Happy New Year!

I went to bed early last night.

My wife has trouble staying up after ten or eleven p.m. We have exactly zero ringing-in-the-new-year stories, because at least one of us is always in bed long before midnight.

This year, I decided to join her.

This year, I made a big mistake.

When we arrived home from dinner around 9:00, our neighborhood was quiet. Sure, there was the neighbor behind us who was shooting off fireworks every 15 minutes, but the air conditioner, fan and white noise machine kept most of that sound out.

(Hiding from the noise was easier for our "brave" cat. When we got home, we found him cowering in a closet. When we went to bed, he immediately crawled under the bed.)

So we went to bed around 10:00. I must have fallen asleep around 11:00, only to be woken up abruptly at midnight, wondering if I were in a war zone.

Fireworks were, literally, everywhere. This is no doubt a hard concept for Americans to grasp, because when I say "fireworks were, literally, everywhere," most readers of this blog will think of firecrackers and bottle rockets.

But what I'm saying is this: Fireworks were everywhere. Fireworks, like the kind you drive to the park to see on the Fourth of July, were everywhere, shot from backyards and streets and rooftops. The acrid smell of gunpowder was in the whole house, including the air conditioned bedroom.

This incredible display of firepower -- including, I'm sure, more than a bit of gunfire -- went on for at least ten minutes. In the few oddly quiet moments in our neighborhood, I could hear, in the distance, fireworks across Manila. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to describe the sound. The best I can come up with, without trivializing the real gunfire of wartime, is this: Imagine a huge urban area where all the buildings have tin roofs. Then imagine giant hailstones, or frozen turkeys, or bowling balls, falling on those tin roofs, continually, for an extended period of time.

By 12:30, everything had pretty much settled down, and I wandered back to bed, where I found Shelly sound asleep. I wondered if my wife, who is at most times the lightest sleeper I've ever known, heard any of it.