Trudging Toward 2012

You Say Febyooerrry, I Say February

Was there ever any resolution to the presumably countrywide debate concerning the correct method to say what year it is, now that we are more than a decade into the twenty-first century?

"Two thousand" was essentially a no-brainer; 2001 is forever truncated in my head to "Nine-Eleven." (Thanks for playing, Osama. Sorry we had to cut the parting gift down to five virgins. It's the economy, stupid.)

I never gave the naming convention issue any thought until the next eight years were already in the rearview mirror. I'm more of a follower than a trailblazer; whatever Everybody Else decided was fine with me. Now that the most recent season of Survivor is over and the season postmortem on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills looms large, however, I have had more time to redirect my critical thinking. Although "Twentytwelve" takes less time to say and "Two thousand twelve" sounds as if I'm counting the miles between the next lightning strike and wherever I am cowering, I think I will go with the latter.

Excuse me. I have to go close a window. The smoking guests banished to the porch of the house across the road are partying like it's one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.

~~~

Ghosts of Holidays Past

There's nothing like telling the truth to bring water cooler conversation to a screeching halt. My holiday tales -- not the ones from childhood; those are very pleasant, like Frank Capra movies -- tend to get more depressing by the year. In retelling, they take on an almost psychotic quality, like a child's bedtime story, but written by the novelist Patrick McCabe. Because I have bad luck with (or bad taste in) men, there's always a generous supply of material, including:

• The time I found a used lawnmower under the Christmas tree. Rescued from garbage collection by a compulsive trash-picking attorney boyfriend, it had been "rehabbed" with a new spark plug and air filter. It was a self-propelled type, but that feature no longer worked and he'd chosen not to attempt finding a new part for it. "It will be great exercise!" he bellowed, when I asked why moving it was roughly equivalent to pushing a car with a dead battery. "Thank you," I offered. "Let me just get a dustpan so I can pick up those bits of dried sod that fell out when I was pushing it across the rug."
• The New Year's Eve when a fiancé timed his announcement that he'd realized I was "a rebound situation" with the stroke of midnight, in the romantic glow of tiny multicolored tree lights. Teddy Pendergrass was on the sound system singing Wake Up, Everybody. Good advice.
  
• A group date-sort of New Year's Eve in which fellow refugees from similarly odd romantic entanglements went to a comedy club and rang in the new year, after which we found ourselves face to face in a subway car with a would-be robber who was sporting a pair of pantyhose on his head. Before he had the chance to (presumably) booze bottle-whip me to death for rolling my eyes at his choice of hosiery color -- sheer nude rather than a more seasonal opaque navy or black -- he fell flat on his face and we all skipped off the car, exhilarated by our narrow escape from an unspeakable end.
  

Then there was last New Year's Eve.

They Tried to Make Her Go to Rehab; She Said No, No, No

I spent it sitting at the bedside of my mother, who had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance at dawn on Christmas. Although she had fought her way back from death in the emergency room, I knew by the close of the year that she would not be going home. My family found out at some point in the holiday period that the only reason she had been moved to a rehabilitation facility was because she had survived the admission to the emergency room. They hadn't expected it and they didn't know what else to do. It was the end stage of a rare medical condition for which there are no good outcomes.

The rehab process was doomed from the start, partly because she was dying, and partly because she was not interested in lifting weights. Her games had been golf and bridge. When I asked her what she had been learning in rehab, she startled me with, "I have no idea." Terrified that she was disengaging at warp speed, I whispered, "What do you mean?" She said, "I am too distracted by the lack of facial hair maintenance. I haven't seen this many bearded ladies since the circus was in town. Don't forget to bring me my tweezers, by the way."

The room in which she spent her last two weeks, with the stroke of a pen in a hallway waiting area, was transformed to a hospice. There was no change in the furnishings, no sign on the door that read, "This was a room of hope. Now it is where she waits." There was no more rehab. There were only loving hands, smiling faces, pain medication and angels in scrubs, speaking softly to her and encouraging her to push the call button - something she never once did during that stay.

After she died, in the days preceding the funeral, I sat down to check her mountain of unanswered e-mail, close her online bill payment accounts and delete her e-mail address. I found a small piece of paper under her computer’s mouse pad. She had torn it from a book or perhaps a calendar. I like to think it was a message she’d left behind. A verse from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, it reads:

“I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch where through Gleams

that untravelled world.”

Happy travels in 2012. And that's pronounced two thousand twelve.