Does everyone spend the first few days of a New Year like I do, i.e. searching it for signs of how the coming year is going to go? I find myself thinking things like "Well, this is a good start" or "No! I do not want to spend the entire year like this!" It's funny, because the year so often doesn't turn out the way I'm hoping for or against, mostly because a year is a long, complex, varied and full thing, whereas my thought in that moment is simple and small. I recollect that I began 2003 sleeping on my grandmother's couch after we brought her home from the hospital where they had fixed the broken arm she hid from us for a week. It was not a good beginning. And 2003 was a terrible year -- I got fired, unfairly, from a job I was perfectly good at, my grandmother went into a nursing home, and I had a minor depression -- but 2003 was also a great year. My brother got married, the whole family went to Florida, and I took my first grown-up trip with Mel to the Southwest.
All this is to say that I understand that my appreciation of how 2009 has gone so far is a little silly, but I'm still going to follow my simple and small way and hope that it bodes for a good year. I know a lot of people who hated 2008, and I sure did, too, especially the last quarter of death, dying, sickness and sadness. I hope we're all liking 2009 much more.
I'm sitting here on a Sunday morning looking at the snowy, icy landscape and I already feel better. Because 2008 was an extremely strange year in which we got no snow at all. It was bizarrely dry and warm, and I kept thinking that this is what it was going to be like now in NYC: no more snow. What's outside isn't very tall or drifty, but it's something, and it transforms our landscape, reminds me of what season it is and quiets things down. It seems right.
Happy 2009, everyone.
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