It was a filmy balmy New Year’s Eve in 1985. A coat was barely needed. A sigh of silence fell over the hospital on Amsterdam Avenue where I worked. My friends, newly home from their respective colleges met me at the lobby and we walked towards the number 1 train on Broadway. The streets were empty save for the odd gypsy cab. A quick dinner at a bustling Chinese restaurant in lower Manhattan and then we walked the streets towards the Brooklyn Bridge, swinging the requisite paper bagged bottle of wine between us, talking, laughing and sharing our futures.

It has been 35 years, but the memory of that night has stayed with me. To be 19 and to have the city as your playground. Well-wishers stopped to chat, hoisting their own brown paper bags in a communal salute. Race, socioeconomic status and language barriers faded away that night on that bridge as celebratory fireworks range out in the background. Complete strangers cheered and hugged each other, some clad in tuxedos and ballgowns, some in ratty jeans and combat boots. We were all New Yorkers at that moment, encased in hope. It spilled out onto the subway ride uptown as well.

As native New Yorkers, we would not do something as obviously touristy as watch the ball drop-in Times Square. Now in retrospect, I wish I had. I wish I had partaken in every gimmicky adventure this great city had to offer as I watch the city I once walked through endlessly and explored inch by inch metamorphosize into a quiet silent fortress. I should have wandered into more coffee shops, bought more from independent businesses, browsed a little more at the Strand. I regret not listening to more live music and dancing at SOB’s on Varick Street or stopping to listen to the subway buskers. I wish I had smiled at the young Juilliard students and the ballerinas toting their dance bags. I would tip the young actors waiting tables more.  The street sellers that hawked their wares, the “dirty water dog” vendors that I used to avoid have disappeared or are encased in plexiglass.

I queried my friends about their New Year’s Eve experiences on Facebook. There were the wedding crashers in the East Village, the kissing a solitary stranger at a crowded club because both were alone. People regaled me with tales of galas at the Plaza, the Rainbow Room, the Waldorf Astoria or midnight runs in Central Park with 4000 of their nearest and dearest as bands played.

New Year’s Eve in New York City was a metaphorical palate cleanser. It removed the flavor of a terrible, middling or great year and freed you  for the tastes of the next year to come. It was filled with well-wishers, subway music and happy inebriation. “Out with the old, In with the new.” Resolutions and resolves were broken the next day but for that time, we existed in a happy vacuum.

Out with the images of mass burials at Hart Island, body bags and refrigerated mortuary trucks. In with a happier, healthier population. Out with the sounds of the cries of grieving families and ambulance sirens. In with the sounds of street performers and clubs. Out with silent, barren streets and shuttered businesses. In with crowded noisy streets filled with life and thousands of human stories. We will never forget our dead but choose to live and rebuild to honor them.

On December 22nd, I was one of the happy and lucky ones that received the Covid-19 vaccine at my hospital. As I stood waiting as the nurse swabbed my upper arm with an alcohol swab, I was engulfed with a flood of mental images. I was surprised by the one that stayed with me.

It was of my beloved city teeming with life and activity once again.