Beginning a new year…

One of the wonderful things about being up in the country is that, at some point, one has to go back to New York City. Tomorrow is that day for me. I haven’t been in the city in two weeks and, honestly, I miss it. It will be good to go back, go to some meetings, keep getting my new office organized, see how things are stacking up for the New Year.

All day I have been putting piles on the couch for me to put into my briefcase, reading and work for the train.

I will only be there for the day tomorrow. I’m going down for the closing on the condo we’re buying in Battery Park City, to have a meeting with Jack Myers and David Fox, to pick up mail and then to meet up with Tripp and return on the evening train.

But it’s time to step back from this magical respite I have been in here in the country and slide back into the world of work and to embrace a year that I have high hopes for – much more so than I did for 2002, which turned out to be a very good year in some ways.

This year began brilliantly with a New Year’s Eve dinner at our friends’ home. Larry and Alicia are restoring a magnificent 1680 farmhouse overlooking the Hudson River and invited us for a small get together which turned out to be a feast of a dinner, steaks, lobster, salmon, potatoes, yams, broccoli – a feast from which I am still full, two days later.

Larry’s son Bill was there and his friend, Tonia. Also there was Whitney and his wife, Irene, along with their two children. Whitney and Larry and I all once worked together.

It had been nearly a dozen years since I had seen Irene and the children. In that time the baby had become a young man and the little girl a burgeoning woman; Irene had changed little, if at all.

We grilled the steaks, boiled the lobsters, grilled the salmon, sipped French champagne and ate in a room that sang its origins through the candlelight. It was a room filled with laughter, everyone enjoying both the food and the company. Whitney laid out a great selection of wines. [Much of what I know of wines I learned when working for him in the ‘80’s.]

And then the party continued on, people streaming from room to room, with laughter the background music. Alicia sat at one end of the table, caught in the firelight from her antique candelabra gifts, sipping champagne and leading the laughter.

We stayed very late or very early. I haven’t done that for a very long time – and that’s a testament to the enjoyment that was filling the night. Outside the snow sparkled with the stars and I basked in being in that place, with people I enjoyed and loved, laughing and being magically free of the bonds of time for a few hours as one year slipped into another.

Now I begin 2003. We all begin 2003. People are drifting back to work, rummaging through piles left behind in another year, picking up the threads of this one.

Tonight, sitting by my fire, getting ready to go back to the fray, I am happy. I hope that you, too, are happy as you begin this year.