First Footing

• Fresh!
• Best Used by December 31, 2007.
• From Scratch.
• No fillers.
• Like new.
• No, actually new.
• Unheard of!
• Newly minted.
• Still warm.
• Off the top of my head?
• Out of thin air.
• Working without a net.
• A leap of faith.
• Boldly going where no one has gone before because, well, it wasn’t there yesterday.
• A shock to the senses.
• A break from the past.
• Startling.
• Un-nerving.
• Out of the ordinary.
Sounds expensive, doesn’t it?
Ah yes, the New Year holds such promise.
It’s a do-over, a cosmic Mulligan, a last minute reprieve from the ‘Governor’, a get-out-of-jail free card, a pass go and collect $200 and moon the ticket taker as you fly by kind of feeling.
• A Gold Card with no limit.
• The key, as Willie Dixon sings, to the highway.
Or it’s hell.
• The Highway to Hell.
• No Exit.
In the play by Sartre, the lesbian loves the woman who loves the man who loves the lesbian – and they have only each other, for an eternity of New Years.
• A vicious cycle.
• A closed loop.
• A windowless room.
• A revolving door.
• A bummer man!
• The same old same old.
• A nauseating ride on a Merry Go Round and Round and Round.
In Scotland the old folks take New Years very seriously. They have a holiday, of sorts, that they call ‘First Footing’.
You know how it goes: if you get off on the wrong foot, if you get out of bed on the wrong side, if you step on a crack it’s not just your mother who is going to pay.
I was once riding as a passenger in the front seat of a Plymouth Valiant that turned up a hill in Braintree in to the last rays of the setting sun and one spear of sunlight caught the windshield at precisely the right angle so that it seemed to snare itself on a small, almost imperceptible gouge in the glass – probably where a small stone had glanced off it some time before, and the gleam caught my eye and, before I knew what I was doing – like a bullfrog snapping at a shiny lure a sadistic boy had dropped in front of it, I tapped the illuminated spot lightly with just the tip of my right index finger and the crack made a high pitched moan and instantly spidered out across the entire windshield.
Know what I mean?
Have you ever run out onto an icy pond and realized, at the last moment, that the ice is a bit on the thin side?
Have you ever heard the ice singing, like whales sounding the deep, and realized that what you were hearing was the sound of gaps, fissures, and imperfections in what you thought was a solid mass: the sound of its slow, but inevitable destruction?
That’s what can happen, the old Scots believe, if you don’t treat the New Year with respect.
Those first few hours of the New Year are fragile.
In the first dawning of January reality has just come out of the oven of the universe and needs a few weeks to cool and set up properly.
• Disturb it before it has set and, nothing good can happen.
• Walk on it too soon, and it will give way.
• Laugh too loudly and your appliances will begin to fail, one by one.
• Your well will run dry.
• Your tires will all go flat.
And so these superstitious folk make special preparations for the New Year, and for the first visitors who come to call.
They may never entertain another soul the rest of the year but the first person to come through their door in the New Year is treated like the prodigal son: lavished with gifts, given the best whisky to drink, the chair by the fire, even allowed to hold the remote.
They err on the side of caution.
Even paranoid people are not wrong all of the time.
Who knows who this visitor really is?
That first friendly face may hide a demon, in disguise.
Or an angel on the lam.
A neighbor they want to impress.
Treat him or her or it right and everything that follows will be dewy and fresh and sparkling, and you will feel the same the entire year.
Slip up and those visitors may never leave.
Do you have a friend, or a family member who happened to show up on New Year’s Day and has never left?
Or a stray cat that wandered in that day?
• Squirrels in the attic?
• Turkeys in the yard?
Did you have a good year?
Make sure you get off on the right foot.