A few minutes before midnight, I walked up to the roof of our building. With me was the teenage son of our only other dinner guest that evening. Both of us had grown impatient with Michael and our guest’s contrarian insistence that this would be a night like any other night, so we went up to wait for the new year.

The view there, if you stand on your toes to see over the raised wall that encloses the roof — is of city lights to the left and beyond them, the black humps of Twin Peaks. The bay can be seen intermittently straight ahead, with the Golden Gate Bridge lit and alive with headlights in the distance. If you climb up to the top of the wall and lean forward, you can look down the steep valley that is our street and see a snip of the Bay Bridge.

It seemed just another chilly San Francisco night. “Is it the new year yet?” the boy kept asking.

“I don’t think so. We’ll know. Let’s listen for it.”

We knew. Fireworks popped, the sky flashed. Horns and cheers rose over the sound of traffic and it seemed every window of the city was lit and had someone standing in it, shouting, waving. Twin Peaks glittered with bright specks of light that were a thousand flashbulbs going off. I climbed to the roof next door and walked to its edge to look towards downtown. Pink and green explosions lit up the sky over the Bay Bridge.