Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all my fans and friends. My wife and I spent the evening together noshing down on cheeses and pate and fresh-baked bread. We watched the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy while we waited for midnight to roll around.

New Years is always special to us. Our first big date was on a New Year’s eve, 21 years ago. A few years after that I got down on one knee on a crowded New Year’s Eve dance floor in the middle of Auld Lang Syne and asked her the question.

I was broker than broke that year but I improvised. I was wearing a tuxedo that I had earned as a bonus for knocking down the drywalled walls of a friend’s tux shop one night as a part of a store renovation they were going through. They paid me for the work and threw in a tux rental with it. I saved for the engagement ring and bought it through an installment plan – paying that last installment that very week after roaming around the neighborhood gathering up empty beer bottles for refund money, rolling pennies and taking on every single odd job and handy man work that I could find.

Come the midnight hour I knelt down on the dance floor and held up the ring and my words failed me. I knelt there making fish-lip motions with my mouth. She ran into the lady’s room for a full half hour while I sat at the bar nursing a beer, wondering if I hadn’t screwed everything up somehow. It turned out she was being swarmed by all of the ladies in the bar who were all cooing and shaking her hand and offering her Kleenex and congratulating her. Finally, a half an hour later, she made it out of the lady’s room, walked up to me at the bar and said “Yes.”

Longest half hour of my life.

Happy New Year, folks.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon