New Year's Eve ramble

Yesterday, when I was looking for videos of Russian children's music for my Сиди дома не гуляй post, I came upon other childhood favorites like the very classic Голубой вагон. It's about the passage of time, very fitting for New Year's. The poetry is lost in translation (you can find the original lyrics and a poor translation at that link), but here are some excerpts (with my translation):

Медленно минуты уплывают в даль,Встречи с ними ты уже не жди.И хотя нам прошлого немного жаль,Лучшее, конечно, впереди.

Slowly the minutes flow into the distance,
Don't hold your breath waiting to meet them again.
Although we're loath to let go of the past, 
The best, of course, is ahead!

and for good measure,

Может мы обидели кого-то зря,Календарь закроет этот лист.К новым приключениям спешим, друзья...

Maybe we needlessly offended someone
The calendar will close that page.
To new adventures, friends!

***
Here's another thing I inadvertently came upon for New Year's: a stack of old letters and cards. Dad handed me a binder of papers to sort through, which he'd described as old 403b statements. There were some of those--together with my GRE scores and some old pay stubs--but there was a lot of personal correspondence from over a decade ago, when I lived in the area. It was all addressed to Boston--I'd kept the envelopes--but I'd left it here for whatever reason. It struck me how prolific my friends and I were, on real paper. It was back in the day when letters were really a thing. Exhibit A:

We wrote on cards, we wrote on stationery. We sometimes apologized for our penmanship, even though it was always impressively legible, We asked about each other's jobs, dates, moves, grad school applications, etc., and asked after the same. We wrote of various events going on in our respective cities, and plotted visits, some of which materialized. In which case we reminisced about those visits in later letters.

There was also a holiday card from one coworker, in which she thanked me for mentoring her, and another card from another coworker, in which he apologized for having made me uncomfortable by having made known his feelings for me. I know why I kept the first card; I don't know why I kept the second, but I'm glad I did. I meant the guy no ill will, bore him no resentment--I just didn't return his feelings. I appreciate now, in a way that I didn't appreciate at all at the time, the explanation in his heartfelt apology, that I made him nervous. 

Over a decade later, I've been hit on a lot more dudes for whom I don't have feelings. I've been counseling a friend on the same, now that I've come to recognize the pattern (at least the dude who wrote the card was upfront about it; none of this sneaking into a date through an ambiguous, potentially date-like situation). I've experienced my own self-sabotage through nervousness. 

I, we experienced many more moves, job applications, dates, jobs, etc. Most of us migrated to email, but not all of us. I received a long paper letter from one of those friends a month or so ago, and wrote her back on paper as well. It's always interesting to look back through the past, to remember what was going on then. Especially on New Year's Eve.