It's a good line, but I don't know if it actually has much to do with why I've mostly stopped celebrating New Year's. Most years, nowadays, I end up just staying home. One year I went to bed ten minutes before midnight.
I have a few other hypotheses. Maybe it's that there have been too many disappointments - all kinds of hype and buildup followed by inevitable letdown? Perhaps I never cared all that much about it to begin with? Or, could it be that I know that it will never again be as great as it was that year?
That year was 1999, and, in the words of Tricky, pre-millennium tension had been with us for years. The media hounding us with the Y2K bug; nutcases making end-of-the-world predictions; besserwissers pointing out that the new millennium really starts in 2001; people making restaurant reservations years in advance.
I was living in Philly - a year-and-a-half out of college - visiting Sweden for the holidays, and decided to spend New Year's Eve with the family at my aunt Barbro and uncle Göran’s house. (When you’re in your mid-20s, New Year’s with the family is not the obvious choice.) We had some great food and a couple of bottles of wine and the topic of conversation turned to “Dad’s birthday wine.”
Nearly twelve years earlier, for his 40th birthday, my dad had bought himself an expensive bottle of wine. Dad had always been interested in wine but we’ve never had the funds to act on it beyond making wine a staple of weekend dinners. Mostly wines that would now be in the $10 range, which made the purchase of a 1982 Penfolds Grange a splurge beyond imagination.
At our New Year's dinner, we were all having such a great time that dad decided it was time to open the Grange! The bottle was at our home but that didn’t stop him and mom from going home and fetching it. When they returned I had the first great wine experience of my life. I had no idea that wine could taste like this! I don’t have the words to describe it; I certainly did not then. What I remember is that it had layers upon layers and a finish that stayed for minutes. Drinking that seventeen year old bottle marked the beginning of my life-long love of wine.
Dad enjoying his bottle of Penfolds Grange
After dinner we walked to the town square where they were putting on a millennium celebration with a stage and local singers performing. While we were waiting for the countdown it started snowing. And not just a regular snowfall but those really big flakes that fall so slowly that they almost seem to hang still in the air, as if not wanting to hit the ground. I ran into several friends and one of my elementary school teachers. It felt like the whole town had gathered. When the clock struck midnight we popped a bottle of Champagne that we’d brought, poured everyone a glass, and welcomed the future. In that one moment everything seemed perfect.
Urban, Gunilla, Göran, Barbro, Per, Dad and I shortly after midnight
After my dad’s funeral last year we spoke fondly of that night. Someone had the idea that we should get another bottle of Grange and open it for New Year’s Eve in dad’s memory. Exactly seventeen years after that night my mom, aunt, uncle, sister and husband celebrated New Year’s Eve in my childhood home, and I opened a newly purchased Grange. It was excellent and I think my dad would have liked it.
