December 31, 1999

I'm taking a break this morning.

I'm taking a break from all the end-of-the-millennium hype. By now it's January 1 in Australia and their world hasn't ended, so we know there isn't much to worry about, anyway. I'm taking a break from all the world-wearing sighing about how it's just another day. I'm taking a break from good riddance stories and silly "best of" polls. I'm taking a break from the last minute hassle to find some activity, anything, that will be exciting enough for Jeremy tonight, because he's rejected every suggestion so far.

I'm taking a break because I'd like a moment of silence, just for a minute, just for myself. The twentieth century is ending, and that makes me really, really sad.

I've always dreaded this day, do you know that? As soon as I was old enough to realize that in all likelihood, I'd live to see the year 2000, I started dreading it. Not because I thought the world would end or Jesus would return or planes would fall out of the sky, but because it would be the end of ... well, of something. I'm not sure what.

I feel a little cheated, I guess, because everyone is talking about the end of the millennium. Who cares about the millennium? What's one thousand years? You can't wrap your mind around a millennium. One thousand years ago, twelve hundred years ago ... it's too big to think about.

But a century -- well, a century is something. And I'm fond of this one. I don't know that I am ever going to feel like the twenty first century is my century. I'm going to feel like a relic. When my kids, should I ever have any, scornfully tell me to "move into the twenty first century, Mom," I'm going to wince. I'm going to be dismayed when a new set of "twenties" and "thirties" replace the ones I know now. Within my lifetime, the twenties won't be roaring; the forties won't be swingin'. They'll be something else entirely.

I've always had a fascination with the past, and specifically, the recent past. I love the twentieth century. My house is from 1910. My Victrola is from 1921. Some of my furniture is from the 1930's. My dishes are from the forties; my clothes are from the fifties and sixties. Tomorrow, all of those things will seem so much older than they do today. They will age a hundred years at the stroke of midnight.

Oh, yeah, it's just a number. If you are a practical sort of person, you'll wake up tomorrow and the only thing you'll have to worry about is remembering to date your checks correctly. But a century matters. The Holocaust occurred about thirty years before I was born, and that memory is still raw and immediate. The Civil War was just seventy years before that, and it's nothing more than a historical event, a problem from a different era.

Fashions from the 1920's still occasionally come back into style again; dropped waists and spool heeled shoes are merely retro. But go back a few short decades to the Victorians, and you're talking ancient history.

1899 is a different world. 1901 is the modern era.

I've never been good at abstractions, so I have some difficulty with the concept of time. I tend to picture it as a physical place, a road traveled by an enormous stone wheel that crushes everything in its path. The wheel flattens and destroys anything left in its path -- memories, people, and ideas. I take dates very seriously.

I'm always a little sad at the end of the year, but not for any reason I could explain. I think that to understand it, you'd have to see time as I do, not as a continuing progression, but as a series of steps. Every time a year ends, that's another step. And that big stone wheel is there behind us, destroying any thing or any person that didn't move ahead.

I guess this is as close as I get to a religion. Up to today, we've all been in the same place. Friends and loved ones who lived in this century with me, it's as if they haven't really been left behind yet, not until those numbers change tomorrow.

I'm always sad when the numbers change, but today I'm sadder than usual. It was a hell of a century, and I'm going to miss it.