Well, I did it again! New Year’s Day, widely celebrated throughout the land by nearly everyone, came and went more or less unnoticed by yours truly. How does anyone manage to miss such an obvious holiday? For me, Holidays trigger columns or at least are supposed to. There are, again, supposed to be columns dedicated to Christmas, New Years, even Valentine’s Day.

I try to treat all equally by missing about all of them. It seems that when I sit down to write a column, the near disastrous experience I just had with a traffic round about that found me in Miami, Okla., 50 miles away f...