New Years Rocking Eve

Oh we are a bunch of party animals, if being a bear in hibernation counts. We will throw a few logs on the fire, steam up some Maine lobsters because they have become, like petrol, ridiculously inexpensive and our vegetarians will eat these gluten free crustaceans. We will pop a bottle of poor man’s champagne: Prosecco, and we will curl up around our new tv set for a year end film festival with the dogs trying to squeeze into our laps. (Although the teen is lobbying for a BBC sci fi fest)

As the wicked witch says just as she melts: What a World, What a World!

I have in mind all the people I love as this year turns, in Mumbai, recovering from shock and sadness, in Israel, newly up in flames, in Athens where they also have problems, in Burgundy and Ireland and Finland and England and Berlin and Amsterdam, all over these sort of united States, and my sweet site director now a Peace Corps volunteer, celebrating with no running water or electricity in Malawi, Africa. It is an amazing thing to be alive where I have friends literally across the planet, and where I can type out a letter that they will get in their email box in a few seconds. It is stunning that I can carry a communication device so my children can find me where ever I go, including, with a lot of time on the customer service help desk, anywhere in the world (theoretically). If we can maintain connections and communicate across the globe, there is hope that we can learn to live together. It is but a slender fragile hope, but there it is.

I lift a glass to all of us, to a fresh new year and all the mistakes we will make in it on our way to making the world a better place. We step off into the future not knowing what it holds, but moving forward anyway. Say goodbye to all the lessons and history and big juicy everthingness of 2008.

Cowabunga, 2009!