So I have settled into a little bit of a routine in the mornings here. I’m usually the first awake — this morning at 7:30am — so I open up the house for the day. This amounts to rolling opening the sliders to the lanai, unlocking the exterior doors, unlocking the living room slider to the lanai and the exterior door to the pool, quickly sweeping the tile floors, putting a fresh pot of coffee on, and then skimming the pool of the various bugs and leaves and pollen that found their demise there during the night. It all takes just twenty or thirty minutes but somehow it feels like it starts a brand new day with order and purpose.
It is January 1, 2019. I’ve been thinking about all the memorable New Years’ eves over the years. A couple of years — 1992, 1993, 1998 – were spent in New York which usually included a light dinner, then dancing until 4 or 5 in the morning at the Saint New Year’s Eve celebration. I was dating Dave Blackwell for the first of those two and Phil Loftin for the latter one. They were always crazy, fun and exhausting! Another year I was in South Beach at one of the newly opened club venues right on the beach. Last year Gregg and I were in Provincetown with Chris and Ilson. These days I prefer simple and low-key. It must be my advanced and advancing age!
Last night we had an 8pm dinner reservation at Sol e Luna, a restaurant on the French side of the island. I loved the ambiance, the food and of course the company. We had martinis, caviar, seafood tartar and foie gras to start, venison and mashed potatoes, wonderful cheeses with blueberry jam and a torte of some kind for dessert. Yum! Rolando drove us hurriedly back to Villa Vista Mare just in time to ring in the New Year. We turned on the network channels only to realize, of course, that the hour time difference meant that the East Coast wouldn’t be celebrating for another hour. To hell with that. We watched the fireworks over St. Bart’s in the distance and then I collapsed, exhausted, in bed twenty minutes after midnight. Welcome 2019!
