Another New Year, my 65th--”Three score and five,” if you will--and only five years to go before the biblical deadline.  Again, as in most years past, I will not attend or host a New Year’s Eve Party. To me, a recovering alcoholic (for the past score of years), New Year’s Eve is amateur night--as is St. Patrick’s Day, major sporting events and other celebrations requiring intoxicating whoopee. Nor do I desire to wear funny hats, utilize noisemakers or generally make an ass of myself, which I did plenty of in my hard-drinking days.

   It is enough for me to ease open a window at midnight and hearken to the sounds of revelry: shouting, the banging of pots and pans, fireworks, churchbells and the odd spate of gunfire. My late father, a man found often in his cups--and also one to eschew New Years as amateur night--would celebrate the magical hour by rising reluctantly from his bed and  lurching onto the front porch in his bathrobe, hair mussed and red eyed, to crank off a few rounds from his 12-guage Remington pump shotgun; or, in his later years, his booming .357-cal. handgun. 
   With ears ringing, and while the booms still echoed throughout the neighborhood, an acrid odor of gunpowder in the air, he would announce grimly, “That should hold the bastards for another year!”

   New Years Day has never seemed to me the real turning of the year; which, I have always sensed, is sometime in mid-September, acknowledged by Labor Day and celebrated by a return to school and a forthcoming change of summer into fall.
   To visualize a year I imagine a nebulous oval shaped somewhat like the track of an electric train.
   Looking into the year from a horizontal perspective, September is in the upper right-hand corner with deep blue skies and the best fishing, “Golden leaves on the trout stream. . .” Hemingway weather.  While New Years’ Day is down in the left-hand corner, each day a gray, rainy and eternally dismal forty degrees--Sylvia Plath weather (though we know, of course, what happened to Hemingway as well).

   Ah, well-- There are good years and bad. And I’m sure many of us secretly yearn for some year past; a year in which we would remain if that were possible; a year most likely of our youth, when everyday was spring, love was new and we didn’t arise feeling as if we’d been stomped by a herd of rampaging kudus, to greet the day with a dreadful, “Oh, God!”
   A close friend (OMED: me) has frequently expressed a desire to return to 1949, when the cars were sturdier, had rounded fenders and life was more predictable. A time before suburbs and so many people, when we could run into the woods with slingshots and Red Ryder .BB guns and there were trout and crawdads in the small streams of the valley. 

   If it were me, I would choose the very middle of the last century. The year 1955, to be exact, the last summer of my youth, 16 turning 17, the horrors of high school behind me, soon to be off to the Navy after working aboard a Columbia River towboat.
   The last good days then were sunny and slow, pleasantly overripe; halcyon and running with salmon:  “The best of times” not yet having segued into the worst, Korea over, no Vietnam. A world timeless to a teenager, optimistic, full of hope and dreams. I remember riding a bus one lazy summer afternoon, the pervasive light golden and ethereal; a moment that remains with me now.
At that age you are aware of being on the edge of a great mystery; great adventures await in an unexplored world. There are great seas to cross, greater loves to encounter, sexual initiations to be anticipated, tattoos; John Wayne images of smoking, boozing and harmless dangers.

   The 1950s, with its realities pushed aside, or under, like Grendel still unbothered in his lair. Forty seven years ago now, and no one goes back again. And except for the recalcitrant hippies remaining among us, wrinkled and pathetic in beads, braids and tie dyes, no one remains where they are--except a guy I once knew, and who is probably dead by now.
   Call him Ralph, a man I first met some years ago swinging down the steps of a two-decked, green and yellow streetcar imported from Sydney, Australia. At that time Ralph was a bigwig in the Oregon Electric Railway Society, a group of buffs dedicated to collecting, restoring and running old electric streetcars, which they ran on a very short trolley line through the woods near Gales Creek.  In his motorman’s uniform, Ralph was all blue suit and brass buttons, a spiffy peaked cap proclaiming his dedication to anachronism.

   How truly committed to “days of yore” I would discover some weeks later on a visit to Ralph’s home in East Multnomah County. Arriving with a photographer to do a feature story on the man and railway, I entered a rather bland suburban ranch house to be greeted by Ralph’s wife, a nurse, she said, who informed me rather laconically, “He’s in the basement.”
   And down there we found Ralph, languishing comfortably in an old rocking chair in a room that time forgot. More cozy than gloomy, the dimly lit basement reminded me of places I lived and visited as a boy, and the music I heard was from the same era, and a little beyond.

   After the requisite questions about street railways, steam locomotives and the necessity of recreating light-rail (this before MAX), I began to look around. There were stacks and shelves of old records and tapes, and Ralph informed us that he once had a career in radio. Back in the 1930s, in New York City, when the world, to him at least, was saner and more manageable. (No mention of the Great Depression, however.)
   “That music you hear,” he said, “is Shep Fields and his ‘rippling rhythms,’” going on to explain that Shep, a favorite of my father’s by the way, had inspired the mellifluous sounds of  Lawrence Welk, that Teutonic North Dakotan who rose from  accordion-accented barn dances to Olympian popularity among aficionados like my folks and grandmother--who actually knew Lawrence in his cow-flop years and kept the Welk gang’s picture scotch-taped over her television set.

    But I digress. Insisting on continuing my “Irish interview” (one in which the interviewer does all the talking, a sin of journalists as they age and acquire more B.S.), I informed Ralph that my uncle Stan, a Paul Whiteman look alike, ironically, had for many years hosted a Portland radio show he called “Old Dusty,” playing records (some cylindrical) that were so old and creaky  they might be better used as fish reefs or Frisbees.
   However, much to my surprise, at mention of my uncle Ralph rose from his chair and some kind of anger appeared in his eyes; little sparks like you see when you wind up those toy Godzilla monsters and let them run amok on the floor.

   “Yes! Yes, I knew him!” Ralph fumed. “And you know what? I once loaned him the only recording that Rudolph Valentino every made. Did you know that? That Valentino made a record? He had a real squeaky voice, by the way.”
   I said I didn’t know, and that I didn’t know that Uncle Stan--or “Stanko,” as he was known in our Croatian family--had borrowed the record from Ralph, whose anger puzzled me.
   “And you know what?” Ralph blurted, “he never gave it back. I never got that record back,” he said resignedly, sinking back into his chair wearily so I wondered about his age and worried about his health.
   “I’m sorry,” I said--And what else could I say.

   We sat quietly for a long moment, the photographer grabbing some shots and me sucking up the ambiance, when I noticed an ancient lamp, its shade brown and tasseled like lamps my grandma had when I was a kid.
   More interesting still was a suit of clothes hanging from the lamp: pants, vest, what looked like a sport coat, and I inquired, “Those clothes . . ?”
   Ralph smiled and leaned forward. “That’s the suit I wore when I graduated from high school,” he explained. “Washington High School. That was in 1934,” he said with a smile of satisfaction.
To be polite, I said, “I see,” and exchanged a look with the photographer that said much more.
   “Yes,” Ralph went on. “You see, that was my favorite year. 1934. This is all 1934 down here,” he explained, his hands gesturing expansively around the basement. “I decided I’d just stay there.”

  After climbing the stairs back to our own time, I paused and looked back down into the gloom where Ralph was sitting, now playing an early Crosby tune. I wondered for a moment and then turned to Ralph’s wife, a somewhat younger woman who caught my expression, rolled her eyes and said, “Yes, I know. He’s down there all the time.”
   And wherever you are, whether it’s still 1949, 1955 or 1934, I wish you a Happy New Year.

© 2003 Paul Pintarich