i'm a listing boat, for the thing carries every hope

Every year, a hidden memory comes back to me.

New Years Eve, 1980. I'm in Atlanta, the house I grew up in, probably watching Dick Clark's New Years Rockin' Eve (which may have been live, but these days it's pre-taped, sorry to wreck your world). Maybe my parents are having a party, maybe they're at a party a few doors down, I'm not sure. But at the stroke of midnight, I run out onto the back porch, light a pair of sparklers and wave them around like I'm trying to signal airplanes, jump up and down and shout at the top of my lungs, to nobody, "Nineteen eighty! Nineteen eighty!"

Now, I won't say something dumb like "I must have known, deep down, that I would be a child of the eighties, that my time was at hand." I mean, first of all, there's no time in my life that I would pick out as being "my time" - for most of the last twenty years or so it has always seemed like my time is now, or at least almost. Secondly, I'm quite sure I didn't understand that I would be a child of the eighties or what kind of enduring impact that would have on my music tastes. What I did know, though, was that 1980 was an impossibly sophisticated and futuristic sounding number to attach to a year, and I was lucky to be living in such an exciting time.

Anyway, this memory is now twenty-seven years old, and the sheer dorkiness of it has made me wince once a year for a couple of decades now. But last night I did the math, and I figured out that, shit, I had just turned seven years old. Seven. So I think, present dorkiness notwithstanding, I'm excused for that particular episode.

Oh yeah: happy 2007, everyone.