By Myself, But Not Alone, On New Year's Eve (corrected version)

I will be spending most of New Year's Eve in a bedroom by myself. 

But that is not because friends and family have abandoned me. It is merely because yesterday I tested positive for Covid.

So far my symptoms are mild and I can only hope that is how they remain. I know that almost all of you reading this have gone through your own version of this illness and recovery but this is new territory for me. Six vaccines and more than a bit of luck made me feel as if I had a special ability to ward off this disease. Oops.

Actually, the ball dropping in Times Square has done very well without my presence for decades. The last time I was awake to welcome the new year, Guy Lombardo was the maestro of choice. (I understand that many of you are now googling his name to see who the Hell I am referring to).

Of all the New Year's Eve "celebrations" in which I took part, one stands out. My dad had passed away on December 13, 1979. It was still an era when my friends and I thought that going out to dinner was a mandate on December 31. We later became disabused of that notion after far too many evenings of main courses for one of the assembled either going AWOL or colliding with appetizers for another, or hours passing while we watched other tables go from soup to nuts even as we were going nuts waiting for soup.

Anyway, I was certainly not feeling very festive that particular night. But the evening was rearranged so that dinner was but a few minutes from where my wife and I then lived. And while we merely stopped by to say a quick hello, I understood I was being embraced by those I held dear.

In recent years the tradition has morphed into bowling (well at least for a couple of us), wonderful food at a friend's house and then a retreat to my own bed well before Cinderella has turned back into a girl with tattered clothes and no ride home. 

I will miss everyone's presence tonight. But even as Covid isolates me, I know I am far from alone. For it is not the company you keep on one night that is of consequence, but the friends and family with whom you walk through every day of life that makes a room, and an existence, full.