When I was a boy, it happened every New Year’s morning. My father would wake me up early and we would get in his truck and set out to meet most of his seven brothers for coffee and conversation at their homes, as well as brief visits to their businesses.
I accepted the reality that this was a men’s/boy’s invitation-only affair, since Pop and his brothers did not hesitate to assure me that they shared the traditional belief that, in the year ahead, bad luck would come to the family whose home’s threshold was crossed by a woman before a man. Thus, this tradition served as a kind of insurance policy for the year ahead.
Bob Newell
Later in life, I would recognize the male-chauvinism and inherent unfairness behind that notion, but when I was a boy, I accepted it, as well as its inevitable corollary — getting up early on Jan. 1 and drinking lots of coffee. When you realize that my Pop had seven brothers and most of them had small businesses, to which the bad-luck notion also was extended, you can imagine that my New Year’s morning began with lots of in-town travel and lots of coffee.
While my education in the anthropology of the old South has certainly challenged the blatant sexist notions behind that traditional way of thinking, it cannot steal from me the deep emotional impression that memory continues to hold. My most treasured, persistent imprint from all of that pre-sun-up coffee drinking derived from watching Pop and his brothers show love for each other and recommit themselves to a loving relationship in the year ahead.
As they would ceremonially step through the doorways of their homes and businesses and sit down at familiar kitchen tables for more coffee, these men — my primary role models for what adult masculine behavior was supposed to look and act like — would invariably speak of the swift passage of time, remember the good and the bad from the year just passed, tell treasured tales of events from their growing-up years on Grandaddy’s farm, thank the Lord for their continued health, and in mostly non-verbal ways, embrace each other with the most genuine brotherly love I have ever seen.
As an old and now well-traveled adult male, my bladder no longer can stand all that coffee drinking and my worldview will not allow the magical and wrong-headed notion that females are so powerful and so inherently wicked that their gender alone can engender evil simply by passing through a doorway at the “right” or “wrong” time. At the same time, I want to claim the better part of that memory.
On Jan. 1, 2022, I want to wish my beloveds a “Happy New Year,” in a far more authentic manner than simply and routinely, as if by rote, repeating those well-worn words. I do not want to try to manipulate mysterious cosmic forces or to take charge of fate itself. I simply want to say to them that I love them and promise to continue to do so in the year ahead.
Oh Lord, help me to find a way to express to my loved ones my continual delight in them and to show them without doubt or question, that in the year ahead I am renewing my lifelong goal of cherishing them.
Bob Newell has served as a university professor and administrator, a local church pastor and a cross-cultural missionary. He and his wife, Janice, now live in Georgetown, Texas, and he serves churches as transition coach and intentional interim pastor. They were the founders and remain advocates of PORTA, the Albania House in Athens, Greece.
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