On Top of the World

This time of year makes me feel as if I’m literally on top of the world, looking down—or ahead—at the year to come.   Of course, this allows me to run “downhill,” as they like to say these days.

New Year’s Eve has always been an interesting time for me.  Things happen, like when a woman fell into my lap at the Diner’s Club (!); I did nothing other than to help her up.  Then there were the two times in high school, bookending the year 1968.  The one New Year’s Eve was very bad, the other pretty neat.

Actually, I can’t remember a thing about December 31, 1967.  It was the next day, New Year’s 1968.  I’d put off doing math homework all vacation, and the next day, Tuesday, school started again.  For some reason, I was the only one home, the better to feel miserable as I lay in bed trying to make sense of some equation or math problem.  Maybe I should say here that sophomore year wasn’t that much fun for me.

Fast-forward 364 days or so, and it was close to zero out, not that the six of us cared.  We were all huddled in our friend Bob’s basement playing Strat-O-Matic football; this was what adolescent boys did then when they didn’t have a party to go to back in those near-prehistoric days.  My team was the 1967 Washington Redskins.  I picked them if for no other reason I loved the players’ names: Chris Hanburger; Sonny Jurgensen; Joe Don Looney.  Did I say “love”?  Washington also had a John Love on the team, to go with Jim Ninowski, Charlie Gogolak…

So, we played all afternoon and then broke for supper.  My father was a Chicago fireman and had to work that day.  That left my mother, my sister Betty and me.  I drew the short straw and went to Johnny’s hotdog stand two blocks from our house, not that I minded; it was all an adventure to me.  I brought the food home, we ate, and it was back to Bob’s for some more football.  Strat-O-Matic does all the major sports.  Back then, it was strictly a board game based on the last season’s statistics.  On we played until an early curfew, 9 PM for me.  I made it home with the game and no spills on the ice.

More than 20 years later, I still had that game and that year of teams.  I’d already been married (even Stat-O players can find a mate) for over a decade when the idea came to have a complete set of all Strat-O-Matic baseball teams ever produced.  Now, the company reprints years, but not ca. 1990.  Anyway, I traded the football game for a couple of baseball seasons, only to have my trading partner complain that he was short a team, the Philadelphia Eagles of Izzy Lang, Norm Snead and company.  In a last-gasp effort to save the transaction, I contacted my friend Bob, whose parents still lived in the house.  Lo and behold, the Eagles’ team was there in the basement, undamaged and ready to join its partners after a very long absence.

I finished assembling my Strat-O-Matic collection not long after.  A year or so later, Clare was born.  There’s a connection running through Strat-O-Matic and childhood friends and New Year’s Eve that makes perfect sense to me from on top of the world.  Happy New Year.