The Ecotone wiki site is a collection of essays on "place" and its meaning to the writers. My other bursts of place-idity:

Books and place
Cats and place
Cemeteries
Cleanup Coffeehouses
Courage
Coming & going
Energy of place
Food & place
Imaginary place
Islands
Maps as place
Mythical place
New urban place
Placenames
Plants & Place
River and Estuary
Rocks and place
A safe place
Saving place
Sea
Solstice twilight
Sound and place
Spider
Secret place
Time and place
Trees
Visitors
Weather

I have a long history of adventures on New Year’s eve.

You know, the kind defined as “someone else having a bad time a long ways away.”

In college, a roommate and I once trekked to New Jersey to visit a girlfriend of his who turned out to have no plans for the party she had invited him to. We spent the night in the fog, driving home through the Catskills.

Afterward, my wife and I gathered with friends of hers who were more reliable about following through with their plans. We’d meet somewhere, sit drinking and telling stories through the evening, and go home, counting ourselves as having had a good time.

Then the friends began to scatter, shedding wives or jobs and acquiring religion, kids or paunches. We kept up the tradition for a while, making lightning trips to New York City or Washington, D.C. to meet. I had my first — and last — experience of deep-fried calamari on one of those trips. My stomach still squirms a little at the recollection, to this day my strongest impression of Newark, N.J.

On another, we went to the top of the World Trade Center and watched from the observation deck through the gathering mists as the lights came on at the Verrazano-Narrows bridge. Yet another trip led to a night of storytelling in Arlington, Va. I think that one was notable for our taking an inadvertant and slightly scary tour of the Poconos on the way home.

Then things came unglued. We joined a different friend in Toronto once and had an uneventful supper at a downtown club, where they asked us to step out of the way as they moved our table to make a dance floor. We wandered into the lobby, where our waitress forgot about us. When we sought her for champagne and our check (the couch in the lobby was quieter and more comfortable than the dining room), she said she thought we had skipped out on her. The trip home was memorable for a tiny beeping sound from the back of the car that followed us all the way through Buffalo. Much rummaging led to a clock that somehow got set.

We invited that same friend to Cleveland, where once we stood in the rain to watch fireworks downtown and got thoroughly soaked. The friend was a good sport about it. I went indoors to warm up and spent a chilling quarter-hour listening to cops debating the merits of pepper spray vs. collapsible batons.

A later adventure took us to a coffeehouse that offered free pastries and a blues band for the night. It sounded promising till we heard the band and observed that the crowd consisted of the band’s families and us. After a couple of cacaphonous numbers, we fled. I always wondered how long the families stuck it out. The coffeehouse itself disappeared soon from its suburban corner — though, Lord knows, we still have plenty of coffeehouses.

While our daughter was still in diapers, we were invited to ring in the millennium, (or the old one’s last year, depending on whether you start counting at 0 or 1) at a gracious mansion near our house. The glittering space, with pale gray carpet and multiple fireplaces and display cases full of glass, was peopled with well-dressed, soft-spoken, well-to-do folk, but the promised baby-sitters were absent. We retired to the TV room to keep the kids out of trouble.

Cold sober, I remember sampling caviar and realizing an anecdote I was telling to a laser-thin woman in a black dress was stupid before I finished it; I shudder to remember a thoroughly dull conversation I inflicted on the fellow who invited us.

Naturally, amid all this elegance, my daughter had a diaper explosion. Appalled at what happened to the velour pants, my wife was ready to go home, but our hosts persuaded her to stay. Then, invigorated by all the attention and perhaps feeling lighter by a pound of the unmentionable, our girl then began playing tag all around the place with the one other kid there — in and out on the soft carpet, among the soft-spoken, impeccably dressed pillars of the Upper Crust. I had to follow, full of anxiety lest a tottering 3-year-old might collide with one of those display cases. My wife stewed.

When at last she had had enough, I grabbed our sans-culotte marathoner and we fled, half an hour short of the historic moment.

On the whole for new year's, give me the couch, an old video, and some hot chocolate.

And leave but a kiss within the cup, and I’ll not look for Guy Lombardo.