Wrapping it Up, Part II

Personally, this has been a crappy year. Oh, I'm fine, and nothing particularly horrid has happened to me, but practically everybody around me has suffered pain or misfortune of one sort or another. This is, I'm told, what happens as one grows older. Well, growing older is for the turtles, is what I say.

I must admit to a bit of unease as I regard the flip of the calendar. 2010...every time I think of the new year, I remember a poster on the wall of the Armoury where I used to go for Navy League Cadets. It showed the current year in big print--would have been 1983, I think--at the bottom of the picture, then all the years ahead in smaller and smaller print on the way up the poster, like a pathway. I seem to recall that 2010 was the last one you could make out, just a speck. It's funny--I looked at that poster every Friday night and it never failed to give me a shot of excitement at a future yet undreamed. Now that the future's the past, the thought of that poster is actually a little frightening....1983 is the speck now, in my rearview mirror, and Time rolls implacably on. I feel as if I've lived four or five lifetimes as I've crawled up that poster, and what's next?

Out of the blue and into the black.

I hate to be conventional in any way, and I just finished explaining why, contrary to extremely popular opinion, 2010 does not mark the start of a new decade...but I can't deny that the years that end in 9 have always, for whatever reason, had special significance in my life and the "0" years have, without fail, signaled massive upheaval for good or ill. Somehow I expect 2009 will conform to the pattern. I'm just not sure how.

My store, which was supposed to have been renovated this past year, is now scheduled to start renovations in July. I'll believe it when I see it. Renew, reset, renovate...2010 will be the year of "re", for me.

And for Eva. She has felt stuck in a rut over the past couple of years, and her body turned traitor on her in 2009. She's getting used to her uteruslessness (a word I, for some reason, can't stop saying aloud), and is champing at the bit to go back to work, which she does, January 4th.

I wish every one of my readers a happy and prosperous 2010. I have to say it's nice to have the 'noughts' behind us.

Happy New Year, everyone,