I miss my niece Evangaline.
Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my nieces and nephews very much, but in the wee hours of this morning, it was Evangline who was foremost in my thoughts.
My New Year’s Eve activities went pretty much according to plan, attending a dance where the quite awesome Tom Cunningham Orchestra was performing. At the stroke of midnight, I was dancing with a complete stranger who happened to agree with me that it would be a shame to let a perfectly good dance song go to waste. The balloons dropped, the band switched to Auld Lang Syne, and everything was good.
The dance ended shortly after 1:00AM when the band played an encore number on the condition that everyone take home some of the left over cider. Another complete stranger (I think her name was “Marta” — they kind of run together after a while) agreed with me that we shouldn’t let this song go to waste either and that was the perfect ending to my evening at the Spanish Ballroom.
I pulled into the driveway about 1:45, gathered up my stuff and went to open the door. That’s about when Evangline entered my thoughts. As I put the key into the deadbolt, it snapped off at the base.
While I waited for the locksmith to arrive, I kept thinking about the story of how at age eight Evangline picked a lock at her school using no tools other than her father’s driver’s license.
Some people complain that there’s never a cop around when you need one. I’ve rarely had that problem. The only time I urgently needed a police officer (after a hit and run 12 years ago), I found several of them a block away at the 7-11. But if Evangline had been visiting this week, she could have saved me $200 and most of an hour.
So aside from that little glitch, my 2009 is off to a good start. And I’m taking the view that the problem with the broken key simply means I’m getting all the problems out of the way up front. Nothing but up from here, y’know?
May 2009 be the best year of your life so far with the best yet to come.
So what did you do on New Year’s Eve?