Epiphany

The Lost Year


This weekend, at the official end of the holiday season, my two brothers were visiting New York which was having one of its (by now familiar) winter heat waves. On Saturday temperatures were in the fifties, so on a whim we ventured into the city to enjoy the last vestiges of the new year ambience while holiday decorations were still up. By Monday the decorations would be down, right after the Feast of the Three Kings, or Epiphany (also known as the twelfth day of Christmas).

The three of us went to Bryant Park and caught the last bit of an ice show at the skating rink, then wandered over to Times Square and marveled at the now barely noticeable New Year crystal ball still on its perch. Only a week ago, it was the beacon which led a million people to pack themselves into this city intersection known as the crossroads of the world.
 
We entered a bar for a drink and light snack, and while we were waiting to be served, struck up a  conversation which meandered around our experiences growing up. We have a version of this conversation every time we meet, I suppose its the way we reconnect.

It's possible to go over things repeatedly, and repeatedly miss something. Try a year. That evening during our 'routine' conversation, we discovered quite by accident that a whole year was missing from our lives - a year during which we were apart, each lodged with a different branch of extended family.

At first there was mild shock. We knew our parents didn't have it together because we always felt like the parents, but we had to admit that they had executed this feat flawlessly because we didn't... couldn't put it together until now, forty years later. Our parents never seemed so masterful.

Laughter and digestive silences took turns at the table while we shared our stories. We marveled that it went undetected for so long, and true to form soon found the humor again, dubbing it a  Jedi mind trick.
We found that missing year in a random bar in Times Square, the result of an impromptu decision to just go walkabout in the city - the last place we thought to look.