January 3, 2021
Auld Acquaintances
I know I am not alone in not being a big fan of New Year’s Eve. I am barely a fan of revelry, let alone forced revelry, and long ago lowered my bar from having fun to surviving the evening unscathed. There have been, to be sure, parties and dinners and festivities. There have been hats and streamers and confetti. I can’t really think of one off the top of my head but I suspect, and the laws of averages and physics dictate, that there must have been a midnight kiss or two. I have never been drunk on New Year’s Eve. The closest maybe being December 31st in 1975 when a bunch of us snuck into the private party at the Tanglin Club in Singapore. We were discovered and summarily thrown out - eventually counting down the seconds on a hillside overlooking the club with packages of crisps and now warm bottles of baby champ. I might have gotten tipsy. But not drunk.
I have had one very good New Year’s Eve - ok, I do remember a kiss - although, without being too indiscrete, it was not until a few days later that I could confirm it had been good - and one very bad New Year’s Eve when an ex-girlfriend I was hoping to convert into a new girlfriend ended up cavorting with a stock broker from Chicago in the hot tub of a gated community in Boca Raton. The rest fall more or less in between.
I have always found the Gregorian yearly calendar a little befuddling - especially if you live in Canada and/or go to school. January is not the start of anything. Not of winter. Not of the school year. Not of new television shows. Not of a new sports season of any league. If anything, January 1st feels like the middle of the year. Largely because, for all intents and purposes, it is in the middle of everything. The Hebrew calendar, with the new year falling somewhere in the month of September, does feel like a new year. Start of school. Of fall. It’s not a religious thing. It just is.
This year however, felt different. Was different. The earth did not stop rotating on its axis. Winter, with me stuck in Toronto instead of Florida trying to convince myself that +3 Celsius was a mild day, came as scheduled. Bringing with it snow and ice and long underwear. But everything else seemed to stop. Or if not stop, at least recalibrate. Working and studying from home on weekdays and weekends began to be indistinguishable and interchangeable. Television shows and sports came and went, started and stopped, with no rhyme and reason. Then an already bad year came to an end with the tragic and sudden death of a member of our family.
My brother’s mother-in-law passed away on December 30th. My sister-in-law’s mother. My nieces’ Bubby. She has been Bubby Judy for nearly thirty years. She was the quintessential Bubby. Doting on and spoiling her grandchildren. Before that she was just Judy. I have a special place in my heart for her. In part because of the way she and her husband Howie treated my much older parents when they were alive and, in part because of the way she welcomed me into her house and family.
Judy never had a family meal I was not invited to.
“Tell Ronnie I am buying fish. Tell Ronnie I am buying steak.” Every time. She included me in her count. I was part of her family. It would never occur to her not to include me. I didn’t like to commit so I would often just say no but she would buy extra for me ‘just in case’. Judy, god knows, could lay on the guilt, but she never did for me. When I did show she would say “Look who is here” with genuine joy I am not sure I ever deserved. I invited her and Howie to BBQs at my house, she had a penchant for Bruno’s rib steaks, and to the Sunday brunch at Boca Grove in Florida. One time I invited them to a Saturday night dinner at the club but when they arrived, there was a private function and the dining room was closed so I called my friend Phil whose daughter worked at J Alexanders and finagled a last-minute table. We walked past thirty people waiting to be seated right to our booth. Judy thought I was a magician. I was the hero for the night.
Bubby Judy and I formed an unspoken bond because we were both big time worrywarts. If one of the kids was traveling we would both each call numerous times to make sure they had gotten home safely.
The girls would answer “Hi Bubby” or “Hi Uncle Ronnie” interchangeably because it could have been either one of us. Both Judy and I thought every plan they had, travel, camping, going to Starbucks, was a bad idea. We were ok with that.
We shared a love of reading and film. Many of the books on my Kindle are there because of Judy’s recommendations. Sometimes they were books she had read herself and sometimes, well sometimes she had heard about a book from Gloria’s sister’s cleaning lady’s cousin. Because that was Judy.
And Judy never stopped being Judy. Even the last few weeks when she was in the hospital, when the family was facetiming her I would poke my head in to say hello. “Is that Ronnie?” She would say. I would say hello and then cede the floor to her daughter or grandchildren. But, now out of sight, I would still hear her say “Tell Ronnie I heard how to get a vaccination in Florida. Tell Ronnie I heard how to ship your car to Buffalo and then take a helicopter. Tell Ronnie that Sorel’s son’s friend did a book reading at his shul in Phoenix and he should do that too.”
Tell Ronnie.
This summer, after much planning and deliberation, she and Howie made it to the cottage. When she arrived, all tired and worn out after the journey, she plopped herself down on the walker which doubled as a chair. She was exhausted and asked for a glass of water. I had just come in from my bunkie and could overhear the conversation. Then she beckoned one of her granddaughters, I think it was Rachel, to come over. “Rachie,” she said, struggling to catch her breath, “in the green bag there is a tupperware with chocolate chip mandelbrot. Those are for Uncle Ronnie.”
Judy liked New Year’s Eve. In Florida, she would arrange dinner parties with her friends or book a night at a trendy restaurant. But her favourite was when the family, foregoing traditional plans, would cram into her house, a house not big enough to swing a proverbial cat - and we would order takeout Italian or Greek food, fight about what movie to watch, and then end up counting down the seconds as the ball dropped in New York City. The food was lousy, the quarters cramped, and the din at an unhealthy decibel level. It was great.
I spent a few New Year’s Eves at her house. Maybe because I had nothing better to do. I guess you could say those were the ones that fell in between. I wouldn’t mind a few more of those.
This year, December 31st really felt like the year had ended.
The funeral had been at 1:00 PM and the covid protocols of only allowing 10 people plus the Rabbi made it even more heartbreaking than I thought possible.
But a new year was upon us. The Jews, a little like the Irish but perhaps with a little less whiskey, understand that a shiva, a wake, with all of its sadness, also becomes a celebration of life. Stories are told and, amidst the showers of tears, laughter is shared. You are reminded of the strength of your family and your endless bounty of friends. Guilt will knock on your door at times when you fear you are enjoying yourself too much for such a solemn occasion but you let it in. You are forced to. Besides, you have plenty of deli to share. And so, with news of vaccines on the horizon, my sister and brother-in-law, aunt and uncle, and cousins had already been vaccinated in Israel, it really felt, for the first time in my 61 years, that January 1st was the start of a new year. One, we hoped and prayed, which would bring better things. Better news. A new day. We are perhaps, with the disappointments and heartbreaks of the last year, too jaded, too cynical, too superstitious to have any real optimism. But maybe we can get a couple of bottles of baby champ, chilled this time, ready so we can toast the hopeful blessings of this new year.
The end.