Rod Serling, Reminiscence, and Red Sauce (New Years Eve Sausage Ziti)

A Journey Into Time

As I crack open the window in the pentagon shaped living room, the room that feels like a cabin on a ship perched high in the trees above the street, I feel cold, but no wind. There is a soft, periwinkle sky and no discernable, locatable sun. The softness in the sky is reflected in me, or at least in the effects of my person. I’m wearing something between lounge pants and pajamas, a light tank top and a comfy purple cardigan that runs real hot. Slipper socks. The difference is that I just got out of the shower and even have some light makeup on. I’m dolled up in homebody comfort and am ready.

There is a certain excitement and, for me (I suspect for others too), dread that fills the air on New Years Eve. Even in my 20’s, and up to half of my 30’s, I went out on New Years Eve, sometimes with friends, boys who were not yet men, group acquaintances that often lived up to the promise of a good time, but more often didn’t. The point is, that I often didn’t live up to it for them either. I rarely had someone definitive to kiss that kiss which seemed more for others to see than the participants in the act. I drank too much, and, as I got older, my body didn’t make it to New Years Day with any real vigor. As an introvert, it all felt wrong.

Rest Home

One New Years Eve, I was struck down with a whopper of a chest cold. The clocks ticked in the New Year, but I was down for the count. However, this gave me uninterrupted time at home, and time away from the dreary expectations of New Years Eve revelry. Since I was a preteen, I had loved the tradition of watching The Twilight Zone New Years Eve/Day Marathon in upstate New York. It had been on Channel 11 WPIX. I related to the crisp black and white early 1960’s characters more than to those around me. The intricate mystery woven into the stories were all different, but all spoke to man’s folly, and, even at 12 years old, I could understand it.

In my mid 30’s, after years of witnessing man’s folly in multitudes of ways, and taking part in the follies myself, over and over and over again, I became obsessed with the marathon on New Years Eve again. It was now on the SciFi channel (becoming the SyFy Channel, which I referred to as the Syphilis channel). Even though the repetitive commercials grew monotonous with each hour, I spent that sick New Years watching the Twilight Zone and making slow cooker meatballs and red sauce. After all, I was staying up all night (or at least deep into the night) and could stir the sauce often.

I set the pot on the wide windowsill and visited it during the night, when I wasn’t coughing my brains out or blowing my nose. Into the late night, I woke up to the slightly charred smell of sauce. I had let it go too long and the bottoms of the meatballs were on their way to black. I was sick, after all!

The sauce recovered, mostly, and I spent New Years Day in my pajamas, trying to taste through my cold to eat a pretty decent meatballs and spaghetti, the fireplace on, and the Christmas Tree weary, but alive with twinking colors. Cats on my lap, at my side, or on the windowsill (the one not hosting red sauce), and Twilight Zone on the TV.

The Zone

My favorite episodes change with the years and seasons, the solid core of them generally remaining the same. “A Stop at Willoughby,” “The Dummy,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” “The Monsters are on Maple Street”…all the classics, plus stories newly discovered like “Obsolete Man,” of course starring Burgess Meredith as a librarian in a future without books, knowledge, poetry, or God. Perhaps I felt like this man, becoming obsolete in a society of smartphones without a soul, humans whose addictions did not disappear when they hooked into the internet, and endless streams of entertainment that could only provide pleasure, and meaning, up to a point. And then what–

So, that sickness brought me back home to myself. Alone, but not lonely, surrounded by creatures and creature comforts, belly full of red sauce, Rod Serling’s voice speaking to me from 1960 and teaching me lessons year after year, with the same words, but, somehow the words understood and creatively received by me more deeply, and differently, every time I watched them.

Another episode I keep coming back to is a simple one: “Walking Distance.” A New York City ad exec, perfectly named Martin Sloane, ends up a mile away from his hometown and, while waiting for an oil change, wanders off into town. He finds it exactly as it was, even including the version of himself as a child. His father ultimately tells him that he cannot stay–that this place as it was is gone for him now. That he has to live in his world.

New Years Day

My New Years Eves were filled with the darkness of memory, with my short walk or long stroll back into time, into seeing my father alive, my family and our meals, our fights and holidays, my somewhat stilted, boring, and predictable adulthood. The holiday lights kept me company and the memories overreached into my ethereal thoughts. I was only grounded by the red sauce and rustic meatballs, which slowly morphed into a more compact baked ziti over the years. My latest New Years New York tradition is sausage baked ziti. By the light of New Years morning, the heaviness of memory has subsided from me. The voices have quieted, the regrets have gone to bed, and the ziti tastes even better than it did the night before.

The Present

I am now in my 40’s, living in a similar but larger apartment a few neighborhoods away in Brooklyn. I live with my boyfriend, and the same cats, until recently. We lost my blue eyed girl and are now hosting a spunky Russian Blue Tuxedo who doesn’t trust us yet. But, she will. I have a feeling we’ll be good friends by the New Years Eve Twilight Zone Marathon of 2021. Our fireplace is manufactured, and there are more windows. Our little ship’s cabin holds us safely from the chaos of the outside world.

New Years Eve is a time I look forward to every year now–home, no plans, soft sky, soft clothing, red sauce, ziti, memory shifting into the presence of mind, nostalgia, and the pain of forgetting. Rod Serling welcomes me back every year. Time passes, the clocks tick, and the phones that aren’t phones keep us in the delusion that they possess something we do not already have.

The light outside dims, the Christmas tree grows brittle, but shines away, and the sauce bubbles in its pot, awaiting for me to construct it into a layered pasta that will satiate us all on New Years Day. Traditions happen like that. Meals, especially.

Red Sauce Feast

What follows ia a very simple recipe for the New Years Eve Sausage Ziti, New York style. It is just one simple part of the process of a New Year.

“And also like all men perhaps there’ll be an occasion…when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope — and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish…that a man might not have to become old — never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he’ll smile then too because he’ll know it is just an errant wish. Some wisp of memory not too important really. Some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind… that are a part of The Twilight Zone.”

— Rod Serling narration, The Twilight Zone “Walking Distance”