The idea of coming out of winter into brighter days has its appeal. It is the celebrations surrounding a particular day that I never fully grabbed. In my childhood, New Year’s Eve was nothing, and New Year’s Day was marked with a family dinner inevitably consisting of turnip greens, black-eyed peas, and the once-a-year hog jowl – you know, for health, wealth and happiness.
It’s a bit different these days, and my experience of the previous New Year’s Eve made me figure that last week’s Eve was going to be a carbon copy.
On Dec.31, 2021, my New Year’s Eve party of one consisted of leaning back in my chair and watching the Bulldawgs dispatch the Big Ten’s hapless Michigan team, the last hurdle before the national championship game the next week.
The result was satisfying, but I was not exactly ecstatic – about the game or about the fact that the stroke of midnight lay only 20-30 minutes away. I did not go around blowing a little whizzer thing or don a pointy, cone-shaped hat held in place with a cheap rubber band that would break the first time you turned your head. That’s just what the sports pages or the movies tell you about proper celebrations.
Instead, at about 11:30 on that night a year ago, I adjourned to the R’n’P – that’s what I call my side porch where I do my rocking and pondering. As I recall, it was unseasonably warm that night, and I thought I would listen for any fireworks.
The fireworks would come a little later, but what I heard was a rooster crowing. About every 6-7 seconds. In the middle of the night. He was either under-brained or oversexed. It became irritating, then maddening. Didn’t he know he was supposed to crow at dawn? And who the dickens keep chickens in town this day and time?
I couldn’t locate the fellow, although he was intolerably nearby. It bugged me so much that I finally got in the car to find where all the racket was coming from. I would stop and roll down the window to listen.
Every time the crowing seemed to be coming from a slightly different direction. I went home frustrated.
My only success came in playing around with some alliteration when I told a couple of buddies about it: The Great Chicken Chase Challenge, I called it. If you had a weirder New Year’s Eve, I want to hear about it.
During the past year, I would hear the crowing, less frequent but still often enough and at odd times, like 3 o’clock in the afternoon. So, with the prelude of the Dawgs playing another Big Ten team for another spot in the national championship game, it became easy to foresee a replay of my 2021 New Year’s Eve adventure. However, that smug prediction changed over the course of 24-48 hours.
One, Ohio State proved to be not so hapless and probably would have won the game but for a shanked 50-yard field goal try off the foot of a 21-year-old. If Noah Ruggles had made the kick, I would have hated him, at least at the moment. As it was, I came to feel sorry for him. In front of 11 angry attackers, 60,000 or so in the stands, and millions in the TV audience, he tried to put too much oomph into a ball aimed at a window 18 feet, 6 inches wide and 10 feet off the ground.
Anonymous chuckleheads who can’t punt the ball 40 yards, even with a good roll, will remind him of it for years to come.
Two, the rooster made no appearance at the appointed hour. Three, I had finally begun reading a reprint of Fred Birchmore’s Around the World on a Bicycle.
I was acquainted with Birchmore as an older man when he enthusiastically led the singing at the Athens Kiwanis Club when I covered a guest speaker.
The book is a travel book and an adventure story of a younger Birchmore in the late 1930s and a different world. A heavy but sturdy one-speed bicycle (now in the Smithsonian). No GPS. No ATMs. Few paved roads, sometimes no trail.
As an American, he was once pushed onto the stage with Adolph Hitler. He recklessly climbed the Matterhorn, standing at the top for all of 30 seconds before a storm hit. He was robbed in Egypt.
He carried the bike over mountain passes. He blew a tire 350 kilometers from an Afghan village. But through it all, a recurring theme emerges of the goodness of the people he met, sharing meals, singing, and allowing him to sleep in haylofts.
And four, a conversation with an old high school friend turned on her good news. She had just heard the results of her first checkup following a mid-December operation for cancer. It had been successful.
Certainly, relief was part of the mix, but the subtle tone in her voice was upbeat, cheerful and relaxed. It was good to hear. Maybe there is something to our yearning for brighter days, after all.