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Auld Lang Syne – New Yorker

The author’s father in 1943, at age three.PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ALLYSON HOBBS

Every year, as the hour grows late on Christmas night, my father’s eyes become misty. He sits at the dining table after our holiday feast and stares off in the direction of the CD player, holding the remote in his hand. He wears a light-blue cashmere V-neck sweater over a neat button-down shirt and brown corduroy pants, classic “gifts for Dad” from previous Christmastimes. The 1963 album “Christmas with the Platters” plays, and a dreamy version of “Auld Lang Syne” wafts through the living room. My father slowly takes off his glasses and dabs his eyes. The phrase “Auld Lang Syne” translates to “times gone by,” and, while Americans expect to hear this song every New Year’s, few know what the Scottish lyrics actually mean. So most New Year’s Eve revellers just mumble or hum along. But they get the gist of the main question of the song: Should old friends be forgotten? And the answer, of course, is no, the past must be remembered.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?

While the song absorbs my father, plates are cleared, dishes are washed, Uno cards are located, and new rules for the game are debated. The after-dinner hustle and bustle do not disturb my father’s reverie. For those few minutes that “Auld Lang Syne” plays, he is far away from the dining table in Morristown, New Jersey, where he has celebrated Christmas for the past thirty-five years. He is a little boy, seven or eight years old, in a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago, which he shares with his sister, his mother, and his grandmother. It’s the early nineteen-fifties, and he sits by the radio with his family, looking at the frosted Christmas tree with bubbly lights. He is dressed in his finest clothes. “There was a time when families got dressed up for holidays. Remember that, Joyce?” he asks my mother. He laughs as he describes the suit that he wore, with a skinny tie, when they were first married, my mother’s fancy dresses, and the special holiday outfits purchased for my older sisters and brother.

For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup and surely I’ll buy mine!

And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.

Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, wrote “Auld Lang Syne,” in 1788. His life was not an easy one. Perhaps his suffering and hardships imbued his poetry with its signature passion and intensity. When his father died, his farm was on the brink of failure, and Burns and his brother moved the family to a new farm in an effort to stay afloat. The labor that the farm required seemed to leave Burnswith a heart condition that afflicted him later in life. Known as the “peasant poet,” Burns fathered at least a dozen children, with several women, and after leaving the farm he spent most of his career compiling traditional Scottish folk songs that celebrate life, love, work, drinking, and friendship, using warm melodies and emotional chords. “Auld Lang Syne” was not intended to be a holiday standard, but in 1929 the legendary bandleader Guy Lombardo (known as Mr. New Year) used it to connect two radio programs during a live performance at the Roosevelt Hotel, in New York. Lombardo’s band played “Auld Lang Syne” just as the clock struck midnight. A tradition was born. Lombardo brought in the new year with the song for almost fifty years, from the stock market crash in 1929 to his last performance, during the country’s bicentennial, in 1976. Lombardo died in 1977.

We two have run about the slopes, and picked the daisies fine;

But we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since auld lang syne.

As the youngest of two children and the only boy in his family, my father was doted on, adored, and treasured. His family did not have much money, but, as he would later tell us with a smile, “We didn’t know we were poor.” His grandmother cleaned the homes of white families and often came back to the apartment with stories of “what the white folks do.” Setting the Christmas table with her best china, she would turn to my father and my aunt and say, with satisfaction, “This is the way the white folks do it.” The world of the white folks was just as remote geographically as it was in imagination and in experience. It was protected by a boundary that no black person (aside from domestics and other workers) dared to cross. My father’s grandmother had served “the white folks” at dinner parties, so she took great pride in making her own celebrations equally special. She wanted her grandchildren to know that, even though they might live in a kitchenette in Chicago’s overcrowded Black Belt, they were just as precious and just as cherished as the white children who lived in the prestigious neighborhoods of the North Shore.

We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine;

But seas between us broad have roared since auld lang syne.

My father’s mother worked as a hairdresser. She was a master of improvisation, the original mother of invention. While she worked, she sent my father and my aunt to double features at movie theatres as a less expensive alternative to hiring a babysitter. One year, my grandmother splurged and bought my father a University of Chicago jacket for Christmas. My father, who dreamed of attending the University of Chicago, took great pride in wearing the jacket. Perhaps it was more beloved by him because he knew the sacrifices that his mother had made to buy it. An older boy would steal the jacket before its leather sleeves had the chance to crease. But such was life for my father, growing up in Chicago back then.

And there’s a hand, my trusty friend!

And give us a hand o’ thine!

And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne.

I notice my father as he muses silently about times gone by and wish that I, too, could go to that kitchenette that he has described so vividly and glimpse him as a little boy, dressed up in his Christmas finery. I wish I could hear the sounds of the crackling radio and join him, my aunt, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother around the dining table or next to the frosted Christmas tree. I drift into my own misty reveries: a childhood when the excitement of Christmas would not let me sleep; years later, watching my brother-in-law assemble elaborate and exquisite floral centerpieces as his generous gift to us; the games played; the joy and laughter before my sister’s illness and untimely death, at thirty-one; even the hectic but happy balancing act of celebrating two Christmases—one with my family and one with my husband’s family—before our marriage collapsed, four years ago.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?

My father can’t go back to the Chicago of the nineteen-fifties. Try as I might, I can’t relive my childhood or young adulthood in Morristown. But we can follow the poignant instructions offered in “Auld Lang Syne”: to remember the past, the stories, the scenes, the settings, the friendships, and the family. Perhaps knowing that these memories live on in all of us makes the “times gone by” a little easier to bear.