News Years Eve has never been one of those nights I’ve met with joy and excitement like all the people I’ve watched through the magic of television over the past 30 years. I’d watch what seemed like endless oceans of people crash, wave, and roar in the new year with swells of song, dance, champagne and proposals flooding the confetti saturated streets of the largest cities in the world. I usually felt such disconnect from what I saw on the screen. I think in a way I was adrift in the dark placid waters of somber remembrance, looking back over my shoulder at the shores most likely I’d never walk again. I always thought of what I could have done better, what I could have done more and should have done less. New Years Eve, for me, was a night of regretful goodbyes instead of a night of promising hellos. I thought this was the way it was destined to be. I never knew it could be different. Then I met a man named Jeffery.
The New Years Eve party I had been at closed down early. I was back at home by 10pm with about an hour to figure out what to do. I was in a new house with new people in a new city and I wanted to thoroughly enjoy the celebration of the new year. I wasn’t having much luck. Half of my roommates were out of town and the ones that were home weren’t feeling well and didn’t want to brave the city streets. My last hope at turning my New Years experience around slid beyond the horizon with a text message from a good friend letting me know our plans had fallen through and he’d be staying where he was at. I stood motionless in the middle of my room looking at my cell phone. It was just a few minutes until 11 and I had nothing to do, no people to see, no place to go. I felt defeated. I didn’t want another New Year’s Eve like the last 30 I’d experienced. I started telling myself that I tried this year and it just didn’t work out. I told myself this was okay. Next year I would have made more friends and would be invited to more things. Really, what’s one more year of the usual and mundane. Everything will be different next year. I almost started to believe what I was telling myself until something inside me asked one of the most defining questions I had ever heard. It’s one of those questions that makes even the grayest of the gray turn to either black or white. It was soft, an almost audible whisper. “What would you do tonight if you knew tomorrow you would die?”
I was in thought for a moment then frantically reached for my nicest collared shirt, wool sweater and suite jacket. I wasn’t just putting on clothes. I was getting dressed for a concert. More specifically, I was getting dressed to put on a concert. I quickly grabbed my acoustic guitar, keys, wallet, knit hat, and my white wooden bar stool and loaded everything into my car. In ten minutes I was on the 405. Five minutes later, the 710. Thirty three minutes after leaving my house, I was parked on 6th street in downtown Long Beach pulling my guitar and stool out from the rear left passenger door of my slightly dirty 2007 Nissan Versa. The streets were alive with thundering footsteps and shouting voices. I picked up my things and began to walk down Pine Street towards the crowds. As people passed by I felt them looking at me while I carried my guitar in one hand and stool in the other. I was brought back to a memory of walking the hallways in junior high with my lunch box in hand mistakenly thinking it was lunch period when to my horror and shame I realized it was only a five minute passing period and thought all the students who saw me must have been laughing at me with their hands holding books and a lunch box in mine. I was twelve again for just a moment and felt out of place. It’s strange how some insecurities seem to never go away, but tonight I couldn’t be hindered by self doubt. I had a concert to make and I was going to make it. Tomorrow I might be dead.
I walked passed the road blocks and stepped into the somewhat familiar wide waters of crowds like I had seen on TV. It was a bit overwhelming to take in the entire scene before me, so I concentrated on person by person as I walked by. I try to make it a point to look into the eyes of strangers I pass. I like to think it helps them know they matter to me. It’s nice when you know you matter to somebody. I kept walking. The streets, growing more dense with people, began to disappear under waves of celebration. Dance music beat against the walls of every nightclub, restaurant and bar in sight with go-go dancers gleaming through the front windows using everything the good Lord gave them to lure more patrons inside. Massive stages filled with lights, walls of speakers and the greatest talents known to Long Beach filled the intersections of these densely peopled streets. I wanted to stop and stare. I wanted to take more if it in, but I only had five minutes to get where I was going. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew that in five minutes I would be there.
I crossed ocean boulevard with a large group of people. The only cars around were police vehicles with lights spinning and firetrucks that seemed to anxiously idle at the side of the road. I saw a corner of sidewalk made by two intersecting walls and wondered if that would be a good place to sit myself down but was quickly distracted by two feet of silky brunet hair waving side to side a few feet in front of me. I decided to keep walking. I have a strange almost-fanaticism where if I see a woman with beautiful hair my mind automatically composes an image of what I imagine her face to look like, and I want to see if my imagination is correct. Although I did keep walking I did not look into the face of this woman as I passed her. I only had three minutes left, and tomorrow I might be dead.
I was now walking along the west side of the Long Beach Convention Center admiring the 111 million dollar expansion that had been constructed in 1994. It has a lot of the glass and a large concourse that sits a story or so above the street. I soon came to the stairs that lead up to the concourse and began to climb them. This particular stare case is constructed of a series of steps broken up by an oval landing you come to in the middle of your assent or decent. It was on the this landing that I stopped to check the time. I saw 11:58pm glowing back at me from the face of my cell phone. Setting my things down, I knew I had arrived. I quickly opened my guitar case and pulled out my instrument. I sat down on the stool and placed the guitar in my lap. I set the fingers of my left hand to play an open G major chord and lifted my right hand to begin a downward strum. As the nails of my right hand fell onto the strings of my guitar the crowd below me broke into ecstatic, almost violent cheer. The tension that had been building in the city streets over the last few hours had finally been released as the clock struck 12 and the damn that once held back such feverish celebration buckled and exploded into what felt like a tsunami of fluid energy, the greatness of which I had never witnessed in a crowd of people before. And there I was maybe ten feet above all of it feeling the strings vibrate beneath my fingertips.
I smiled as I played through that G major chord. I smiled because I knew I was where I wanted to be. From the top of my few feet of makeshift concrete stage in the midst of the darkened city streets now set in motion by the celebrating bodies of my fellow men I lifted my voice towards the sky and sent my songs heaven bound. The Bible speaks of God being surrounded by millions of angels who sing his praise without ceasing. I sometimes try to imagine what such a choir of creatures would look like, what it would sound like. I can’t, but I like to think that on this night my voice somehow rose up from the earth and joined in with their songs of praise to the Almighty God, the Creator of all. It might be a silly thing, but it’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to put on a concert for God and just hope that he might be pleased with what he heard. I sang a number of songs full of lyrics that are close to my heart before detuning my guitar to play some meditative instrumental noodling while contemplating God’s grace and the people he loves all around me.
“Do you mind if I sit here and listen to you play?”
My head was down when I heard this question. I lifted my eyes to find a middle aged man looking at me while pointing towards the steps in front of him. He was a pleasant looking man with blue eyes and short curly hair wearing a red down filled jacket and pointed with a black knit gloved hand. I told him he could sit and listen all he wanted. We both sat in a silence only broken by the chatter of the crowds and the strum of the guitar. It was nice to have another person there even though I didn’t know his name.
“Jeffery. My name is Jeffery,” I heard him say.
I looked over at him and extended my hand. “I’m Brian.” He went on to tell me how he has a friend I remind him of. His friend played the guitar like I do and had long hair like mine. He said he’d sit for hours listening to his friend strum away on those six strings. Then he paused for a moment. I was looking into his eyes and saw them preface his next question with a deeper longing than most other expressions I’ve seen.
“What kind of songs do you know?”
I don’t really know any popular songs except a rusty version of Rainbow Connection by The Carpenters and the ever so catchy broken heart pop-ballad Since You’ve Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson. I thought of these as more of a guilty confession than a useful answer to his question. I kept silent. From the look he was giving me I felt as if something was dependent on the answer I returned, as if he already knew what he wanted me to say. I remember wishing he had just asked me if I knew a specific song or something, then I could have just said no, but now it was up to me to think of a song I knew that he might know and like. I couldn’t think of anything but didn’t want to ignore the question altogether. I looked away from him to break the tension I was feeling and explained that all I really knew were some church worship songs as I reached down to pick up a pile of chord charts to show him. Instead of taking the chord charts he grabbed my hand with both of his hands crinkling the charts that were now clutched between his forearms. He held my hand tightly. I looked over at him. His once longing eyes had swelled with tears that now flowed down his cheeks and his mouth cracked with a quiveringly frail grin.
“That is exactly what I need tonight,” he whispered, trying to swallow his emotions to be better heard. I felt a warmth come over me as I listened to him speak. He told me about his broken relationship with his mother. She hadn’t spoken to him in several years. He told me of obstacles beyond his control that were keeping him from living out his desires to be a missionary pilot in South America flying people and supplies to isolated villages that were not easily accessible by car or truck. He asked for prayer and if we could sing together some of these songs to God. That’s what we did. For the next twenty minutes or so Jeffery and I poured our hearts out to God on our little makeshift concrete stage. I remember him having a well sung voice that picked harmonies gracefully out of the air as if they were old friends he had sung so many times before. I smiled again thinking of the ways that God brings unlikely people together and faithfully gives to us what we need.
At the end of our time together Jeffery told me two things that struck me. The first was that he loved me. I rarely hear these words from a person I’ve just met. I remember one other time. It was from a man I spent three hours with talking on the street who had lost everything to alcoholism. During our time together he kept spitting out blood that oozed from an extremely painful tooth infection rotting in the back of his mouth. We talked about everything from childhood memories to the meaning of life. At the end of our time together he asked if I could get him a beer to help dull the pain and calm the shakes he was getting from not having alcohol in his system. He had already turned down my offer to get him some food. The company of a friend and a cold beer was all he wanted. I had given him company, and a few minutes later I gave him the tallest beer I could find at the Rite Aid we had been sitting in front of. To this day, I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but I know I did it because I loved him. He gave me a hug and told me he loved me. He called me his friend. It seems this uninhibited love is given by those who know they don’t have anything to loose by loving another human being. It seems most of us still think we do. The second thing Jeffery told me that struck me was thanking me for listening to God’s call to bring my guitar and stool down to Pine Street and play worship songs on this cold New Years Eve. I wondered if it really was God’s call I had listened to at 11pm that night while standing motionless in my room. I wondered if it was God’s call that lead Jeffery to sit down next to some stranger playing a guitar in the middle of cascading concrete steps. I’d like to think so in some way, but I do for sure know it’s God’s call for us to love each other. And love we did.
I sat there for another hour or so after Jeffery left. I played more guitar and met a few more people. After the street had grown quiet, I packed up my guitar and gathered my things. I walked the half empty sidewalks back to my car and met more people on the way. I climbed into my car and started the drive home thinking about the night. I realized I wasn’t feeling my usual New Years Eve melancholy funk but was excited for the new year. I wasn’t looking back with regret but looking forward with a deep anticipation. I anticipated more of what I had experienced the first few hours of 2010. I anticipated more of God’s calling to uninhibited love. He is faithful to call. I want to be faithful to listen.
