Sometimes it’s like ‘Back To The Future’

We never paid much attention to New Year’s. We didn’t celebrate it like Christmas or the Fourth of July. In those early grammar school days, it was sort of a precursor to having the holidays end, precipitating our forced return to the classroom.

We didn’t do any “New Year’s ‘Resolutin’.” Now, we hoped a lot back then. Bobby Brewer, Buddy Wiggleton, Ricky Hale, and I would gather on the front porch, with our coat collars turned up against the cold, and hope we didn’t have to cut out those February presidents’ heads in the fifth grade. We hoped the school boiler would explode again and delay our return to school.

We hoped it would snow “knee-high to a giraffe” so the whole school system would be shut down indefinitely. We hoped the teachers would go on strike. We hoped a train loaded with dangerous chemicals would derail and overturn in that sweeping curve between the railroad station and the telephone office, and the town would have to be evacuated. 

You catch our young drift….

But mostly we hoped our beloved St. Louis Cardinals would win every game in the upcoming 1959 season. It was our most consistent, ongoing hope. It sprang eternal in our little hearts…

And I believe to this day we would have won every game that summer if we hadn’t a’traded Wally Moon to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Gino Cimoli before the season started. Moon helped the Dodgers win the World Series that year. The Cards finished in their usual seventh place.

I know that startling trade doesn’t crank anybody’s tractor at the outset of 2025, but it does point out how unforeseen events and uncontrollable situations can mar any New Year’s dreams, hopes, thoughts, or predictions.

Daddy used to say, “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.” He wasn’t talking about abstract forecasts or way-out-yonder prophesies, he was actually reminding me to not let Daisy or Mary May step in the bucket and spill the milk when I was a’milking them on those early, dark, freezing cold, December mornings. 

Dad lived his life not looking back, or ahead, he was always tuned in to right now, at this very moment. I don’t know if he was short-sighted. Or profoundly spot-on! 

High school found us spending our waning days of the year at the back booth of Frank’s Dairy Bar. We still hoped more than we “resolute-ed.” But we had moved way past the elementary years. Buddy allowed we could pour a box of sulfur into that coal-burning furnace in the basement of the high school….

Mostly we talked about the basketball season and the upcoming playoffs. We wished we had Bobby’s ability to charm Miss Polly Rucker in English class. We hoped, or maybe dreamed, of owning a brand-new Thunderbird convertible. Shucks, the plain truth is we would have settled for a 1954 Nash Rambler.

I didn’t say nothing out loud, mind you, but secretly I sucked on my chocolate milkshake and kinda hoped Jane Hill might notice me a little bit in the upcoming year. Some New Year resolutions ain’t nobody else’s business!

College was another whole predicting ballgame. I was so busy just surviving, I didn’t know one year from the next! My very first day on campus, I saw a guy jump out of a second-story window. I got hit so hard at football practice one time it knocked me into the next year. We had multiple dogs come to class with us. The school called it tradition. Listen, it was hard to read “Chaucer” in proper Old English with a 70-pound Dalmatian chewing on your shoestrings!

It snowed every day for two months during the winter. Classes were hard. I was 212 miles away from home. Life got very hard there for a while.

I prayed more than I dwelled on what may be coming in the next year. 

Finding a job, marrying the right girl, trying to make a living, and starting a family throws the whole New Year resolution game offkilter. It is not about you anymore! It’s about the folks around you. Responsibility can put you into Daddy’s “here and now” world quicker than greased lightning. 

Being a grownup is way more involved than we ever had a clue about out on that old porch, hoping up ways to keep from going back to school. I never laid awake at night pondering on what I needed to focus on, plan for, or take care of until I had children of my own. You talk about rearranging everything about life.

But what a fun trip! It sure was better than jumping out of second-story windows in college. And it beats the heck out of milking ole Daisy and Mary May on a 25-degree predawn morning. 

Life somehow got in the way of New Year’s predicting, and the wishing business.

And, with the onset of old age, the years are going by so fast you don’t have time for it. Before you can finish your resolution, that year is gone; and you’re halfway through the next one!

All that said, I have managed to summon up one hope, one small prediction for the new year. The St. Louis Cardinals are not going to lose a game this season….

Blessings in the New Year,

Kes