Do you have any New Year’s traditions? We do. We usually say goodbye to the old year by having a blowout fight on New Year’s Eve followed by welcoming the new year with some form of reconciliation.
Our most spectacular blowout happened when we lived in Bridgewater. One kid had a doctor’s appointment in Boston; another kid got sick and needed to see a doctor. Lauren asked if I could leave work to help but I was in the process of losing a major project to poor performance. At the same time, a huge snowstorm hit, and mayhem broke out.
On the way home, Lauren’s windshield wipers stopped working so she wound up stuck in a parking lot. This forced me to leave work to go get her, but the snow eased up enough for her to drive so she sent me home to clear the driveway instead, which I did. Through a series of poor ideas, once the driveway was clear and Lauren was home, I managed to drive the minivan into the mailbox and cause $800 of body damage. A misunderstanding about a party we were going to followed, so I canceled, which I thought was what Lauren wanted but was in fact the opposite. We tried to call to get a pizza delivered, but all the places were closed. Lauren went to bed early and I ate a homemade omelette alone.
We had another year in which we were invited to a party but a kid got a cold. We stayed home alone. I shot baskets with Grant on our new basketball hoop in the freezing dark. Another year, it wasn’t quite New Year’s but close enough to count, we got in such a spectacular fight that I drove to the Plymouth waterfront without a coat, parked next to the bay, and walked for about two miles in short sleeves in twenty-degree weather.
Last year on December 29-30, Grant and Katy got married, and everything about it was perfect. Balance needed to be restored to the Force, so we had a big fight on the thirty-first that somehow involved Lauren’s sister, Lisa, though I can’t remember what it was about. There cannot be unrestrained joy—there must also be darkness, and the Laws are here to deliver.
This year, Lauren tried to change the mojo by planning a weekend in Lewisburg with Grant and Katy. So we drove to PA yesterday, and we did a several-hour stop at the Smith household—Lindsay’s boyfriend’s family. Lindsay met us there, and the Smiths were decked out in Penn State jerseys for the big bowl game. We had pizza, we visited, our dogs made friends, Carrie took Lauren on a tour of the house that went so long a SEAL team was dispatched to bring them back, and all seemed great. But Laws New Year’s mojo prevailed: Penn State lost, and later, Carson came down with a migraine. That’ll teach the Smiths to hang out with the Laws around New Year’s.
Last week, Lauren got a tattoo of my initials on her wrist. Sitting at Church on the last morning of 2023, Lauren nudged me, pointed at it, and said, “I love it. It makes me think of you and that makes me happy. Of course, I might kill you tonight, but for now …”
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