We went to Omaha to rock on for New Year's Eve with two of my friends from high school.  We didn't realize until we got there that the group also included four of my friend D's college fraternity brothers and their wives, none of whom we knew prior to last night.  However, a friend of D's is a friend of ours, and we all got along pretty well.

Our first order of business was to drive to a restaurant in the Old Market, where we had reservations for a fabulous meal.  I had never been to this particular restaurant before, so I was wondering what it would be like. Our table was upstairs.  As we walked up the stairs, the waiter told us how much he liked being upstairs because it was so beautiful.

(Let me pause here to say that I grew up near Omaha and therefore tend to be as hard on it as a mother on her first-born child.  Also, I lived in fabulous Chicago for fifteen months and had a full-glass-window office on Michigan Avenue the entire time. So my standards are maybe a little bit high.)

We reached the top of the stairs to see a bunch of church-basement banquet tables set with white linen, and those chairs you only see in either legion halls or bingo parlors, the ones that are edged in chrome and have cushy, foamy seats and backs.  There were gorgeous windows, but the view appeared to me to be of a parking lot, even though the joint was called Rick's Boatyard Cafe.  I was trying to figure out where the boats were the whole time; wondering, in fact, if maybe the only boat was the one they missed with the upstairs decor.

After dinner, we were told that one member of our party was pregnant and wanted to go back to drink in the hotel bar to avoid cigarette smoke. 

(Now, I feel for her. I had wicked terrible morning sickness when I was in my first trimester with the little angel.  I could actually smell Guatemala on the produce in the grocery store. I could smell the Guatemalan donkeys that lived near the produce.  But still, it was New Year's Eve.)

We all piled back into D's friends' minivan, which we had taken to the restaurant.  When the driver turned on the radio, "Man In Motion" from the St. Elmo's Fire soundtrack filled the minivan.  I was sitting on a plastic Happy Meal Elmo.  I felt a little dizzy for a moment, as though I might've accidentally left my personality somewhere back at the restaurant. 

After about an hour of hotel bar, I was starting to get hivey.  I convinced my beloved to help me rally the troops. We took the hotel shuttle down into the Old Market and entered one of my favorite bars there, Mr. Toad's.  The bar's walls are covered in books and stained glass, and it has a very rabbit-hole effect.

As we were standing around, talking, drinking and waiting for midnight, one of the other women motioned to the twentysomethings carousing in the corner.  We were all in our early to mid-thirties.

J.:  "It's funny how when you're in your twenties you behave like an absolute ass in the bars."

Other J:  "Yeah, but you think you're so cool. You think everyone in the bar is looking at you, wishing they were you."

K:  "I think I just saw that one do some cocaine."

Me:  "Really?  Where?"  (crane neck)

J:  "I wonder if there were people like us back in the bar when we were twenty-one, laughing at us."

This is a sobering thought.

J:  "The funny thing, though, is that I still feel like I'm twenty-one."

I pause to reflect on this.  I don't feel twenty-one, per se, but probably twenty-seven.  I could probably be twenty-seven forever.  I got married when I was twenty-seven.

Other J:  "My aunt is fifty.  She told me she still feels thirty, but her body doesn't do quite the same things anymore.  Isn't it crazy that our grandmothers probably felt thirty when we were their grandkids?"

I down a glass of champagne. The idea of my grandmothers Dorothy and Helen feeling thirty while teaching me to bait fishhooks and make cookies is freaking me out.  What if there is only one consciousness?  What if we are all really thirty for the rest of our lives after passing that fateful milestone? 

Midnight came, and we drank heartily, watching the twenty-somethings make out with each other like Will Ferrel after doing beer bongs in Old School.  Then, shortly after, we immediately left the bar.  We were tired, and the whole aura of the bar was starting to give me the weebie-jeebies.  The forced enthusiasm, the mismatched countdowns, the stench of cigars in cramped quarters.

My beloved and I rode the elevator up, took nice, hot showers and snuggled up in the king-sized, angel-free bed.  It was 1:37 a.m. 

Beloved:  "You know, that was fun, but I almost could've just hung out at home."

I thought about it.  I had this need to go out this year, to do something.  I had a great time, but the longer I go, the more I question who I am becoming.  I told Pa this when we got back to pick up the angel. 

"Welcome to the rest of your life," he said.