Happy New Year!

On Thanksgiving my sweety and I went to The Parks for Thanksgiving dinner with the widely extended family and it was a great time. From wine and multiple cheeses to pecan pie and champagne (through mushroom stuffing, amazing yams, perfect biscuits and a few small slices of turkey) and on to gratuitous karaoke competitions it was a great great day.

Afterwards we wound up at the Mark Twain Hotel (next door to Glide Memorial) for the night. We had plans to return to Petaluma the next day, but those plans changed.

Friday morning we arose lazily and decided to take a chance at catching the first showing of the day at the Castro Theater where we could see Milk right where the events took place and right on the block where it was filmed (not to mention the neighborhood I was living in during part of that time). After the film, which was beautiful and amazing and the perfect way to begin "Black Friday," we brunched in The Castro and shopped in The Fillmore, winding up in Union Square for a Macy's bacchanal, the Union Square Christmas Tree lighting, drinks and pizza in The Starlight Room and rides up and down (three times!) in the glass elevators at the St. Francis.

It was a great day!

We decided to spend another night.

On Saturday, we moved lazily through the day and wound up eventually at Grace Cathedral where we walked the Labyrinth.

It wasn't until this point that it even dawned on me that it was the Saturday before Advent... a sort of ecclesiastical New Year's Eve.

Walking the circuit inside the big cave of that cathedral, I was, even more than usual, taken with the sense that I was leaving one year behind and moving into another phase of my life. Every time I walk the labyrinth it's a completely different experience; that's one of the things I most like about it. This time I was introducing someone else to this part of my life (something I've never really done before) while at the same time experiencing everything in the weekend as its own gestalt.

Each piece held a magic, as if this place and this time and the newness of what is to come were telescoped into this singular segment of reality where all my life leading up to now was brought together on this one weekend.

Advent.