Every year on New Years Eve, as I ready myself for the evening’s festivities, I rummage around in the back of my lingerie drawer for that one essential item, my New Year’s noisemaker. I keep it in the lingerie drawer because I know it will be safe there hidden from inquisitive eyes, ensconced in silk and finery, and protected from an overzealous housecleaning.  

The noisemaker is metal, red with white polka dots of various sizes, distinct with its “Made in U.S.A” printed in random locations, and sports a small, plastic pink handle. To this is tied a shiny red, wrapping paper ribbon, secured snuggly with a green rubber band. For the past fourteen years, it has been an essential part of my New Year’s Eve attire, accessorizing jeans, black sequins, and pajamas alike.  

I’m not a packrat, and no one who knows me would call me sentimental, so keeping anything that resembles a memento would be considered out of character. My greggor, as my husband calls it in the forgotten language of his old-world grandparents, is one of the chosen few. It’s a kaleidoscope of memories, taking the place of photographs, letters, journals, and scrapbooks. When I grasp its pink handle and swing it around I see familiar faces, foreign places, happy times, and sad ones, too. I crank the handle a few more times and an image like that of a dream of the night I found it, the friends I was with, and sense of where I was on my life journey. It projects a picture that a photo never could; tells a truth more accurate than any diary.  

The first image I glimpse in this busy collage is always that of the night I found it in a rain swollen gutter in the narrow, crowded streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter. It was in the early hours of 1989, my first New Year’s Eve after the dissolution of an eight-year marriage, and was spent with two of my oldest and closest friends, along with the son of a deposed Bolivian General in exile whose story shall be told elsewhere.  

I’d known Neyla since we were both twelve, when she’d entered my seventh grade homeroom class a few weeks into the school year. We’d grown up together talking late at night about boys, riding bikes on summer afternoons, going on our first double date, and could still locate our initials in the cement curb a mile from my family’s home. This New Year’s Eve was the first spent together after having gone in different directions since high school, her to Italy to study and me into the local university and a marriage that shouldn’t have been. That night in New Orleans marked the resurgence of a friendship that has grown stronger and deeper with time. While we haven’t spent New Year’s Eve together since, we do travel across the country to visit one another, share vacations together, and in recent years Neyla has become as welcomed a part of my family’s annual Thanksgiving on the gulf coast as the sand, sun, and laughter.  

Luke was the other friend that night, and like Neyla, that was the last New Year’s Eve I spent with him. My friendship with Luke has neither strengthened nor deepened, and each new year I look at the noisemaker and mourn my loss. Luke and I met as freshman in the Louisiana State University School of Music, where we shared the highs and lows of college life and the dreams of careers as classical musicians. One of my fondest memories is that of the Carlotta Street Halloween Party, a street fest in the student ghetto just off the LSU campus where everyone partied and anything went. Luke paraded as a bottle of champagne a cork that popped, and I lumbered about as a dinner table, bedecked with a red checkered cloth, four place settings, and a floral centerpiece weaved into my hair. It would have been a clever costume had we considered how we might eat or drink! 

Later, I sat under his baton, his first venture into conducting, for a performance of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire de Soldat. It was the start of great things for him, and over the years I proudly watched his career flourish. It was in October of 1993, just shy of Halloween, that I read of his death in the newspaper. His car had been found in an Industrial Park in Virginia, his body inside and a hose connected from the exhaust pipe into the car. The musical scores for his upcoming symphony concert were neatly bundled together with instructions on where they were to be sent. The concert would go on.  

Tradition holds that the noisemaker’s purpose on New Year’s Eve is to scare away the demons of the previous year. As that year came to a close, I cranked and cranked the greggor, hoping the magic would work. Now each year as I celebrate, I spend a few moments reminiscing our friendship, and do an extra turn of the pink handle especially for him.  

The beauty of that red, polka dotted noisemaker is that each year it embraces new people, places, experiences, and memories. The kaleidoscope grows ever more brilliant and fantastic. It was one of a select number of items chosen to cross the Atlantic with me in 1989, collecting exciting images of a life in Munich and a New Year’s Eve in Vienna. That was the year the Berlin wall came down, and as I ring the noisemaker I think of standing at the base of Brandenburg Gate in 1990 during the reunification ceremony of East and West Germany. I recall my heart pounding as I witnessed a moment in history, as well as the horrors of the time. I see burning cars, angry young crowds, and riot police with billy clubs. It was a time of change, for both me and Deutschland.  

In 1991 the noisemaker was packed up again and returned with me to Baton Rouge, for another stint at graduate school. While there, I met my current husband, embarked on a new career, and spent many more New Year’s Eves. Good or bad, the greggor remembers them all.  

The noisemaker has witnessed many new years since including the Ironic New Year’s Eve, the Truth is Stranger Than Fiction New Year’s Eve, and the New Years Eve That Wasn’t. The ironic one was spent with the woman who had been dating my husband-to-be at one of those pay to party celebrations in a hotel ballroom adorned with gold paisley wallpaper and a faux chandelier, a cover band playing tunes from the seventies, and strangers wanting to kiss you at the stoke of midnight.  

The Truth is Stranger Than Fiction New Year’s Eve placed me center stage as the Dominatrix of head shaves with participants cajoled into the barber’s chair. It’s an experience I savor even as I recall it. Pulling that humming instrument through the thick, shaggy mass of hair, feeling the blade buzzing against the smooth scalp, and watching the dark strands fall effortlessly to the floor.  

The New Years Eve That Wasn’t was spent in a cheap hotel in El Paso, Texas returning from a car trip out west. I’d counted on a crazy, adventurous night in Mexico, slamming a few shots of tequila at a run-down neighborhood bar. My husband-to-be in his infinite wisdom nixed my fantasy, and the noisemaker and I retired long before the countdown into the next year.  

In my greggor is a crystal ball that foretells my future. I look at the red, polka dotted, made in the U.S.A. noisemaker with the small, plastic, pink handle and I see joy, sadness, laughter, and tears. I listen to its raspy, tin voice and see old friends and new; familiar places and places not yet known; I see the extraordinary and the mundane.  

For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne. We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet for auld lang syne.  

  

Author's Biography

Essay Reviews!

Want to read some? Or write some? Great! 
We need your input!

Site Reviews!

We'd like to know from our readers if they enjoy Seven Seas Magazine! Do you have praise or complaints? Suggestions or ideas? 
Would you like to read reviews by other readers? 
Please check out our Site Reviews Page

Get notified!

Would you like to get notified as soon as new Seven Seas issues are published on the Web?
Get notified!

Tell a friend!

Do you enjoy the Seven Seas site? 
Please tell a friend to stop by!
Tell a friend!

Go back to the table of contents
 of the current issue.

You just read essay # 6.  Read essay #

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10