A Toast and A Prayer for the New Year

The real trick to parenting might be recognizing that stupidity and bad choices are as natural as changing over to a new calendar each year.

A new year inevitably brings reflection. This morning I found myself remembering an early version of myself where the most important part of changing the calendar involved getting a booking for the band. Gigs for New Year’s Eve celebrations in Western Pennsylvania brought the best payday of the year. There would be sauerkraut and hotdogs served at midnight, a necessary part of the revelry, consumed under an umbrella of cigarette smoke and on tables loaded with empty beer bottles. Noise makers and shiny Happy New Year hats were necessary, too.

I turned eighteen in December of 1980, and the only New Year gig offered was an after-party at the American Legion in Patton, Pennsylvania, a hulking, mansion-like building on the outskirts of that small town in the Allegheny Mountains. The American Legion sat among trees and behind an iron fence. Or maybe I’m imagining the fence. At any rate, the saner members of our band weren’t interested in a 2 to 5 AM timeslot, but three of us accepted the New Year all-nighter in the name of cash and potential fun.

My memories of that gig aren’t entirely clear, but something tells me it was more drudgery than fun. I do remember the drive home, in the pre-dawn hours of January 1^st, 1981. That’s because just a few miles away from my parents’ house, I crested a hill on what we called Ridge Road and saw an oncoming car whose headlights were clearly in my lane. Somehow, instinct told me to swerve to the right and quickly. I steered to the berm and the grass and avoided the head-on collision. Quick reflexes, which might have been slightly hampered by illegal alcohol intake, saved me from certain injury, or worse. I was a little shaken and stopped the car on that snowy ridge to gather my senses.

I don’t expect that I was an expert driver in the days after my eighteenth birthday. Decades of experience behind the wheel sharpen your powers of observation, and you gain a sense for impending danger. My dad always said, “You need eyes in the back of your head when you drive.” That can’t be literally true, but he knew what he was talking about. Our attention is required in many different ways when we drive, and yet we do a lot of it unconsciously. I can’t account for why my instincts were so good in early 1981, and maybe it was just dumb luck that I arrived home safely that morning. As you might have surmised, it was a moment I would not forget.

I suppose this is on my mind because my oldest daughter is seventeen and wants to go to a party tonight. She won’t drive, but her equally youthful friend will, a tentative New Year plan. Parenthood requires us to walk a fine line between safety and independence. I want nothing more than self-sufficiency for my kids, an ability to read the world and react accordingly, in a way that will keep them safe and reasonably happy. And yet, my instincts are speaking to me this morning, saying that maybe I ought to provide transportation to tonight’s party. Safety or independence? Which will it be? When I think of New Years Eve, I think of drunken amateurs on the roads, those people who drive on the wrong side of a two-lane road.

And how about this for another New Year reflection? It’s certain that I survived my own stupidity several times in the last six decades, perhaps more times than I can count. Instinct matters. Maybe I’ve had dumb luck. Maybe what I want the most from my kids is some assurance that they won’t do anything stupid on New Year’s Eve, or on any other night. That might be wishful thinking, though, and the real trick to parenting might be recognizing that stupidity and bad choices are as natural as changing over to a new calendar each year. Stupidity is as reliable as the sun and moon, and maybe job number one is teaching your offspring how to pull themselves up from stupid, or how to steer around it.

People occasionally tell me I’m a good dad, and my reaction to that is always pride mixed with incredulity. All I know as a dad of three girls is that you must offer time, attention, and conversation—there’s really no other path. No one hands you a guidebook on fatherhood, and what I do, most of the time, is follow my instincts. I suppose I will do the same today. I’ll follow my instincts and hope for minimal damage on this New Year’s Eve so we can all sit around the dinner table on another day and tell stories about the stupid stuff we’ve done. Sure, we do stupid things, and there’s more to come. No one can stop the tide of human stupidity. The good part is that sometimes stupidity is highly entertaining and very funny, just as long as you survive your own bad choices. That’s the tricky part.

Here's a toast to a 2024 where we can be mostly smart, and a prayer that if we do anything stupid, which seems inevitable, we’ll be able to laugh about it next year.