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Being a police wife means spending New Year’s Eve apart from your police husband, unless his RDO — regular day off — falls on the holiday, which is pretty rare. So, early in our marriage, I got into the habit of assigning myself New Year’s Eve Projects. When Ginger was little, she and I worked on the Project together, and when she was old enough to escape to a slumber party, I muscled through it with Dick Clark. Whatever the Project was, it served its dual purpose: It helped to pass the time more quickly, and it helped to steer my thoughts away from crazy drunks firing guns at midnight.

And because I am a creature of habit, I’ve pretty much continued my tradition of my New Year’s Eve Projects, even though my husband is safely retired from the force. We all know why, though, right? Because now I am a police mother, wishing for the night to hurry into a crisp and happy January morning.

This year, my Project is to collect and organize pages and pages of household documents into reasonably logical storage files. And I’m finding “stuff” along the way. Look in this box that I’ve just brought up from the basement. I think it is the contents of a former junk drawer in a former home, and it all just got lost in the last move. Do you see those two pagers? (Do you remember pagers?)

Let me tell you a story about the PageAmerica pager. If you were feeling any sympathy for me a minute ago, this will cure you.

Back in the 1980s, when Bill was on a tactical team, he worked long hours with a tight group of guys. This tac team was so tight, in fact, that they often had to spend time together after work, to relax and review. As a young working mother, this “relaxing and reviewing” ran counter to my need for a good night’s sleep, and so I would page my husband to kindly request that he come home. Now.  Remember how pagers worked? You phoned a number, entered your number, and maybe the person you’ve paged will see your number and call you back, from a pay phone in the bar. Where he is relaxing and reviewing.

One night morning, after hours of frequent and unanswered pages, my husband walked in, and proceeded to the basement laundry room to shed his stinky bar-smelling clothes. I followed, not caring that I was acting like a fishwife, and declared how I’d been paging him all night.

He looked at his pager and said, “Nope. No pages from you. It must be broken.”

“Let me see it.”

Would you have handed your pager to me? Well, he did. And I whipped that thing at the steel security basement door.

“Yep, it’s broken, all right.”

And I went to bed.

Postscript: He repaired the darn thing from pieces of pagers that they’d confiscated from bad guys. But it wasn’t long before he got a new-fangled cell phone. Which didn’t work any better than the pager, I’m afraid.