the Beatles and John Denver and the Mamas and the Papas on old records.  And though you can get these things digitized, cleaned up with perfect tone, you won't get what the scratches and imperfections give you: a sense of being who you were and where you were when you first heard these tunes.

We listened and we remembered and we sang and we talked. And I thought, life doesn't get better than this.