Looking Forward

I’m trying to decide if I remember New Year’s Eve 1999 more because of the epic celebration—such grand festivities I’ve never experienced since—or because of the fear and anticipation generated by apocalyptic predictions of world closure if and when we awoke to the dawning of Y2K—because we love us our acronyms and abbreviations. And then nothing happened. Or maybe it did, just not as we could have imagined.

Perhaps I’m just wondering where more than a quarter of a century has gone.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, I attended a “Party Like It’s 1999” event—Thank you “Prince”—hosted by Sandy Shore Productions, at the Embassy Suites in Seaside, California. Sandy Shore founded Smoothjazz.com in 1995, initially as a ticket portal for her concerts. But by the late 1990s, she and partner Donna Phillips had built it into the world’s first woman-owned Internet radio station, officially launching its full online radio stream in 2000. Today it enjoys world domination.

I remember that I wore a midnight-blue ballgown, stretch velvet on top and a full satin skirt that promised to ripple like “Moon River” if someone happened to swirl me around the dancefloor.

That dress went on to belong to an anonymous high school senior, so she’d have a beautiful prom dress to wear in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

That New Year’s Eve, we moved among ballrooms, listening or dancing to Smooth Jazz live, indulging in fancy food and wine, feeling ourselves young and festive and free. Because we were.

The next morning, having spent the night at the hotel, an indulgence that extended the event and removed us from other predawn revelers on the road, we awoke on New Year’s Day 2000 to find the clocks still kept time, computers came on, and electronic calendars had made a smooth shift from the 1900s to the 2000s. After all.

We joined others at breakfast, who also had bought the overnight party package, and promptly won a Smooth Jazz trip to Mexico. The new century was off to a great start.

That trip to Cabo San Lucas was only the first of events we couldn’t have predicted.

The year 2000 ushered in a decade of life-changing events, which included the 911 terrorist attacks that vanquished nearly 3,000 lives and devastated the rest of us, changing the way we travel, think, pray. A year later, the birth of beautiful baby twin girls we lifted out of trauma and into our hearts and home made us parents, an experience that eventually broke the ties that bind.

During that first decade, I also met the man who makes my life feel safe and secure, who fills our home with heart and humor, who takes the wheel on long car rides, and who is the one who will go the distance with me.

During the second decade of this millennium, we got a dog. His dog, by all observations.

This year, whether we gussy up or slip on sweats to celebrate the flip of the calendar on another year, we are bidding farewell to a quarter of a century since that festive evening at Embassy Suites, when all seemed so uncertain and yet full of promise.

May it be so.