I accidentally see the sun rise on the first day of the 00s. In the pre-dawn hours of Saturday 1 January 2000, I am in my car, somewhere in rural Central Virginia, doing an ill-advised two-hour drive home to Charlottesville from a rather low-key “Millennium Eve” party in Arlington. I have declined the party hosts’ offer of a couch or floor to crash on. I am sober but delirious with all-nighter sleep deprivation.

I travel due south between five-something and seven-something a.m., and in the middle of the drive the cloudless eastern sky to my left pours a slow, hour-long bloom of rainbowed dawn light over low silhouetted mountains and rolling hills and cold pasturelands. Eventually sunrise ensues. It looks like all sunrises look, only more so. There is something to be said for getting to watch the sun come up on the first day of the year/decade/century/millennium in such surroundings. (Yes, technically 2000 is the last year of the twentieth century and the second millennium, we’ve all been over this before, but it is the numerals, not the durations, that count.) A transporting experience, albeit one that might’ve been more pleasant had I not been occupied with furiously drumming on the steering wheel and slapping myself in the face the whole time, trying desperately to stop falling asleep.

Anyway, today it is the last day of the 00s, and, to wrap things up in a bookendish sort of way, I am hoping to accidentally see the sun set. At this latitude it is scheduled for 4:53pm. Just in time for cocktail hour! I will probably not be in the car.