In recent years, I have pondered organizing a New Year’s Eve party for aging baby boomers like me and many of my friends. The inspiration came from a conversation with Peter Simonson, who is about my age and owns Salida’s well-known Victoria Tavern.
“I haven’t seen much of you lately,” he said when we encountered each other on the street one afternoon. “You used to close the place down when we had a band you liked.”
“A hazard of age,” I replied. “Nowadays I have trouble staying awake through the first set,” which starts about 9:30 p.m. “You ought to run some matinees for us geezers.”
Simonson pointed out that even if he did that, bar sales likely wouldn’t cover the costs, given that we tend to consume less alcohol as we get older. Perhaps that accounts for the saying “With age comes wisdom,” though I doubt a publican would agree.
Thus I couldn’t come up with a profitable commercial proposition for boomers, but a private gathering should work. Here in America’s invisible Mountain Time Zone (as in the TV networks announcing a program at “10 Eastern, 9 Central, 7 Pacific” but no “8 Mountain”), we run seven hours behind Greenwich Mean Time while we’re on standard time in the winter.
Actually, it’s not really Greenwich Mean Time any more, for it is not based on when the noon sun crosses the meridian at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Since 1972, we have used Co-ordinated Universal Time (for some reason abbreviated UCT), based on atomic clocks.
UTC has to be adjusted with added “leap seconds” every 18 months or so, because the earth’s rotation keeps slowing from tidal friction. Generally, though, there are 86,400 seconds in a day.
This leads to a neat coincidence if you need to follow Colorado water matters. One cubic foot per second of flow, through an entire day, produces almost exactly 2 acre-feet, and this is useful for quick-and-dirty water reckoning.
The Internet runs on UCT, and you can synchronize your computer’s time with UCT. You may know it also as Zulu Time if you read modern military or espionage thrillers.
To get back to the celebration in question, when it’s midnight in London and the UCT official new year is starting for the whole planet, it’s only 5 p.m. here. For us boomers, late afternoon is a perfect time to count down the last 10 seconds, toast the New Year, and try to remember the words to “Auld Lang Syne.”
This brings up another problem with the traditional New Year’s celebration. We have scores of Christmas carols, although some oft-heard tunes, like “Jingle Bells,” are really winter songs rather than Christmas songs.
But for New Year’s, there’s only “Auld Lang Syne.” The lyrics are generally attributed to the 18th-century Scots poet Robert Burns, and the tune is likely a Scots folk-dance melody. “For auld lang syne” means something like “For old times’ sake,” and the rest of the lyrics are even harder to comprehend, as with “We twa hae run about the braes, and pou’d the gowans fine.”
Thus we find ourselves attempting to sing a song whose words we can’t remember, and even if we could, we don’t know what they mean. Clearly it’s time for the tunesmiths of the world to get to work and come up with something better — still sentimental, of course, but with some hope that the coming year will be an improvement on the last one.
Maybe next year I’ll arrange a matinee UCT New Year’s Party, complete with a 5 p.m. song with sensible lyrics.
And a Happy New Year to you, even if I slept through it last night.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
David Harsanyi’s column will appear tomorrow.