Closing Out the First Decade of the Twenty First Century

Whew! Ten years! Gone! Poof!

I was laying a bed this morning and suddenly could not remember what happened this last decade. It went so fast I couldn't remember? It scared me. Yes, it did go fast. And I have more behind me than I have before me. That scared me too. At first. Then I thought, somewhat inapposite to my "glass half empty" nature, that there was an opportunity here, to treasure what was left far more perhaps than I did in the days gone by when I thought I had all the time in the world. Does this make sense?

The time has been a gift and I have been so in the middle of doing and thinking and worrying and wondering that too often I have failed to savor. You know. The moment.

I won't promise that I'll change. I am though recognizing that the window of opportunity is closing and it's up to me, no one else.

And as for the last decade, yes, how could I forget? The big, and the sad, first. The 2000 election that preceded the worst attack on the United States ever on September 11, 2001. A new generation was born after that, and the rest of us have sanitized the event such that we are ripe for another if we aren't vigilant and insistent on American values rather than variable, relative global ones. The 2008 election of the first black president, a landmark proof of the legacy of the American dream, if only we don't deny it.

For me, there were new friends, old friends who moved to new places, a train trip to Chicago, a discovery that Missouri has lovely wineries and beautiful countryside, and that I really could move to the quaint old towns of the South Shore Massachusetts cause it was so beautiful, except for that darn cold weather in winter, that I really could kayak with a bunch of 20 year olds in Hawaii, that it is fun to go home again to the old college radio crowd, and stay in a cool revolutionary home now hotel called the Kittle House, an installation of a new Archbishop in San Francisco and a second trip to Sausalito by ferry, a wedding in the dry Ventura river bed in Ojai, my father's 90th birthday celebration weekend with Sophis and Len, Chris, and Andrew, many movies and dinners with friends. It was also a decade of horrible loss, Fran Bassios, Gerry Markle, Bill Tilden, my father too soon after the celebration of his life, people who were integral to my life in various ways they could never really know.

So, I raise a glass (that photo is really me raising a glass one day at lunch at Cork in downtown LA), to the ten years past, to the people and places that populated my experience of it, to a grateful moment of memory.