Keeping an Eye on the Ball

December 31, 1977. I've never been a fan of science fiction, but I appreciated the brief toasty comfort of a movie theatre, even if I had to watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I don't remember being all that impressed. UFO's and aliens and strange force fields going bump in the night don't hold a candle to the other worldly experience that is Times Square on New Year's Eve.

It was one of those bucket list things, back before we had bucket lists. Standing outside in Arctic temperatures for hours, the technological shortcomings of my pre-Canada Goose down jacket somewhat neutralized by the cumulative body heat of the massive crowd. I didn't even see the ball fall; I'm pretty sure I was facing the wrong way. My date whipped out a bottle of champagne and some plastic champagne cups, the kind with the screw-on base. For some reason, I worried it would spill.

If there was a police presence that night, I didn't notice. Those were days of innocence, tucked somewhere between the tumultuousness of the sixties and the scourge of AIDS in the eighties. Our heroine of the moment was a princess with Cinnabon hair and we all still believed that good triumphs over the dark forces of evil. Just like in the movies.

My children are all older, now, than I was on that New Year's Eve in Times Square. They have grown up in a different world, a world where bucket lists are filled with items far less dangerous than being in a big crowd in a big city on a big night. Relatively risk free things like, say, sky diving.

There is much to look forward to this year, even though a few sucker punches in 2016 have left me a bit wary. The princess with the Cinnabon hair is gone, as are many others who seemed to be on the side of the light, and close encounters of any kind are wrought with suspicion. Still, the crowds will descend on Times Square, and forty years from now, some middle aged woman will look back on this night and smile, wondering how she survived the cold but glad that she did it, at least that one time.

I, for one, will be at my friend's house, enjoying what has become a somewhat annual tradition of watching a small crowd of lobsters crawl across the kitchen counter. Talk about other worldly. Mostly, I just feel really bad for them because -- like most of us, I suppose -- they have no idea what's coming, and, unlike most of us, they're pretty much out of options. Talk about a sucker punch.