Kissing The Top Of My Father's Head

On New Year’s Eve

Back when I was drinking, I regularly imbibed my way past midnight, so New Year’s Eve was just another trip into oblivion. When I think back on how I marked the year changes of the past, not much comes to mind. There is one notable exception, which happened during my sophomore year of college.

This was the transition from 1993 to 1994. Being only twenty—and having grown up in a strict, religious family—I was an amateur drinker.

A friend invited me to a New Year’s Eve party at an ROTC house associated with a well-known and respected Philadelphia-area college. My three best bros at the time were in attendance and we threw back a small ocean of beer and whisky. It was certainly a record-setting drinking night for the young me.

At midnight, I went outside and attempted to guzzle an entire bottle of pink champagne as if it were a shot. I remember the empty bottle leaving my hand and then trying to steady myself, reaching for a fence and realizing too late that it was fifteen feet away. After I fell to the grass, it took a minor miracle to get me on my feet again.

Another miracle: I actually remember calling Alicia after that. She was in Vermont with her family. We had only been dating for a few months. No one we knew had cellphones in the mid-90s, so I must have used a landline back inside of the house. Who ultimately paid for that long distance call I’ll never know.

I just right now asked Alicia what I said on the phone to her thirty years ago—THIRTY YEARS!—and she reports that I slurred my way through a story about a young woman at the party who was studying to be an astronomer, only I was hearing astrologer and kept un-ironically asking her to tell my fortune. The future astronomer had been good humored about it, patiently explaining the difference between astrology and astronomy, but when I called Alicia, I was verbally whipping myself for making such a stupid faux pas.

"In all the years I saw you drink,” Alicia just said. “I don’t ever remember you seeming quite so out of control.”

Back in nascent 1994, sickness swiftly followed the phone conversation with my new girlfriend. I remember throwing up in someone’s hamper just before I passed out.

When we dropped off one of my friends on the morning of January 1st, I threw up again on his parents’ lawn with his mom watching. I offered to clean it up, and the mom said, “Just go,” in a way that haunts me to this very day.

Young people getting wasted on New Year’s Eve is hardly uncommon, but I find myself thinking back to that night often and wondering why I felt the need to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol. The answer, of course, is that I was in extreme amounts of emotional pain. From what did I so desperately need to escape? I couldn’t have given you a precise answer at the time. It’s taken decades of living and years of analysis to begin unpacking all that.

Why do so many people reach for alcohol on New Year’s Eve and then drink to the point of illness? I would guess that most end-of-the-year partiers are also hurting in their own ways and are not conscious of their own truths—or maybe it’s more accurate to say they are not yet ready to know. The bottle helps us forget. Temporarily takes away responsibility. Returns us to a wonderful infant state where we don’t know the meaning of words and others have to clean up after us.

Drinking can be fun. People need to blow off steam. Hit the reset button. Alcohol is a proven stress and anxiety reducer. It never once failed to relieve my symptoms. Like Billy Dee Williams used to say about Colt 45, “It works every time.” But there should have been an asterisk, because many of us learn the hard way that there’s usually a hefty long-term cost for the temporary relief that alcohol use provides.

From watching The Criterion Channel (and listening to This Jungian Life), I learned about the Roman god Janus, for whom January is named.

www.janusfilms.com

As you can see above, Janus has two faces so that he can look into the past and future simultaneously. As the god of thresholds and doors, he is often depicted holding a key. (The word janitor—someone who usually has a ring full of keys and is in charge of lots of doors—also derives from Janus.) Being a heavy movie consumer, I had seen the Janus Films icon untold times before I finally consciously understood what it invoked. I also lived through forty-some Januaries without realizing that the name of the month is loaded with symbolism.

I wonder if looking at the past and the future simultaneously is just too excruciating for some of us. Education is often painful. There is a price to pay for knowledge. We sometimes outsource the responsibility, recruiting other people to be our historians and astrologers. Or we just choose oblivion. We push off for another day the adult hard work of seeing the entire spectrum of time. We punt. We party. We find ways to numb and forget. We allow ourselves to regress.

After that infamous New Year’s Eve, I never drank pink champagne ever again, but I kept drinking beer and whisky for another quarter century. I kept numbing myself into oblivion. I only stopped doing that five and a half years ago.

Fellow writer Andrew David MacDonald recently suggested I read Finding Meaning In The Second Half of Life: How to Finally Really Grow Up by James Hollis, PH.D. I just marked this passage:

“Our dilemma was best described in the nineteenth century by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard when he noted in his journal the paradox that life must be remembered backward but lived forward.”

Photo by Alexander Tsang on Unsplash

Exactly thirty years after getting obliterated at the ROTC party in the Philadelphia area, Alicia and I plan on spending a sober New Year’s Eve with my parents. As previously mentioned, Alicia and I moved to South Carolina to be with my mother and father as Dad battles Alzheimer’s.

There is a bring-your-own-booze New-Year’s-Eve neighborhood bonfire party going on, but tonight I’m more interested in looking backward and forward simultaneously.

Mom has many times told me stories of my father holding baby me during Eagles games, rubbing my brand-new head for good luck, back when he was just twenty-five. I don’t remember that, of course. But for a long time, it was the only story I had of my father being physically affectionate with me. For many years, I doubted the authenticity of my mother’s claims, especially as I suffered through many childhood Eagles losses where my father rained maniacal frustration down at the awful Veterans Stadium AstroTurf or screamed at the TV in our living room before once again retreating back into the all-consuming world of his work.

As an adult, I used to go to Lincoln Financial Field with my family and drink so many beers I often forgot the players’ names and usually had to read a recap the next morning to remember what had happened during the game. Drunk, I’d ride the Orange Broad Street subway line home from the Eagles games with my stone-cold-sober distant-as-the-moon dad. Sometimes the whole train would be so packed with Eagles fans that no one could move an inch in any direction. My father and I would get smushed together and—even with so much alcohol running through my veins—I remember feeling the shock of our being so physically close.

Dad never mentioned the booze on my breath.

Here in Beaufort, S.C. my father watches Eagles games via the Internet, usually after they have already been decided. Because of his disease, he can view each game over and over again without knowing the final score, which provides hours of entertainment.

After not watching the Eagles play for a few years, I’ve taken in four games with Dad since moving to Beaufort. Of course, the Eagles began losing just as soon as I started watching and I’m surprised by how easily I fell right back into caring.

During games, Dad asks if my brother is in the stadium and whether what we’re watching is live and, if not, have we watched this one before and who wins. No matter what answers I give him, he will ask the same questions within five minutes and many times afterward.

An hour before I’m supposed to show up at my parents’ house on New Year’s Eve, Mom texts that she can’t find today’s previously played Eagles game on their TV. I google “How to watch a repeat of the Philadelphia Eagles vs Arizona Cardinals,” which brings up the score, immediately ruining the viewing experience for me. 35-31 bad guys. I think about my father watching the Eagles blow an important very winnable game multiple times in the coming week and I literally groan. Seeing the Eagles win is a small pleasure for Dad, and his rewatching games provides much needed respites for my mother. These days, there isn’t much else that can reliably keep Dad occupied for three hours. After a little Internet sleuthing, I come to the conclusion that we probably won’t be able to watch the game until the next day.

Alicia and I leash up Kingsly anyway and walk the few minutes to my parents’ home.

When we knock, my father answers the door.

Lately, I’ve found myself touching Dad a lot. He likes his shoulders, scalp, neck, and feet massaged. He will now often tolerate a hug without pushing me away or punching my kidneys. I’ve become fond of kissing my father on the top of his head, which smells wonderful, because he rubs it with some sort of cream or gel that I could easily ask my mother about, but prefer to let be a mystery. The love-starved little boy in me can’t get enough of this, especially since—for the first time in my entire life—my father often welcomes these small affections.

But tonight Dad is distant again as he barely repeats, “Happy New Year,” back to us and lets us in. There’s a game on the TV, so I ask who’s playing and Dad says, “Andy Reid and I can’t remember who else.” We sit down and watch Taylor Swift cheerlead from Travis Kelce’s luxury box as the Chiefs handle the Bengals. When I ask Dad about New Year’s Resolutions, he says he has none. When I ask who he hopes will win the game, he says he doesn’t care. When I reach over to massage his shoulder, he gets up and moves to another chair.

At one point, I walk over to him and kiss the top of his head, which makes him flinch.

Dad disappears into his bedroom for a long time, so I send my mother back to see what’s up. When she returns, Mom reports that Dad kept asking her whether I lived in Beaufort now and was I staying or going home to OBX.

When the Packers and Vikings game comes on, Dad returns wearing a smile and his PJs, and—after covering himself with a blanket—he promptly falls asleep in his chair. It’s not even nine when he stands and declares that he needs to go to bed.

“One last hug for 2023?” I ask.

“Are the Eagles playing tomorrow?” he says.

“Yep.”

“They’re out of the playoffs though, right?”

“I think they actually are going to be in the playoffs,” I say, withholding the disastrous loss they suffered earlier in the day.

“But they aren’t playing well enough to win a playoff game,” Dad says. “Are they?”

Instead of answering, I stand and open my arms. My father hesitates, but then gives me a hug, pounding my back with his open hands, which lets me know that he’s not feeling as comfortable as he did on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when his hugs were much warmer and less violent. I hold on for as long as he’ll let me.

After Dad puts himself to bed, Alicia Facetimes with her parents and my mother looks at Facebook, while I watch Green Bay beat up on the Vikings and text a few friends who actually have a rooting interest in the game.

At halftime, Alicia, Kingsly, and I say, “Happy New Year,” to my mother, give her hugs and kisses, and then make our way home. Fireworks explode in the distance, even though midnight is still hours away. It sounds like a war zone.

Inside our home, as we take off our shoes and hang up our coats, I say to my wife, “I think I’ll work on my Substack essay.”

“You mean the one about watching the Eagles game on New Year’s Eve with your Dad?” Alicia says.

“Well, I’ll obviously have to pivot.”

“Fifteen years ago we would have been the life of someone’s party,” Alicia says with a laugh and then goes upstairs.

At eleven, I pause writing to take out my contacts, put on glasses, and tell Alicia I’m going to finish my Substack post. Sitting up in our bed with her green leather journal in her lap, she says she’s going to sleep, so I give her a kiss and say, “Bonne année,” which is a nod to another youthful drunken New Year’s Eve we spent together in Montreal once upon a time. Alicia and I yelled those two French words as we ran through the cold snowy streets and rejoiced whenever a genuine Canadian echoed them back to us.

“Bonne année,” Alicia says in a way that seems to mean, Another life.

It’s 11:41 now here at my writing desk and—despite the fact that I have at least five cans of seltzer in me—I’m fading fast.

Happy New Year, Substack readers. I hope 2024 treats you and yours spectacularly well. May we all find a way to remember backward and live forward. Goodnight and G.T.A.

Matthew

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