So ironic! I was going to write this on New Year’s Eve, but I was busy from 9 to 9, driving the hour to West Lafayette to spend the day helping our daughter and her husband set up their home. Sophomores at Purdue, they just moved into a new apartment. My wife and I hemmed and ironed curtains (she) and mounted rods (me) to hang them, helped arrange furniture, put a bed together, and ran to the hardware store. We enjoy arranging and decorating living space and the kids value our knack for making a place beautiful. The point: we spent Friday of our holidays working. By the time we got home, it was time to ring in the new year.
No problem, I thought. I’ll write on New Year’s Day. Except that we spent the whole day, again till past nine at night, cleaning our condo, taking down and boxing Christmas decorations, packing for the trip home (we live and work nine hours from our “home”), and oh yes, did I mention we put up new curtains in the living room since we hung the other ones yesterday in West Lafayette? Again, a holiday, again, we work. Again fun, again tiring. Then we left yesterday at 4:45 a.m. for the nine hour drive home. There we unpacked, shopped, washed the salt off the car, and fell to sleep early. Another day of work.
Why should it be any other way? Maybe, it’s an apt way to spend the last and first day of a year: setting up a new home and cleaning an old one. Still, work and play, regular day and holiday, fast and feast are difficult to keep balanced. How I spent New Year’s Eve that year our van broke down a mile from my parents’ house (http://www.thelifeliterary.com/?p=82) shows that pretty well.
How could I get back to Louisiana in time to lead church on Sunday that week between Christmas and New Years? The van wouldn’t be finished nearly in time and being young church professionals with a family, we were poor as church mice and looking for the least expensive option. I ended up taking the bus to St. Louis to join my wife’s sister’s family, already driving south for the holiday. Since they were passing close by where I needed to go, they welcomed me in their large van. I was grateful, enjoyed the ride, and was glad they could see our 75 year old re-furbished house except that it looked like a dirty-clothes-wrapping-paper- dirty-dishes bomb had gone off in every room.
I was glad to be home in time to lead church on Sunday but sad to be far from my wife and children, already missing their raucous, fun presence. I picked up the house, wrote my sermon, and still had time on my hands. I called a member of the parish who was as much friend as parishioner. His wife was a medical resident at the local hospital and was on call that night, New Year’s Eve, so he was going to be a bachelor too. He invited me to join him in the small apartment on-call residents use.
Our families got together a lot, sharing meals and conversation. He and I had discussed many a point of theology over a beer or two. We would sometimes drink, from a bottle kept in the freezer, an icy cold, burning, shot of pepper infused vodka, wincing and laughing at the pleasurable pain.
That year New Year’s Eve was Saturday, the night before church (my job at the time and the reason for rushing back before the van engine was rebuilt). I saw no problem spending the evening before a work day with a friend. I also saw no problem downing a shot of pepper vodka to toast the evening and each other. I continued to see no problem with another toast, and another, even unto seven or eight more spread out between hours of truly sterling, truly enlightening, and definitely brilliant conversation. At the time I didn’t understand why his wife, the doctor, upon seeing her husband and pastor, two fine, respectable gents enjoying such a fine evening (and getting plastered) together, shook her head and went back to tending her patients.
Apparently, there was still a little more conversing to be done when the (three fourths full) bottle of vodka was finished, so we started on shots of truly fine gin, sufficient to carry us into the new year expressing thoughts both profound and deep. Finally, even we realized we’d had enough. We had about a teaspoon of sense left, enough to realize it wouldn’t be very good for that small town’s only Lutheran pastor to get pulled over in such a state. So I sank into a stupor on the couch to wake up with an hour or so to get ready for church. I won’t go into details except to say I preached with what felt like a mouthful of cotton and led the service with what felt like the anvils (possibly of hell) pounding in my head.
Maybe the point is that excess work and excess play are feathers of the same bird. It’s all too easy and familiar to mix them up, get them out of whack, doing one or the other or both too little or too much like I did that holiday season. I remember the libations and talk with my friend, shared during an evening I was sadly far from my wife, with a smile. I also remember the hung-over young minister with a dollop of shame.
I guess the point is to work hard but not too hard, and to play well, but not to the point we did that evening long ago. Sometimes, the work may include cleaning a house on a holiday and the play may include raising a glass (or two) with friends. This new year, I’m going to try to keep the two in balance.
