You can get into a lot of trouble on New Year’s Eve, especially with a driver’s license

I have a long history of getting into trouble on New Year’s Eve. I’ve been stranded in snowstorms, drunk too much (which doesn’t happen often, much as it may appear that way in this column), gotten hopelessly lost driving home from gigs or parties…the list goes on. I’m hoping this year will be somehow different.

My weekend band is playing New Year’s Eve at (free plug alert!) Riverbend Bar & Grille in Ada, less than two miles from home, so any snowstorm looking to strand me there would have to be exceedingly formidable. Sweet Annie’s driving, so I needn’t worry about the affects of that extra glass of champagne I don’t really, technically, in all honesty need. And my car now has GPS, so it is—in theory, at least—impossible for me to get lost on the drive home, if I were driving, which again, officer, I am not.

So with any luck I’ll wake up around noon on New Year’s Day, well-rested, un-hung over and with the smell of slowly baking ham and sweet potatoes wafting into the bedroom. God will be in His Heaven and all will be right with the world.

Yup, that’s my hope.

But like I said, the odds aren’t good. The first of my New Year’s Eve misadventures took place the year of my 16^th birthday, two months after I received that Holy Grail of teenager-dom, my driver’s license.

The family car was, as were many in those days, a Ford Country Squire capable of housing an entire Catholic family, one that took the Pope’s admonitions about birth control very seriously. There were seven of us and you could still fit a couple dogs and cousins in there along with enough baggage to survive a cross-country trip. That Country Squire was, in no way whatever, a cool car.

Since my folks had no lives other than the daily wrangling of their herd of recalcitrant progeny, they had no plans for New Year’s Eve. I did. I was going to pick up my girlfriend Debbie and drive. When you’re 16, a destination is optional.

The weather was lousy and my mother didn’t want me to take the car. My dad, understanding he had four other perfectly good kids should something terrible happen to his eldest, overruled her. The last thing he said as I left the house was, “Don’t get stuck on any cow paths.”

I had no idea what a cow path was or why I might get stuck on one, but I was in a hurry to get out of the house before my old man could change his mind about loaning me the car so I promised I wouldn’t.

I did. With Debbie. In the middle of nowhere, next to some farmer’s field. What were we doing out there in the middle of the night in the sleeting rain? That’s the same question my mother and grandmother asked me when they drove out to pick us up. I didn’t give them an honest answer and I don’t feel the need to give you one, either.

This was after Debbie and I had hoofed it over a mile of muddy road to the nearest home with lights on, where Old McDonald let us use his phone to call for help.

It was an hour before the wrecker arrived to pull us out of the mud. The ride home with my mother was not a comfortable one. The encounter with my old man when we arrived home was not particularly pleasant either, though I did live to tell about it so that’s something.

I’m hoping this New Year’s Eve will be less eventful. All the roads between home and Riverbend Bar are paved and well-lighted.

We do have to cross one small bridge, however.

Uh-oh.

Mike Taylor’s book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or in digital format from Amazon and most other major booksellers. Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.