We’ve Wandered Many a Weary Foot

Another new year. It's just now sinking in. But not just any year -- a leap year, an election year, an Olympiad and the 30th anniversary of the release of "The Safety Dance."

This New Year's Eve was almost Lilly's first with friends, rather than her family, but the party fell through. Next year, I figure, they'll pull it off. Gathering for the new year is something youth should do.

Last summer, a high school friend of mine published this picture on Facebook, and she's kindly letting me put it here. It dates from December 31, 1981, during a gathering of high school friends a few years after we'd finished high school.

I'm actually in it -- barely. That's the edge of my leg, arm and head on the left. At least, I'm fairly certain that's me. Left to right from there, top: Tom, Catherine, George, Ellen, Lynn, Louis, Elysse, Tom, Debbie; bottom: Stephen, John, Nancy. I'm not sure who took the photo.

I'm glad I have an image of Stephen, the fellow with his tongue out, a pose he struck sometimes. Stephen Humble in full. He was born in December 1961, so had he lived, we would now both be 50.

That occurred to me a while ago, and when I had the thought I happened to be near Google, so I put his name in. There's a psychiatrist in Nashville by that name, and an English cricketer of that name who has a Wiki entry and a Facebook page, and a number of other references that probably don't point to the person pictured above. Deeper in, there are other references to other people, but I have to put in "Stephen Humble MIT" to get a few fleeting references to his name in dusty user group archives and academic papers. Maybe those are faint traces of the person I once knew.

So I thought he should have a better mention somewhere on line. Here, for instance. Stephen Humble was my friend in high school and a memorable character for those of us who knew him ('umble, he said it was pronounced, but not even the teachers said it with a silent h). He was exceptionally bright and insatiably curious about a lot of things, with a special facility for mathematics, the sciences and languages, at one point studying Turkish "for fun." He was the only male flautist in our high school band. He appreciated strange humor and weird incongruities, and had a vigorous laugh for someone with such a skinny frame. In his high school years to proved to be a freethinker and all around odd duck.

So naturally Stephen gravitated to my group of friends. Fit right in, he did. I know he caught a fair amount of flak from, let's say, less enlightened kids, though probably more so in junior high than high school. Too bad for them. They missed out on a lot by not listening to what he had to say.

He's the only one, besides former Sun-Times columnist Zay N. Smith, ever to appreciate my line, which I made up one day after Latin class: "I move that the subjunctive be abolished from the English language." Stephen laughed out loud at that, back when that was an actual activity rather than Internet shorthand. Of course, it's not really a laugh-out-loud joke; but as I said, Stephen was a highly literate oddball.

He went to MIT in the early '80s. I don't really know what he did for a living after that. He was a Unix expert, among other things. I remember once he told me how user-unfriendly Unix was, noting that when you made an entry mistake, the only reply the system would give you was a question mark. I think he spent some time in Europe, doing who knows what, but by the last time I saw him, in 1995, he was back in Cambridge, Mass. At that moment in his life, he had an enormous, Old Testament-prophet head of hair and beard.

He also had a boyfriend. That was a surprise. Not, ultimately, that he preferred men, but that he had a sex life at all. Knowledge of the carnal sort seemed to be one of the few kinds he wasn't interested in, but I suppose our high school assumptions were wrong, as they often were.

I don't know why he killed himself in 2002. How could I know that anyway, even if I'd seen him more often during the last 20 years of his life? Whatever troubled him must have been powerful, to subdue his love of learning. But I won't dwell on his end. All I know is that my life was more interesting for having known him, and so requiescat in pace, Stephen.

New Year Entertainments

The stretch of days between Christmas and New Year's proved to be brown and dry, at least around here, except for the rain and dank drizzle on Friday, and a weak spot of snow on New Year's Day. It's like November never ended -- the least-white December I've seen since '94 in London, which, a native told us, was a strangely warm month as well. Suits me.

Unlike last year, we didn't happen to see any of the holiday movies showing at theaters, such as We Bought a Cemetery for Christmas, Who Cares About the Adventures of Tintin? or The Girl Regretting Her Dragon Tattoo. I did manage to see Duck Soup on television on New Year's Eve.

That was my nth viewing of that movie at intervals of once every two or three years since the mid-70s. I know all the gags but laughed again all the same, and saw some details I'd never noticed before (or had forgotten). I paid particular close attention this time to Margaret Dumont, whose face was remarkably expressive. I've come to doubt the story that she didn't get most of the brothers' jokes, which sounds like something Groucho would make up.

I also paid closer attention to Edgar Kennedy, the lemonade vendor tormented by Chico and Harpo. Turns out he had quite a career and, if Duck Soup is anything to go by, a fitting sobriquet in "Master of the Slow Burn."

Over the holidays I also chewed at some of the books I've been reading lately, such as The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency (Jeremy Lott, 2007), an entertaining read that (among many other things) makes a good case for regarding President Tyler more highly. Still, I didn't find myself in the grip of an intensely good book, as I did with True Grit this time last year.

I did spend some time reading the entertaining blog Lifetime, Wow! which consists of reviews of movies shown on the Lifetime Movie Channel. I'm not particularly familiar with Lifetime, but apparently it shows a lot of risible movies, and the bloggers at Lifetime, Wow! shoot those fish in that barrel with glee. The blog's plot synopses are probably more fun than most of the movies themselves.

Mickey Takes an Uppercut

The first meal of the new year was pancakes, made by me. That happens often enough on Saturdays anyway, but this time I had pecans and blackberries on hand to add a little zip to the creations. Ann still asks for pancakes with mouse ears -- you know, like the famed cartoon character. Since blackberries were available, she asked for a face made of those, and watched me add eyes, a nose and a smile.

I had a little trouble with the flip. On a plain pancake, or even a nonrepresentational pancake studded randomly with blackberries, that wouldn't have affected its essential goodness. But since I was going for a smiling face, it looked like Mickey had gotten his jaw dislocated in a bar fight. Maybe he was defending Minnie's honor.

Ann didn't complain too much, eating it all with syrup, and gusto.

True Grit Holidays

New Year's Eve 2010: the Great Melt here in northern Illinois. Three or so week's worth of snow started melting in earnest with overnight above-freezing temps early on the 30th. By the 31st, all except the hardiest of snow islands were gone and the air pleasant, like a lost day of spring. A parting gift from the year 2010, which will not be remembered fondly for a while, and then forgotten in its particulars, except by historians and other eccentrics.

I finished True Grit, the Charles Portis novel, on Christmas Day; and saw True Grit, the movie now playing, on New Year's Day. Like a lot of people, I hadn't ever read the book, but had seen and enjoyed the famed earlier movie version, though it's been a good many years now.

The prospect of seeing the new movie led me to the book first, and I was rewarded with the best novel I've read in years. Guess I'm a sucker for books about tough yet sympathetic characters on harrowing journeys as opposed to, say, books about unhappy academics who commit adultery and struggle to write books about unhappy academics who commit adultery.

The Coen brothers' movie hews pretty close to the book, which helped make it satisfying, though they usually make satisfying movies in a lot of other ways, such as by hiring a talented cast and paying close attention to the details of time and place, as they did with True Grit. The arresting visuals, with Texas passing for Oklahoma, greatly added to the effect.

I dragged Lilly, protesting, to see the movie. She's old enough now to see an occasional movie that hasn't been dumbed down for an adolescent audience, male or female. She was one of the youngest members of the New Year's Day audience at the suburban multiplex we visited, a fact she pointed out. But after it was over, she said it was "not bad." High praise indeed for something her dad likes.

All of You on the Good Earth

Merry Christmas to all, and a Happy New Year thrown in, since I'm not going to post until around January 2, 2011. Every new year I ask myself, how did that year-number get to be so high? Every year, the answer is tempus fugit, dude.

Apollo 8 Christmas Message link for Facebook readers.

A Cup o' Kindness Yet

About 10 minutes into 2010, I asked my daughters to put on their coats and shoes and come outside with me into the back yard. The night was clear and too cold. The bright-coin full Moon was nearly straight overhead -- in brightness as close as it ever comes to being the Sun -- laying a moonglow on the carpet of snow below, interrupted only by gray patterns of tree-branch shadows. Ann noticed the tiny diamond sparkles in the snow before the rest of us did, but once pointed out, they were impossible to miss.

Won't be long, sometime in the '10s yawning ahead, before the girls are hanging out with their friends, not their parents, for the change of years. I hope so anyway, because it's something youth should do. Recently I saw Facebook pictures of my nephew Robert, 21, with his friends for December 31/January 1 festivities. I didn't know anyone in the pictures except him, but it all looked familiar. If my old high school friends and I had had Facebook on January 1, 1980, we'd probably have made similar postings.

I don't have any images from the first day of the 1980s. People weren't snap-happy in those days. I do have some from Day One of the 1990s, though:

By this time, old college friends. Left to right: Mike, Dan, Steve, me, Victor, Rich and Lisa, in front of the Golden Palace Restaurant in Boston's Chinatown (amazingly, it still seems to be there); photo taken by another in our party, Karin. A nicely composed impromptu group portrait of happy friends.

We had dim sum at the Golden Palace for lunch that day. More of a breakfast, since we'd stayed up till 4 or 5 that morning. Hard to believe I used to have energy for that kind of thing. I suppose I could still stay up that late if absolutely necessary, but I'm not sure I'd be quite so glad about things the next day.

Memo to 2009: So Long, Don't Bother Us Anymore

Another New Year again? Didn't that just happen about a year ago? So many New Years have piled up in the warehouses of memory that some of them are as lost as the Ark in an FDR-era federal surplus property facility. Anyway, no more posting until 2010 is under way in every time zone.