North Coast New Year's Memories...

Nothing screams Humboldt County like the arrival of New Year's Eve.

My memories of ... um ... ah ...

Those wild midnight celebrations where we ... oh ... we ...

My most vivid memory of New Year's Eve in Humboldt County involves little kids going outside at midnight to bang on pots and pans and, then, me cringing at the sound of gunfire. It was unsettling to consider that the new year's arrival was hailed by someone under the influence of alcohol using a firearm in a populated area. Gunshots don't rattle me nearly as much after living in the Bay Area for eight years.

My mom was a waitress who spent my early New Year's Eves working -- mostly at the Baywood Golf & Country Club, but some at the Eureka Inn. (I hope she was actually out partying and only telling me she was working so that I wouldn't insist I be allowed to come to the party, too.) So, I'd sit around all night messing with my Topps NFL football cards and then, one of goofy half-sisters would wake up my nieces and nephews from a dead sleep to go celebrate the arrival of the new year.

Later, much later, my oldest sons would actually stay awake -- they come from heartier stock than my half-sisters' kids -- until midnight. We'd usher them outside...they'd bang on the pots and pans, I'd cringe when I heard the gunfire...same thing, different year.

I was hit by a massive panic attack after Amy and I got back from a Clint Eastwood movie at the Eureka Theater, in the 1980s when it was cut up into a tri-plex type arrangement. There are feelings of panic and full on panic attacks that left me convinced I was dying -- and the granddaddy of panic attacks involved me staying up all night wishing I was dead. I greeted that New Year with a pulse rate of about 150 and the increasing sense I was having a heart attack.

Oh, I had my first sexual encounter on New Year's Eve in 1972...or 1973. (I warned Amy that she'd get mentioned here if she started reading this stuff.) My mom was babysitting for the McKeowns, who'd had move to then luxorious Lunbar Hills. Amy and I drank some beer that I'd scored from a guy who always got beer from his uncle or something.

Relax. I'm not going X-rated. Note I referred to a "sexual encounter." It couldn't possibly live up to the hype when two drunken 16-year-olds try to do the big nasty. Honest to God, I hadn't really thought about...what it entailed. Now, cripes, my 10-year-old daughter knows what goes where in the act of sexual intercourse. It was awkward and, I think, we just stopped because there was an element of physical discomfort involved.

I remember, too, that New Year's Eve because my mom called breathlessly to tell me that Orlando Cepeda, one of my favorite baseball players, had died in a plane crash taking food to the needy in Puerto Rico. Cepeda didn't do charity work...I was relieved to point out it wasn't him, but...it turned out, sadly, to be Roberto Clemente who'd been killed. (Small World Dept: Orlando Cepeda literally lives only a couple miles from me here in Fairfield now. The kids ran into him shopping at Safeway one day.)

There was a New Year's Eve in Portland, Ore. where Amy and I went out with Dennis Bills and his wife. I remember disco music and thinking, "You could never party like this in Eureka!" I also remember it snowing for all of December and into January and missing Humboldt County a great deal.

To show what New Year's Eve has meant to me, the only other real memorable one spent in Eureka came in the early 1990s. I went to a fairly big, fairly wild, party at the home of the 24-year-old girl I was ... involved with ... when I was a divorced 35-year-old. I remember it for three reasons:

1) I liked the young woman, but I spent the first couple hours of the party at a movie ("Tango & Cash") with Trent at the Bayshore Mall.
2) A bunch of kids I'd coached and knew to be under legal drinking age showed up and my insistence that letting them liquor up was ill-advised left me feeling like the adult chaperone at the party.
3) While the 24-year-old flirted around (the price of a grown man being involved with a younger, flightier woman) -- an absolutely beautiful, red-haired young woman began to chat me up. And, remember, I don't normally chat with much ease. But, I was ... smitten. Really. All of a sudden, the 24-year-old decides to invoke her involvedness on me. She pulls me aside and begins to chastise me for clearly being interested in the red-head. As I began to invoke the universal "It's a free country" defense...it was short-circuited with the revelation that the girl was barely 18 years old. She seemed much, much...well, I hadn't given any thought to hitting it off in that way with someone who might well have been in high school.

So, yeah, my North Coast New Year's memories leave a little to be desired.

Now, I'm 52...live close to places folks associate with big parties...and I'm still considering that I might turn out the lights about 8:30 tonight and just lay in my bedroom with the blankets pulled over my head.