My “first” was not technically my first but the first one I had a serious relationship with and who really taught me how to have great sex. We were both 18. Myra was a drop dead gorgeous Asian girl and my passion for her was so intense. We’d have sex until the sun started peaking through the window in the morning. She moved away and we grew apart and lost contact forever. I can’t find her on social media.

The one who got away, my god I loved this woman. The first time I saw Sarah I fell instantly in love with her. I was 23 and she was 19. She had a young Molly Ringwaldish face and Sophia Loren eyes. Smokin’ hot body to match. And such a sexy, alluring, flirtatious personality. I couldn’t keep her though. Every guy who met her fell in love with her just like me. It was impossible to compete with every man on earth for her affections and she got away. I looked her up online a few years ago and she sells real estate now. There’s a picture of her on her website, and she still takes my breath away.

My “last” is of course my wife. We’ve had such a wonderful 24 years together and she is truly my soul mate. She is beautiful, smart, kind, loving and sexy as hell. We still have a ton of chemistry after all these years. But more, she is relaxing mentally. I have had so many relationships where home was a battlefield, including my daughter’s mother. I was a magnet for bitchy women for years. Women who were a week or two away from a nervous breakdown and were looking for someone to blame their entire miserable lives on seemed to gravitate towards me. To come home and relax and feel at ease with my wife is so special. To have someone who supports me and not constantly bickers or nags or has depression issues or is outright insane is a gift to my life. I wouldn’t trade her for the the world. Elon Musk could offer me every cent he has and I’d tell him to fuck off.

We have become so accustomed to bad news, crisis and dysfunction that it’s hard to accept the ways in which 2022 was a surprisingly good year for democracy, innovative government action and even a degree of social peace.

Can we build on the good news in 2023? Yes, but it will take a lot of creative work because Washington will soon become much more of a partisan battlefield and because the global forces working against democratic advances will try to recoup their losses.

Accepting that things have improved is almost never fashionable. It’s bad for page views and it carries the whiff of complacency. It’s safer to say that things are a mess because there are always so many injustices to be confronted and so much human suffering to be relieved. There’s also this: Since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, we’ve suffered from a frenzied addiction to the prospect of ruin.

But supporters of democratic governments and societies will never right the world’s wrongs without confidence that democracy itself can work — and unless a majority of citizens sees evidence that this is true. In 2022, the evidence began accumulating.

The failure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the courageous rallying of the Ukrainian people and the remarkable unity of the world’s democracies in standing against aggression is the most obvious sign that the democratic distemper of recent years is abating.

The relative success of democracies in dealing with the covid-19 pandemic contrasts with a regime-challenging failure in China. This, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic misadventure, has quieted talk — reminiscent of similarly misguided commentary in the 1930s — that authoritarian governments are inevitably more “efficient” and “effective” in solving problems.

In the United States, the congressional session that just ended was remarkably productive. Major investments in infrastructure, clean energy and technology showed that our government has the capacity to think ahead, not just react to political pressures and short-term problems.

Government is building things again on a large scale. As it did in the era after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States is using public outlays to make the nation more technologically competitive. And the push for green energy shows there are ways to avert a planetary climate calamity while also restoring our manufacturing prowess.

Finally, the skeptics who said that campaigning on democracy in the midterm elections was a foolish strategy for Democrats were proved wrong. The GOP’s red wave failed to materialize for many reasons — Supreme Court overreach, especially on abortion, was a factor, and the actual achievements of a Democratic president and Congress counted, too. But democracy mattered. The Republican candidates rejected by voters tended to be the most extreme, the ones especially committed to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and those least ready for office.

Sure there is bad news. Republicans control the House, but their extremely narrow majority may limit their ability to do serious damage. The global economy is slipping into recession but the USA is by far the strongest and best position economy to avoid a recession, or at the very least limit its depth and duration. The collapse of the Russia military has destroyed the myth of Russian conventional forces being on a par with NATO forces. It will take them decades to rebuild and recover credibility. Meantime, our alliances abroad haven’t been this strong in many years. The Iranians are building their nukes but their people are truly sick of the mullahs calling the shots and their days are numbered.

Yes, it’s the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.

His last,

And the one that got away.

It was not you. It wasn’t her. It was, perhaps, y’all together.

She was smart as hell, old wise eyes set in a face as cute as you could imagine. And a laugh that haunts me still. Been what, 25 years since I heard from her last?

Was it that we were too much alike or not enough? Some sort of strange wave interference between personalities? We amplified one another and not always in a good way. We’d have, had we stayed together, torn each other apart, just from the tidal forces. So, we flung each other out into the future.

“(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).”*

*Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”

Then there is the old friend who died homeless on a Florida beach…