New Year's Eve

New Year’s Eve I didn’t know. I really didn’t. I suppose in retrospect, that I had never thought to ask the question, or even to think the question. The first few years, dating, we were either with family, or working. The first year we were married we were working waiting to be called to active duty with the military. Only the 2nd year, when we got to our first duty station, did it come up and I learned the truth. I had married a man who had NEVER celebrated New Year’s Eve and who now, saw no reason to start. I cajoled, I coaxed, I tried everything, before he gave in. BUT. We were in Montana, where there really wasn’t any place to go to celebrate the New Year’s arrival. Literally, the big “to-do” in Great Falls, was to go to the restaurant at the small regional airport on Fridays when Fresh Fish was flown in from the coast for a seafood buffet and New Year’s Eve wasn’t on a Friday. We finally agreed to dinner at a restaurant followed by a movie. Dinner went well. The movie went well. Then out we went into the cold cold snowy world that is Montana in December. To a car that didn’t start. We tried and tried, but nothing. We went back to the movie theater, which was locking up for the night, and tried calling for a tow truck. BUT, it seemed that tow trucks didn’t run on New Year’s Eve in Great Falls. The manager of the movie theater, wanting to close, suggested a taxi. So we called, then waited, then took a taxi home on that cold winter’s night. The next day, bright and early, we called for a tow truck from home (cell phones not being in existence back then). Now the tow trucks were running, but we weren’t the only ones who had need of their services, so we took the other car and went back to the theater- and to the car and waited. Bored, with a long wait ahead of us, we tried the car again. Still the car wouldn’t start. Finally, as he lifted the lid to check the engine and battery, I was directed, by my husband, to get in and try starting the car. “Sweetheart, doesn’t the car have to be in park or neutral to start it?” I asked. For many years after that, he was accused of doing it on purpose. So that I wouldn’t, ever again, ask to be taken out on New Year’s Eve. For many years his strategy failed. (He even volunteered to be on Nuclear Alert one year, only to have the Wing Commander make the Officer's Club an alternate duty station for the evening....). Now, 43 years after that cold New Year’s Eve, we both often agree to a nice early dinner out, then home to watch a movie and drink champagne at midnight. Content to watch the bustle of the crowd on TV rather than in person.