Last Words A Millennial—and private—New Year’s Eve By Jill Buerk and Linda Levine It’s been going on for over twenty years. Eight p.m., black tie, the usual—we trek through the crackle of the cold night on our way to one or another of our houses, with an hors d’oeuvre or first course in tow, bottles of wine and champagne—and, paradoxically, no small sense of expectation. Something has held our New Year’s Eve group together, and it is not unanimity of opinion or predictability. On the contrary, dissimilarities rule. For one thing, the eight of us rotate among our houses from one year to the next. For another, the menu is never remotely the same. For a third, the current of conversation always varies. Those dissimilaries aside, they aren’t the ones that most matter. What matters are our own dissimilarities—from couple to couple, person to person—in many ordinary ways but also in un-ordinary ways. We are different religions, different races. Even our houses convey a spectrum of sensibilities. At one end of the block, there’s a house that resembles a Victorian Christmas card, with mantelpiece festooned, tree to the ceiling, aromas of pine. At the other end, there’s a house fragrant with flowers, muted with the memory of spent Chanukah lights. Unspoken differences among us combine with rich appreciations of where we are. Sitting in one living room or another before dinner, we sip champagne, bite into a caviar roll if we’re lucky, or eat lovingly assembled canapes, or swoop up coquille St. Jacques; not to worry, we arrest our appetites in some fashion. Our party runs the gamut from a lusty Lutheran minister who likes fine food and lasts through impressive quantities of Bordeaux—to the Mormon bishop who abstains. Grace, spoken one year by one of those authorities, the next year by the other, begins the meal. Common practice in some of our houses but not in others, the saying of grace and clasping of hands, turns out to be a unifier. We each bring our customs to this traditional night, one we treat as sacred, though with an ecumenical cast. We are a disparate group, culturally and experientially, with our own personalized tradition of New Year’s Eve in common as we move together into the millennium. Collaboratively we establish the menu, attempt a composition, assign a course for each to bring. Howsoever simple or complex the food—a clear broth with a melange of mushrooms, a homey beef stew, a fancily articulated salad, a chocolate cranberry tart, say—it must all come from our own kitchens. We feel an edgy pleasure in the spontaneity of our conversation. Before the evening begins, one of us might wonder: what will the cattle farmer say to the chemist? What will the professor of dentistry stir up with the professor of English literature? What will the singer of arias and ballads sing to one and all? What will social psychologists say to each other? Does anybody really talk on New Year’s Eve? Over the years we’ve come to feel accustomed to one another, but custom does not stale our infinite variety. This gathering is anything but inbred. Some years, some couples haven’t caught sight of one another since the New Year’s Eve prior. What’s become a comfortable ritual serves as the process by which we re-connect. Yet, too, this ritual has forged such firm friendships, complete strangers have sometimes become traveling companions. New Year’s Eve for the eight of us, who seem more important to each other as the years pass, is decidedly not a night on the town. Intimately at home, we find our hilarity in the telling of appallingly bad jokes, and not half-bad stories. Call it simple pleasures, we’re just hosts and guests, joyously breaking bread. Ah yes, the bread, from the hands of the professional baker in the crowd: one year a glazed challah, another an onion poppy seed, reliably a feast in itself. In the progress of time, a baby has been born, a couple has died. Unforgettable and irreplaceable, that couple was replaced by another. Actually, we never intended the occasion to be only for couples, nor need it be, nor will it be. And so there’s been a continuity, which twenty years earlier was the last thing we anticipated creating. Sensing the joy it brings, in the surrounds of our small group—sharing the last round of champagne and sweetenening the end of the evening with handmade petit fours—we treasure it. In this continuity, we recognize a value: a worth in our connectedness, a worth in our differences. We revel in it. We don’t have to get on a plane, to find excitement. We’re ready for New Year’s Eve 2000, here in Buffalo. Rachel will pull out something elegantly decolleté, Barbara something a little spangly, Jill something dark and soignee, Linda something long and at home. And Larry and Douglas, John and George will look simply splendid, getting one more use out of their tuxes. We’re getting older, and will no doubt dribble out by one a.m. We’ll leave with the hope that we’ll all be here and well enough to greet the post-millenial New Year’s Eve, and the Eve after that. Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top