The same sidewalk twice

LET US OBSERVE THE ONE GREAT CONSTANT of a Chicago New Year's Eve, and that is how dampness expresses itself: slicks and drifts of sooted snow? Or gray streets, lightly drizzled with beads of moisture, dusted with grit and turds and muck? No matter the quality of past year's resolutions or how resolutely they've been resolved across the course of the 364 or so days that just tumbled down the rat hole, you will be walking somewhere, hands-in-pocket, head-down against the wind, contemplating a sidewalk tapestry, beat-down cement and macadam crusted with junk, organic or not, a mirror-image of the bottom of your shoe. A lifetime of New Years can be rolled out as a succession of "And once I..." memories. But I long for sweeping banalities: I like to hear stories that consist mostly of smile and mental furze, undergrowth of determined guzzle atop crunchy groundcover of tipple. Bleary, happy memories, capturing the essential sensation of fun and fracas and folly and fraternity, recalled with a goofball's grin. Legend of waking to buttered cinnamon toast and cloudless afternoon and then hot bowls of lucky black-eyed peas, mushy like hung-over friendship. Straining memory, of course, the generalities fall away and singularities stand out: I could test your tolerance with the tale of the night of 90 degree weather in Florida backwoods as then-girlfriend's father tried to put out the dozen-persons-warming campfire with a barrage of freshly-distilled piss as Mormon cattle stared across lines of rusty barb with eyes red like zombies and sixty miles to the south fireworks rose high and hardly audible above Disney World. Or the party marshaled by someone just out of college, who kept no clock that night, and ready for the twenty or so revelers who'd braved then-dangerous Western Avenue to count down to the nouvelle année, turns on the radio only to find the new year was twenty minutes of age already. (Drip, drip, drip went the polite yet speedy exodus of guests.) Or smiling across the course and cosmos of a party as guests, one-by-one and two-by-town filter down the stairs and back into their lives and you repeatedly catch the hostess' eye as she catches yours, sharing a peripheral vision. (Good times, which you should say in a Greek or Portuguese or Russian accent for best effect.) A highball cup is always a half-second from falling, a keg is always spewing its last, someone else's inner tumult will somehow be expressed as a facial expression to be taken in autistic-Asperger tumble as a syndrome of desire or admiration. (And sometimes this will be so, and how!) But there remains the constant: just as the pedestrian-endangering footpad at the wheel, who swears behind the windshield while jerking into crosswalks will within moments climb down from the SUV cab and become once more a creature on foot themselves, you will be a citizen in seconds, reveler in retreat. Outside the party where it is warm and bright and the music grows quieter, where the golden glow is like timeless candlelight as you withdraw, patterning of sidewalks resume once more, Chicago paths, a muddy, murky rivulet that can lead in so many directions, as it has since the city's history began amid tall, clean, strong prairie grass, but mostly home, soon, home, bed, gravity itself taken for resolve, toward tomorrow, tomorrow, and 363 to come. [Published in a slightly different form, Newcity, 28 December 2006.]