All Is New

I remember one New Year’s Day when as a child I peered out the window in downtown Centrahoma to see what I could see. It was a sunlit but drab looking New Year’s morning, January 1st of 1944. Everything looked exactly like it had looked the day before, the last day of 1943. I’m not sure what I expected but not this. It was a new year and in my 8-yearold brain I expected it to be different — an improvement over what I had experienced during the old year of 1943.

A lot of mysteries concerning the new year peppered my thoughts that morning. My dad had instructed mom to cook up a pot of black-eyed peas this New Years Day as this would bring good luck. He hated peas but I guess he was just looking after the rest of us. My older brother Gerald had a few firecrackers which we set off. The big mystery to me was where he got the things in the middle of the big war. But we started a small campfire in the back yard and set them off. I know now that the sound of fireworks routed the forces of evil. Gerald told me this. I wasn’t sure this would work since we all knew the forces of evil that day were headed by Hitler and a Jap named Tojo.

In some places, I’m told the ringing of church bells in clock towers is a popular New Years’s exercise but in Centrahoma our churches were poor and a little small. None had a tower and if they could have had one they couldn’t have afforded the bell it would need. Gerald did remind me that he was awake at midnight, and he had heard some gunfire. Exactly how this would help route evil spirits and help us to have a happier new year was not clear to me at the time but Gerald was at ease with the knowledge.

Whatever the good people in Centrahoma did that dark night seems to have helped some. During 1944, the great war in Europe and around the South China Sea had begun to be won by our soldiers. I was anxious to see my uncles and other kin get to come home and live their lives in the safety and wonderful embrace of the United States of America. On a more personal basis, my family had a stroke of good luck and made the move up SH-3 all the way to Stonewall. It was a good move which saw us move into a much better house. A place with an indoor bathroom, running water and natural gas for heat. Stonewall held many wonders and marvels and we had never had it so good.

I suppose I can drop back a few months and comment on this good luck of moving out of Centrahoma (Gerald said Centrahoma was the poorest place he had ever seen) up the highway to the “Stonewall the wonder city” was indeed a stroke of good luck and I attribute some of this to the delicious black eyed peas mom cooked up that January first, 1944. Some years later Gerald wrote this about the move using analogies he had learned in church. “Centrahoma was Egypt. Stonewall was the promised land and Dad must have been Moses since he delivered us there.”

A long time ago, 1958 to be exact, I was able to live through another one of my hopeful visions. I was in the Navy and my ship was in Brooklyn, New York. The afternoon of December 31, 1957 I suggested to my friend from Baxter Springs, Kansas that we go to town tonight — Times Square — and watch the natives drop the big crystal ball in frigid Times Square. We did. We were both short of money so we mostly just stood around and watched the big crowds. But as the ball came down signifying the arrival of 1958, I heard a girl say, “Hey Sailor! How about a New Years Kiss?” I willingly yielded and the pretty girl vanished back into the crowd. And 1958? Well, a few weeks later I started a new life as a civilian and married my true love, Pat. So? If a pretty girl wants to kiss you on New Years Eve, well, you probably should just let her. It could bring you good luck too. Happy New Year.

Wayne Bullard, DPh

cwaynebullard@gmail.com