LETTERS FROM HOME: HOPING FOR NEW YEAR OF AMAZING GRACE, TOILETS THAT FLUSH

Dec. 30, 1999

Dear Patty,

Near dawn of a fresh millennium, the analysis around our family dinner table this holiday week seemed typical.

Talk of possible financial calamities reminded my ninetysomething grandma of the Depression. She and my grandpa lost $30 when their bank closed and never reopened. Grandma still doesn't trust banks. She asked for and received a paper shredder for Christmas so she can do unto her bank statements as that bank did unto her.

Both she and my brother listen to the late-night thoughts of paranormally inclined deejay Art Bell, who will broadcast for eight hours New Year's Eve to update listeners on the catastrophes as they do or don't occur. Art thinks the power grid could collapse.

My mother is more concerned about terrorism, the kind of threat that caused Seattle to cancel its celebration at the Space Needle. She attended the World's Fair that made the Space Needle famous so she has a personal stake in what happens to Seattle. Besides, one of her brothers lives there.

DC is more worried about homegrown terrorists. My personal geographic/emotional connection, having been to Oklahoma City last spring, says she's right.

"Everybody should go see Saving Private Ryan' if you want to know how it really was," offered my WWII veteran dad in the middle of all this. It wasn't really a non sequitur if you think about it but nobody else's brain could make the leap.

Seeing nobody understood, he left to go watch TV.

Somebody wondered whether cars with computer chips will run. My mother knows someone who is planning to fill her bathtub with water just to make sure the family doesn't have live with an unflushable toilet.

DC has laid in 15 gallons of water and cut firewood just in case Art Bell knows what he's talking about.

When I was a kid we stayed home with Granny on New Year's Eve to nibble potato chips and French onion dip. We fell asleep in the living room after the ball hit bottom in Time Square, then were awakened by our parents returning home with noisemakers, goofy hats and intimations of all the fun they'd had.

I sensed we'd missed something.

But after all those New Year's Eves in my 20s and 30s hoping to revel in drink and debauchery, something still seemed to be missing.

My best New Year's Eves have been spent with DC. There is no sweeter toast than one made with the person you are co-dreaming the future with.

Fumblingly, so often failing, we try to create a union of souls. The task is sacred, this intimate wedding of Hers and Mine. To accomplish it, I know, is my life's purpose and will require the help of amazing grace.

Things haven't changed much since I was a kid. My parents will be partying New Year's Eve, I'll be staying home.

My initial desire was to be someplace holy for the magic moment. Machu Picchu seemed fitting, to welcome the New Year at an ancient ruin high above the world. But after that business of the oxygen masks dropping out of the sky on our flight back from Hawaii and the Y2K disaster hype, much more than an 800-year-old Incan empire would have been required to get DC out of Cape Girardeau. I couldn't argue much.

Here at the beginning of a new era in the history of the Earth, the landscape in the rearview mirror is drenched in blood. Fear of violence clouds the celebration of our new beginning.

The cynical and practical-minded say nothing will change when the clock strikes midnight Friday. I hope they're wrong, but nothing will change unless we will it.

We are destructively intolerant and unaccepting of others because we are intolerant and unaccepting of ourselves, denying our own faults and only recognizing an idealized self-image. We deny ourselves our own love.

Jesus told us. Buddha told us. Moses told us. Mohammed told us. Gandhi told us. John Lennon told us. Love is our reality and our remedy.

The old hymn told us, too.

I once was lost but now I'm found

was blind but now I see.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian