Fuso Orario

The New Year caught me by surprise. I wasn’t ready for it. I was sitting at an Enoteca with friends on Via Fontesecca—street of the dry fountain—poking at cinghiale, or wild boar, with my fork, tender, flakey, no knife necessary to cut the gamey chunks. The meal seemed hardly to have begun or the conversations to have gotten past preliminaries. “Ecco, ecco,” my-waitress friend Chiara hands me what looks like a sparkler. It is a sparkler, confetti is already falling in the air, red and silver spangles in my hair; a sudden match, the sparkler’s lit and I think the little osteria will surely go up in flames, all of us with it.

“It can’t be midnight!” I announce. I’ve got champagne and dessert and plans for fireworks back at home on my terrace.

But it is midnight. The Italian equivalent of the men who watch the silver ball fall at Times Square have made the announcement from the television above the bar. “Buon anno, buon anno!” the busy celluloid streaks of TV partiers chime. As our sparklers fizzle, it’s beginning to dawn—the New Year is here, without the countdown. It crept up to us on cat feet and climbed in our laps. Now it thumps its tail, but is not quite purring.

An email from a friend in Seattle introduces me to a new delirium. I confess I am a little drunk: Prosecco, red wine, champagne, a little drunk, but not embarrassingly so, not “shit face” as the kids would call it, just a little giddy and disoriented. “Happy New Year!” she writes, explaining that she is baking dates stuffed with parmesan wrapped in bacon for the party she has yet to go to when my party’s over. It’s 3:00 in the afternoon when she writes, nine hours from her new year. Time is relative enough, the instant elastic enough, that she may as well be writing me from 1973—the year when we first knew each other. Time is artificial, we remember, a product of the human mind, calculating certain movements in nature that could surely be reinterpreted, reconfigured.

My own daughters on the east coast, are primping before mirrors—a little more mascara, a little more twinkle in the eye shadow…the wonder of the night before them still beckoning, looming bright as the near full moon in the sky. Their mother lives a light year beyond them in another time zone, the moon well behind her. In Spoleto, the last firework has fizzled; the drunks are passing out; the bars are closing, the mysteries of the midnight kiss have been revealed.

It’s funny that, even having gone to bed at two, I wake up a little before six, needing to pee, needing water, but more awake than I’d like to be, doubtful I’ll fall back to sleep. Not only is it the New Year, it’s now a new day, the Monday that comes after a Sunday night’s sleep, and it seems impossible that, in the states, everyone is still standing in some figurative Times Square, waiting for the ball to fall.

I hold a little vigil in my living room. Light is beginning to dawn; morning really is breaking, and it’s not quite New Year’s where my daughters are. 10, 9, 8…I imagine I’m capable of reaching that point of mystery with them, the point where the old becomes the new, and everything is now possible.

A few minutes later, I try to go back to sleep. My dog has kept the sheets warm and looks at me suspiciously. Perhaps she senses the old year that keeps stalking me on cat’s feet.

It’s still only 9 p.m., December 31st, 2006 in Seattle.