Another New Year's Eve

New Year’s moments. People make resolutions that they will mostly break. People wish a good riddance to 2021 and anticipate a better year, but really not much changes from December 31 to January 1. I think that what must change is not the year but the person, or even from January 1 until the next. Some people will wish me a Happy New Year, but I don’t quite know what they might mean: what changes are they wishing? And so for me the celebration is artificial and really quite counterfeit. It might be a new year but what makes a new person isn’t the responsibility of the calendar.

I remember once spending New Year’s Eve in Times Square. I believe I was at the time with Renee. Maybe we had gone out to dinner at a French restaurant and at her urging I ordered frog’s legs. Tastes like thicken, she told me. I did not finish my dish though I know that she ate with delight. But maybe this wasn’t the time when at Renee’s urging I sampled frog’s legs. Such is memory though I am certain that at some moment in our friendship I did order frog’s legs at a French restaurant but did not finish the dish. Anyway, in this New Year’s Eve in Times Square we were crushed uncomfortably by the mostly inebriated and screaming crowd, and I was probably more tired than frightened. Certainly if we had eaten at the French restaurant I was also hungry. We were cold and wondering what the hell was so exciting a) about New Year’s Eve, and b) Times Square on New Year’s Eve. And we were wondering what the hell we were doing there. I know I probably puzzled how much longer until the ball dropped and then how we were going to find our car and drive home.

I remember another New Year’s Eve spent with Jill. We thought it would be fun to celebrate the event from bar at the top of the World Trade Tower when those edifices existed. We made it as though certainly clean ones far as the elevator before we were stopped because I was not suitably attired. I had on what I still refer to as dungarees and a very lovely shirt, but this attire did not satisfy the dress code for attendance at the trendy, upscale bar. Jill was dressed in jeans (ahl not dungarees), but hers were designer brand and so she was considered acceptably attired. We didn’t go up into the Tower and what we did the remainder of the evening I cannot recall. I have long since lost touch with Jill. 

There was a third New Year’s Eve that I vividly recall. Following my regular weekly therapy session, I hopped onto the subway and headed down to the Village Cinema (but I think that perhaps it wasn’t that theater —I don’t quite remember. But I do know that the movie theater was certainly one down in my beloved Greenwich Village. I was meeting a friend for a triple feature. On this last day of the year the theater was screening The Last Waltz, the end of The Band; Let It Be, the end of the Beatles; and Gimme Shelter, the end of the Sixties. I think I regretted all those endings with all my heart and soul. Then bleary eyed we got on the subway and rode Uptown for a small gathering at my apartment. It still wasn’t yet midnight, and we laughed and toasted to nothing.  I sense that perhaps there was even an innocence about us that New Year’s Eve, but I think this might have been a most bittersweet New Year’s Eve.

And tomorrow will be another New Year’s Eve and I will not wait until the ball drops to tuck myself into the bed covers. Perhaps I will hope to change in the coming year, or at least make changes  in my life, but I don’t need a new year’s eve to inspire that change. I just have to will to make revisions in myself and my very limited world and then hopefully with some strength act on that willing. In the meantime, the greater pandemic continues to evolve—we are up to omicron in the succession of variants, and I know the Greek alphabet is not yet exhausted—and that other plague, the Republicans, will continue to lie and cheat in their grasping for power..  Trump has scheduled a press conference for January 6, the anniversary of the insurrection he helped organize and perpetrate. I hope no legitimate news organization will cover the event. Let him speak into the wind and may that wind blow right back into his face. 

I don’t have great confidence that the new year will be any more acceptable than was this past two years.