Is anyone else glad to see the end of 2009? In retrospect, I think almost everyone is. The”9″ years for me have all been pretty monumental in one way or another. I was too young in 1969 to enjoy anything good that happened that year and just old enough to remember some of the unpleasantness. 1979 was a better year. First year of college, first full year of sports car racing, a new job, college women…it was a good year. Ten years later a lot had changed. No more college women, probably for the better. After 10 years of sports car racing, that was tapering off as the cost was just getting out of hand, I had a one year old son and was at the doorstep of owning my own business and being my own boss.
Perhaps the “9″ years are cyclical, because 1999 was a horrible year to end a century on. Work sucked, my marriage had collapsed, I had a Plymouth Breeze after trading in my Dodge Stealth…ugggh, I was single, working two jobs and about as malcontent as I’d ever been.
There was, however, a silver lining. In the evenings, I was working in the kitchen of a pretty upscale steakhouse. It wasn’t Sullivan’s but it also wasn’t Ponderosa. The working part sure wasn’t the bonus, but the fact that a majority of the staff was 18 to 25 was. As an “almost” forty year old hanging out with them for me was like a breath of fresh air. There weren’t any expectations; I was just one of the crew. After work one or two nights a week they would all head next door for a drink or two or to just unwind. After about three weeks it became apparent that my worldly wisdom and experience had impressed some of the younger female crew members. For the next six months I was like a thirsty man on a desert island that had found a flowing river. It had been a long time since I’d been or seen twenty-one year old, anything. I went days without sleep. There were mornings I would leave, go to work at my day job, come home, crash for an hour, work four or five hours at night, go out after work, do crazy, wonderful, mind-numbing things until five or six am and start the process all over again. It should be readily apparent as to why this process only lasted six months. Actually, it wasn’t the process, it was the processee. Damn, it sucks when you’ve forgotten how much work it was to be young. It seemed every part of me ached, some in a good way and I’m pretty certain some were just screaming to get me to stop. My last hurrah was New Years Eve, 1999. A big party, a stunning date, a wonderful evening, and the next morning the start to a new century.
2009 has been an up-and-down year. The low point, becoming unemployed. The upside: time to work on family projects that just happened to need to be completed in the fall and of course the ability to write, and write, and write some more. I look forward to the challenge of 2010, extraordinarily grateful for the wonderful people in my life. My beautiful and loving wife, my wonderful, smart and precocious daughter, my son, my extended San Diego Family, the East Coast clan; my father, my sister and her family and everyone who has been a part of my life as I now approach the magic of fifty years on this planet. That may be the hardest part of 2010 to reconcile. It seems only yesterday that I was putting on baseball cleats for little league, or lugging book bags back and forth to high school. Even the weekends at the race track, all the friends there, they all seem as if I’ve just turned that page of my life only yesterday. Somewhere in the realm of quantum physics I read that someone believes everything is happening now. What you are experiencing now, is everything. I haven’t really wrapped my brain around the concept, but when I think of those things, it does seem as if it were only yesterday. And when I look back at all the great moments, yesterday was a great damn day!
