New Year's Eve 2.0

 

My prior blog on this matter was written and posted in January 2010, 11 years ago.  NYE 2009-2010 was spent in Fort Lee, New Jersey, watching the Times Square festivities with my then-GF, Loni.   That relationship had started in June 2009 and ended in May 2018 when she told me not to bother coming up to visit her anymore.

This year we had darker concerns on our minds – more so than last week, when I wrote my Election blog on Christmas Eve.  Our 86 year old mother had gone to the hospital in July for an operation, and from then to the present had been switching back and forth from hospitals to assisted living facilities, with her mental health severely deteriorating.  We last saw her in person on December 16, and last saw her on FaceTime (smartphone video conference) on Christmas Day.   On December 17 we were informed that she tested positive for COVID.  On Sunday, December 27, despite initially resisting the illness, we received word that she was being transferred back to the hospital again.  My brother and I, by her bedside at the ER, watched her breathing get progressively slower until it ended altogether.  By now, at 51, I’ve experienced multiple family deaths, including my own father’s departure in December 2004 of a stroke.  However, his removal from life support and expiration took place outside my personal presence.  In this case I was in the room when she actually passed away.   We’re talking about my second parent, from whom neither I nor my siblings have ever been estranged.   It’s a savage blow, and it will take awhile to recover. 

This New Year’s Eve, as with those of 2018 and 2019, was spent alone, in my apartment, watching the Times Square festivities on TV in warmth and privacy with the prerogative to immediately go to bed after the “ball dropped”.  I watched Joel McHale and Ken Jeong (both “Community” veterans) trade off on insulting each other.  Kelly Osbourne reported live from Times Square itself.

Of the umpteen New Year’s Eves spent with Loni in Fort Lee, on no occasion did we actually go to Times Square.  Oddly, that part of NYC is only a Forty-Second Street block from Seventh to Eighth Ave. and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the 158 Bus to Fort Lee, an hour trip which ends two blocks from her house.  On one particular NYE, she was actually working at Citizen, its flagship watch store at Times Square itself, that day, and returned to Fort Lee long before midnight, watching everything with me on TV.  But we shared the indifference to being in Times Square itself.  Most of the crowd acknowledges being from out of town. 

As noted, on two NYE’s I was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with my prior GF, Leila.  In 2000-2001 our lodgings were in Ipanema and we watched the fireworks on the beach from Leme, which is the opposite end of Copacabana.  It was raining, so after the fireworks everyone left the beach at the same time; it took us an hour to get back to where we were staying (in between the beach and the Lagoa).  In 2002-2003 we were staying in Copacabana, there was no rain, so after the fireworks we simply walked back two blocks to where we were staying.  Winter (June through September) in Rio means 70 degrees, fog on the beach, and it gets dark at 6 p.m.  NYE is during Rio’s summer, which means 90 degrees, no fog, and it gets dark at 9 p.m.  Spending NYE outdoors makes a bit more sense in this context – or in someplace like Miami, Phoenix, or California.   Just my two cents.

Chinese/Vietnamese New Year.  Both cultures follow a lunar calendar which puts the New Year sometime in January or February.   In 2021 that will be February 12 – for Year of the Ox.  Those of us familiar with the Vietnam War know that the Viets call this “TET”, and in 1968 the VC/NVA launched a huge attack all over South Vietnam.  During the course of that battle, ARVN general Loan Ngoc Nguyen summarily executed a VC prisoner, Lem Van Nguyen, who himself had murdered an ARVN officer’s entire family – including wife and children.  The picture and movie footage are abrupt and disturbing, but even cameraman Eddie Adams regrets it, as you can’t see the full circumstances of that incident. 

My own experience is two-fold.   First, the aforementioned Loni – from Shanghai, China – would take us to Flushing, Queens, and we’d have some sort of meal at a restaurant there.   Second, the firm I work at in Falls Church, Virginia has a majority Vietnamese clientele, so around Tet-time our office manager would have the Buddhist monks bless our office, and the nearby Eden Center would be in Tet mode. 

With that, absent any more developments, I have exhausted what I might have to say about this topic.  Happy New Year!