Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone.
What’s the best NYE you ever had?
For me, it was the year I went to Paris with my little brother. I guess I was about 20, which would make my brother 14. My parents had treated us for Christmas to a week in London and we decided to take the train across the channel and spend New Year’s Eve in Paris. He was counting on me to be able to navigate our way around the city but it was my first time, too, and after taking the hydroplane across the channel I succumbed to deep culture shock. We arrived at St Pancras just as the sun set.
In my memory, that night the lights of Paris were suspended like stars flung randomly here and there across the skyline. I was equally enchanted and intimidated. Somehow we found a tourist bureau and successfully scored a place some four métro stops away. I can remember being awed at how clean and impressive the Métro was compared to New York’s subways. All those foreign train stops — Gare St. Lazare, Madeleine, Chatelet, Bastille, Gare du Nord. I itched to be up on the streets. To experience first hand all the places I had heard of in my French classes: Notre Dame. Arc de Triomphe. Rodin’s garden. The house where Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past. Luxembourg Gardens. Jardin De Tuileries. The Louvre.
It wasn’t in the cards for this trip.
We checked in to a dingy French hostel-style hotel with the girls and boys sections on opposite ends of the second floor. There was a shared bathroom and kitchen.
My brother remembered the name of a fancy French restaurant he had gone to with my father on a previous trip and we took a cab there. We didn’t have reservations (I couldn't fathom how to use the phone!) but we managed to get seated. Of course, I couldn’t read a thing on the menu and so when the waiter came, I pointed to a selection. “Oxtails, mademoiselle?” he asked. He patiently helped us translate and order.
When we finished dinner, we walked out into streets mobbed with people celebrating the new year. “Bonne année!” Absolute strangers would come up and hug or kiss your cheeks. We walked for hours carried along by the crowd. It was magical.
When we finally found our way back to the hotel, my brother fell violently ill. Something in the meal he had eaten in the fancy French restaurant must have been off. I spent the night up with him and we decided to check out of the hotel first thing in the morning and head back to England which at this point felt like home to us. My brother was sick, yes, but I also think he was a little bit afraid of how unsavvy a traveler I was.
New Year’s Day found us back on the hydroplane and that evening we checked back into the hotel at Earl’s Court on London’s south side. By then my brother was feeling hungry so we took the train to Trafalgar Square to a hamburger joint we’d eaten at several times before.
Paris will be quite different this year. But in my imagination, I can return there now and imagine what it would be like to be in Paris on New Year’s Eve, in a city I grew quite familiar with and comfortable in after many visits over the course of my life. My intimacy with Paris is so intense now I feel as if some part of my essence remains there so that I would just slip into this shadow of myself were I to return.
This year, I think for the very first time, I’m actually going to watch Anderson Cooper from Time’s Square. I’ll be alone. Probably won’t get a phone call from my little brother. We’ve become estranged over the years as I’ve watched his brain being “Fox-ified.” So much so that he even believes some of the QAnon conspiracy therories.
There was a picture in the small pile of photos my older brother sent for Christmas. It was taken on New Year’s Eve when I was sixteen. I am in a deep funk, folded between my two brothers who are trying to get me to smile. I am sulking because I am home alone on New Year’s Eve when all my friends have dates or other plans. My brother is ten and he is looking up at me with such adoration.
I miss that.
Share your stories and again, Happy New Year.
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