New Years in New York
By Steven Beschloss
My friend Rick had a great apartment at the southern end of Madison Avenue in New York City with floor-to-ceiling picture windows, perfect for gazing straight up the street. My wife Kirsi and I stayed there late in December when Rick was gone for the holidays and she was six months pregnant. The baby would be our first child and, like most first-time parents, we were excited and not a little disoriented.
We used to live in New York just a few blocks away. But now we lived in Helsinki, the home city of my Finnish wife, so we needed a place to crash. We traveled to New York whenever we could—to meet editors for work assignments and to see friends and savor our favorite haunts. We’d never gone to Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but thought this year we would.
Every time we visited New York we went to Coffee Shop on 16th Street at Union Square, which was more a bar/restaurant than a coffee shop. Maybe it was nostalgia—we’d always note the spot by the window where she sat and I first talked to her nearly six years earlier—but we also loved the vibe there. The music. The food. The liquor. The people. The easy feeling. The sense of freedom.
Maybe it was also nostalgia that led us to the restaurant where we first fell in love just off Broadway near Madison Square Park where we were staying. But that restaurant, Ovo, where we had the shared feeling that we might have known each other in a previous life, was gone. The new restaurant was not bad, all in white like Ovo, but slicker, colder, not quite right.
Since it was early New Year’s Eve, the conversation turned to New Year’s resolutions, something we like to think about and plan every year. But we quickly realized that our usual brainstorming was going nowhere. As we imagined the year ahead, we grasped for the first time that we had no true idea how our life was going to change. Planning was impossible.
I got another vodka. Kirsi got another alcohol-free beer. We were both a little stunned by how unsure we were about the future. Not that we made it easier by choosing not to know the gender of our baby.
We went back to Rick’s apartment, still a bit dazed. We sat on the edge of the bed, staring out at Madison, as the clock ticked toward midnight. Like most everyone else, we flipped on the TV and watched the ball drop in Times Square. But unlike most viewers, we could hear the live echo of cheering revelers rumbling through the streets. The sound was more plaintive than joyful, adding to our sense of unease.
It’s not like we were kids. We were both already in our thirties. We were living the life we had chosen. Two people born on different continents, who met by chance and realized how much they had in common, both working as writers and journalists, both bit by the need to travel and explore the world, even if that meant periods of insecurity and doubt. Both also realizing that by being together and having a family they would have the chance to heal some of what was broken growing up.
Sara Sofia was born three months later in Helsinki on March 27, 1997. The labor lasted more than 24 hours. There were no drugs to soften the mother’s experience. But we did put a bottle of Russian champagne in the hospital’s freezer to celebrate the start of our new life.
All these years later, I’m still regretting I left that bottle in the freezer too long—it broke before we tasted its contents. But that was no metaphor: Every year we celebrate the combination of growing clarity and newly discovered uncertainties as the parents of two daughters. Every year on New Year’s Eve we raise a glass to challenges yet to come.
This essay is part of our series on the topic “Holidays?”
Steven Beschloss, executive editor of Transformations and director of the Narrative Storytelling Initiative at ASU, has lived and worked in New York, London, Helsinki, Moscow, Los Angeles—and now Arizona. A professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, his writing has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler and many others.