Holiday Best from MetroWest!
So another year has come and gone, and it has been pointed out to me that maybe Christmas isn't exactly the best time of year to open up the mail and suddenly be weighed down with the burden of having to read one of these endless diatribes. Between the parties and baking cookies and killing the salmonella in the eggnog and noticing what a loser Santa is in the Rudolph video, there isn't a whole lot of time left in this busy season to indulge oneself in reflecting on the year in review, I'm told. After all, breaking up the stages of our lives into 365 day increments is a fairly arbitrary conceit, and maybe it would be better served to write a year in review say at the end of April, after tax season and Easter are over but before summer gets here, possibly on a cool but sunny Thursday around 2:30 in the afternoon.
If this were to be the case, however, the first cataclysmic event of the New Year would never have happened, because if I hadn't sent the last letter out at Christmastime, I wouldn't have answered the phone only a few nights later to hear a distantly-remembered voice on the other end say "This is an uncontrollable nihilist calling." For the first time in close to a decade, the illustrious Steve Creighton was not only visiting the land of his birth, but actually had some free time to get together. Of course he had way more free time than he thought he did, but we still managed to hook up once, actually a couple of days before January 1, at MIT, then I had to buy him dinner, followed by trips to a Japanese bookstore in Porter Square and that giant statue in Orient Heights, then I had to drive him back to Marblehead. Apparently the circus has fallen upon hard times for the Chief, such that he begrudged every dollar Creighton spent while he was visiting, and wouldn't let him borrow the car because of some lame reason that last time Steve accidentally totaled it. During this entire evening, Creighton did most of the talking, while I tried to piece together just exactly what he'd been doing the last 8 or 9 years that would leave him here, penniless and jobless, and on the outs with the Chief for hogging the phone all day. Suffice it to say that naturally he had been embroiled in some tempestuous relationship spanning three continents for years on end (although the claim to being married was just a ruse), had put those eleven college degrees to good use trying to track down a place in China where he could watch Benny Hill, and here he was back in Marblehead, albeit temporarily. After another week or so, he was off to California, possibly to get a job where he might actually be required to wear a sportcoat and have an office. Typically, although he has email he is keeping his actual location a secret. Apparently his former employer, the Oklahoma Natural Gas Council or whatever I said it was last year, is trying to track him down for allegedly scalping Springsteen tickets on company time and shagging the boss's wife as well.
This meeting with Creighton made me feel much less guilty that I had actually made up stuff about him in order to elicit some kind of response from him, such that as you can see I've done it again. While these letters in past years have affected history before the fact (where people would ponder as they did something how it would be represented in the letter), this was the first time that I know of that one changed the course of history after the fact. Most everyone else who reads (or at least opens) this letter has been doing a pretty good job of keeping their whereabouts known to me through this year, although I thought the same was true last time and it turned out my commendation for doing this was premature when it was revealed that Dirks had moved and not told me. Of course he swore he had, but this is what I see as endemic now in this age of instant communication, where nearly half of this mailing list has access to the Internet, and they still don't get around to dropping me a line most of the time, or else they have email and fail to mention it. I have resorted to artificial means, by dredging up the past and challenging everyone to come up with as many memories or events from their Willard days as they can think of, and then share them with the group. It's worked for a while, but it won't last forever, and I still do most of the writing. I also have my web site at the URL above, where you can find current and old pictures of most of the gang, just in case you aren't embarrassed enough here.
Anyway, enough whining, surely there were other momentous events in '97 besides seeing Creighton again. Well, yes, although none on that order of magnitude. After one of those winters where it only snowed twice, but each time dumped about 30 inches of snow, we drove down to New Jersey at the end of May to see the Kevins. There were two reasons for doing this, one was to see Nancy pregnant, since we'd missed it last time, and the other was to see how Chloe did on a four-hour trip before we embarked on a 20-hour one the following month. We spent the weekend there and drove down to the southern part of the state with them to go to Six Flags over Trenton or whatever it's called. The clientele there is such that as you enter the park employees check all your bags for weapons. It was fun, even though Lee and I only did one rollercoaster, but it was really more for the kids benefit anyway, plus we got to see their new kitchen that they spent two years renovating.
The four-hour car trip went fine, so the following month we drove to Illinois for the Fourth of July. Who should be there when we arrived but the Kevins again (they, being the smart ones, had flown there), visiting their own relatives. They and we met up for dinner with the Pollocks to see their new house in Riverside. In spite of all the hints I had dropped up to that point, Jennifer, being a dink (double income no kids), insisted on going out to eat, even though we had two little girls in tow, so I was very nervous, but it turned out fine, as Kyra and Chloe kept each other entertained through the endless wait for a table at a Mexican restaurant in Berwyn. Still, it was a dangerous thing to attempt, and Nancy and I have vowed we will have our revenge, as Jennifer is expecting one of her own next spring.
Also whilst in the Windy City, no less a group than the Stonefamily drove all the way from Indiana to spend the entire day with us on the 3rd of July. Elizabeth is now seven and Hannah was almost four, and I feel exceedingly old. Bill is doing well in private practice, although sadly now that he's done interning at big city hospitals he doesn't have nearly as many good penis stories as he used to. Chloe could play ring-around-the-rosie with the girls while we adults discussed Willardites and penises, and then we cooked them dinner and they were on their way. The whole Bartlett family was in attendance for the Fourth of July, but otherwise it turned out not to be a great week to see people. We managed to catch the Pollocks just before they left for Door County to spend the weekend freezing, the Rebstocks were just coming back from New Hampshire (a real state) the day before we left Chicago, and all the other Chicagoans I never got around to pestering.
Then it was August and the big 40-days and 40-nights Nate-apalooza tour, in which Nate decided to crisscross the eastern half of the United States trying to find a city he liked less than West Palm Beach (the winner: Akron). The real purpose for this jihad was to officiate at a bunch of croquet tournaments being held at various locales, one of which was Newport RI. Nate came to stay at the house for a couple of days, then he took off for Newport, then a few days later we went down there for a day to see him in action (he wasn't playing, just wearing white). Scant hours after our visit, he came down with mono, and had to drive all the way back to Florida, thereby shattering Jeff's previous record for driving while asleep. In a brazen attempt to catch up with Nate, Adam drove up from Connecticut with Red Sox tickets in hand, bringing along a friend who reminded me of Ratso Rizzo, and then hung around until Nate's arrival the next day. We grilled up some vittles, then Wolsky took off and Nate and I hung around watching Monty on Jeopardy and old Python tapes. Nate came to us by way of Clifton, NJ, where Nancy had just been told to stay in bed until she had a baby, and fortunately she was already expecting one.
Wolsky was bucking for paragraph one the whole time he was here, kissing up so much it was just painful to watch. But he does get an honorable mention for taking me to a Sox game that they actually won. His recent move to Connecticut after decades in upstate New York meant that we had both congregated on New Year's Day at the Lauro estate in Southbury, CT to watch the Wildcats play in the Citrus Bowl. Although the game began with much anticipation, before the first quarter was over we were discussing Adam's impending furniture delivery. Tony's wife Linda cooked up the largest amount of food ever served to five adults, Adam brought some decadent dessert from Long Island, and we brought Chloe, who had fun running around the Lauro's nearly furniture-less house. Sadly, the Wildcats lost bigtime (witnessed in person by Nate, Cohen, and not too many others), and the team's subsequent season this fall unhinged Tony's already delicate mental state to the point that one day he announced that they were packing up and moving to Indianapolis. I still harbor a suspicion that it's all an elaborate hoax, but he took a promotion within his company to sell something other than industrial gases (apparently Indiana makes their own) and move closer to Ryan Field, although he managed to time the move to coincide with Purdue's best season in a few thousand years. Only the Lauro's disdain for material possessions allowed them to make the move so effortlessly.
In the interest of shortening last year's letter I completely excised an entire trip that we made, but this year no such luck for you! For the second year in a row, The Bank sent me to a developers conference. Not too spectacular, except that it was at the Dolphin Hotel at Epcot, as in Disneyworld, and this year even coincided with Chloe's second birthday. We had a birthday brunch at the Grand Floridian, and some of our former Bostonian cronies who live down there now were in attendance, along with Nate, and my aunt and uncle, and Mom, who stayed for the whole week. She went with us to Sea World, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Magic Kingdom, and we did the Polynesian Luau and the Rainforest Cafe‚ and some other stuff. It was quite the trip, mostly courtesy of BKB, and I'm already bugging them about next year. And this time Nate didn't get mono. The Olsons were invited too, but Eric used that tired "I'm playing the Vaughn Williams oboe concerto that weekend" excuse. Just got a picture of them and their little girl Gina a few days ago, but we haven't seen them "live" in quite some time.
My grandmother has for years received at Christmas a card from a former coworker of hers who long ago moved to Hawaii and celebrates World Humanism Day or somesuch instead of Christmas and enclosed with his card is a good six or eight page letter in tiny type droning on about the state of world affairs and Hawaiian politics and god knows what else, and every year she would show me the letter to read, and not once could I make it to the end, and I doubt that she ever did either. So for those of you who made it this far, regardless of what month or year it is now, or even if you're some total stranger that dug it out of the trash, thanks for listening and have a Merry Christmas and an epistolarily challenged 1998.