Auld Lang Syne

It is New Year's Eve in Odyssey, and Whit's End is packed with people celebrating. The one person missing is the owner. John Avery Whittaker has slipped away from the noise into a quiet back room, and that is where his friend Tom Riley finally tracks him down. Everybody has been asking after him, Tom says, because it seems only polite for a man to show up at his own party. Whit apologizes. He simply wanted a few minutes to think back over everything that has happened in the past twelve months.

So the two old friends start remembering. They have handed out an enormous amount of ice cream, Whit admits, though he hopes to add a few healthier things to the menu in the coming year. They count up the inventions that have been built or displayed at the shop - the pizza oven, the instant freeze machine, the train cars, the movie camera, the radio station the kids put together, and even Tom's own boredom buster. Tom's favorite, though, is not a machine at all. It is the Bible Room, and he still remembers the day Whit opened it. Discovery matters, Whit agrees, but so do people, and this year has brought plenty of new ones: the Barclay family, Connie's mother June Kendall, and the shop's newest helper, Eugene Meltsner.

Eugene, Tom says, is a young man he likes very much and understands hardly at all. They recall the day he first walked through the door, announcing himself as a science student and, in all modesty, a recognized genius from the community college. His professor, Richard Pierce, had sent him to learn from Whit, and Eugene offered his services in such a towering pile of long words that Tom wondered whether he might be a foreign exchange student. Whit hired him on the spot for part-time holiday help, and Eugene has been baffling Tom happily ever since.

The year has had its funny moments too. One of the best came the morning Brad and Sherman launched Kids Radio. Big Brad opened the broadcast by telling everyone to switch off their Saturday cartoons, then could not find the record, could not read the spinning label, and set the needle skipping across it. Scoop Sherman delivered a traffic report consisting mostly of the moment he fell off his own bike, stumbled over the name of the Soviet premier while reading the news, and finished with a weather forecast promising highs in the lows of the uppers. Whit himself squeezed in a commercial offering a free ice cream cone with every cone purchased, once someone reminded him to speak into the microphone.

The shop has stirred up some remarkable imaginations, as well. Tom brings up Irwin Springer, who tumbled off a stool in the Bible Room and knocked himself out cold. Irwin woke on a dirt road that looked like the way to Trickle Lake but was not, with a stranger shouting at him to run if he valued his hide. Redcoat soldiers were closing in, the man was out of ammunition, and Irwin spotted the answer hanging in a tree above the troops: a wasp's nest. One well thrown rock scattered the soldiers, and when the wasps turned on the two of them they escaped by diving into a lake, where Irwin learned to swim in roughly ten seconds. Safe on shore, the stranger thanked Irwin for saving his life and gave his name - Nathan Hale. The year was 1776, the month July, and the camp they were walking toward belonged to the Continental Army.

The Bible Room has taught deeper history than that. Jack and Lucy once found themselves in the dark in a place that smelled strongly of fish, sharing the belly of a great fish with a grumpy Jonah who wanted peace and quiet to think. When Lucy asks him why he ever imagined he could run away from God, Jonah turns the question back on the children. He points out that God's own command is to obey your parents, so disobeying them is disobeying God. Jack, who skipped church clean-up day, admits the story has stopped being fun and started stinging. Jonah has no excuses left either, and he excuses himself to pray for forgiveness.

The sweetest memory of the year is quieter than any of these. Whit's heart was racing like a dozen horses the day Connie Kendall came to talk with him after her trip to California. She had been confused for months and had hoped the journey would sort things out, and it did. What she wanted was to pray with Whit, to ask forgiveness for her sins and ask Jesus Christ to come and live in her heart. Whit could hardly speak. He had prayed a long time to hear those words, and Connie told him she thought his prayers had traveled all the way to California. The two of them knelt down together.

Moments like that, Whit tells Tom, are what Whit's End is really about. Neither of them knows what the coming year holds. God only knows, Whit says, and whatever it turns out to be, he is content to trust Him and say, Thy will be done. Tom answers amen, the two friends wish each other a happy New Year, and they head back out to rejoin the party.