YOU DON'T HAVE TO DRINK NEW YEAR'S EVE

To a Sober 2023, One Day at a Time

The last time I drank on New Year's Eve was on Dec. 31, 2009. We had been invited to a New Year's Eve party in the next town, complete with live band, platters of food, dozens of guests, and three stacked self-serve bars. Our daughters had been invited to friends of theirs just a few blocks away, so it was an easy call: drop them off, go to our party, pick them up after midnight, go home.

I had been semi-sort-of-not drinking, which meant I was drinking and trying to hide it, in the weeks before. This was five months before my epiphany in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in early May 2010. I wrote about that as a kind of miracle story December 25, 2021, "Sober at 60."

It was how my mother gave me her late-husband's car just to get it off her hands. I flew down to Boynton Beach, Fla., to drive it home. My plan was to drive slowly and drink myself into a spiritual coma at beachside resort hotels all the way back to New York. The first night, I passed more than 200 motels and hotels (t/h Frank Zappa)…