Weathering ‘87, Whither ‘88? : Regrets and Rue Have Their Dusky Place, but the Dawn of a New Year--This Time Around--Offers 366 Free Chances

If there were a grand climatic design, New Year’s Eve Day would be dank, dark and gray, thus creating a fittingly funereal mood in which to observe the passing of the late year.

New Year’s Day would on the other hand dawn crystal-clear, rain-washed and sparkling, atingle with the promise of 365 days in which to commit a whole new set of triumphs and follies.

This week the elements appear to have the grand design in mind, and in between the hailstones and the misplaced icy New England winds there have been breathtaking reminders of just how beautiful Southern California can be when the smog has gone visiting elsewhere, the hills are alive with soft greenery and the clouds appear to be posing for calendars. The moments will do as auguries of a good year.

The death of an old year is not quite like the loss of a friend or a loved one. I can’t ever remember feeling pangs of regret when a particular year, considered as a whole, slid into the pages of history.

There are a few I wouldn’t mind having back, all in all. It seems to me that 1950, 1956, 1962-65 and 1976 were particularly choice, but I would feel spectacularly foolish standing about in 1950, wondering why everyone else looked so young. So let it pass.

I’m not sure how you assess a year, although journalists keep trying, totting up lists of the 10 bests, 10 worsts, 25 largests, 50 dumbests, 100 least forgettables.

The Lists that hurt most this year are the necrologies. It’s hard to recall a year in which so many figures in the arts here and abroad became only memories. Martin Bernheimer’s list ran to several dozen in music alone. And you bare the head in tribute as well to John Huston, Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Jackie Gleason, Robert Preston, Ray Bolger and Danny Kaye, Geraldine Page and Mary Astor, to take no more than a melancholy sampling.

The thought of the voices, famous and not famous, that went silent during the year creates another kind of stillness within the quiet of a wet afternoon.

The year, like any other, will have its public assessments, and 1987 will surely go down as the year of glasnost. Its most encouraging image may have been the doomsday clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Over the years the editors have pushed the hands ever closer to fatal midnight as the Cold War hotted up. Now, in glasnost time, the editors have pushed the clock back by not one but several minutes, giving the world a kind of grace period to park undisturbed a little longer.

The Black Monday stock market swoop is doubtlessly the other semipermanent memento of 1987. But, with due commiseration for the innocent bystanders who got caught in the undertow, it’s hard not to feel simply that the mortgage came due on a fool’s paradise of speculation, sharp trading and spendthrift fiscal goings-on that would have had any of Charles Dickens’ creations in debtor’s prison faster than you could say “Egad, sir.”

But aside from larger considerations of hair’s-breadth escapes and the Dow-Jones averages as an instrument of poetic justice, there are the private contemplations of 1987 and, indeed, of 1988.

As you gaze back on 1987 the mix of emotions is dominated by simple relief that you survived the year more or less intact. The doctor did not conclude the annual checkup by asking if your will was up to date, always an encouraging sign. There were no lines at the gas stations (just as well, since gas stations are disappearing even faster than the mini-malls are rising). The IRS did not ask you to drop in with your canceled checks and other receipts from 1980. You had to admit things could have been worse.

There are, of course, 12 months’ worth of incompleted projects which linger now like hangnails, and there are the unrealized goals that cause twinges of regret in the lower back and conscience. (A friend brags of setting 16 goals last Jan. 1 and achieving 15 of them. The 16th, unfortunately, was “Make more money.”)

But the year is going, going, gone, and if you’re lucky, it takes with it all the guilts attendant upon what didn’t get done that should have, and what was done that might better have been let alone. The blackboard is washed clean and the erasers are clapped free of chalk dust, ready to receive a whole new 1988 set of guilts.

Yet possibly not so. Hope never seems to spring quite so eternal as on New Year’s morning. I’ve long since realized I’d rather receive the day rested and refreshed instead of dazed with fatigue and excess stomach acidity. The New Year’s Eve frolics wore out their welcome with me some while ago, and it may be a trend.

A few years ago a reporter friend was researching a magazine piece on New Year’s Eve party-giving trends. One of the story sources turned out to be a film personage who said that he and his wife used to give quite an elaborate party.

They and some of their friends were also weekend nudists. When the midnight kisses had been exchanged and “Auld Lang Syne” properly sung, the non-nudist guests would depart. The nudists would stay behind and disrobe in celebration of their beliefs.

But they had stopped giving their party, the film personage said. “It was always the same old faces.”

On which newborn note, I wish everyone a clear day and the full promise of the new year.