Bittersweet good-bye

… This afternoon Kates and I are sucking WiFi at a Panera restaurant, passing the hours until I have to take her to the airport this evening and we begin our adventure with full-force … We fled here -- to Kansas City suburbia -- this afternoon to enjoy some sense of the civilization we’re accustomed to.

There’s a lot -- a lot! -- of questions and doubt circling our heads right now … It’s freezing cold here. And to paraphrase “Wizard of Oz,” we’re definitely not in K-town anymore. We’re in rural America.

Saying good-bye to Kates tonight, no doubt, will be terribly tough ... But we’re here, and we’re determined to make the best of it, for however long that might be. To learn new skills and meet new people. To test ourselves and get out of our comfort zones. To experience a different slice of life …

Over the last week or so, as the media has been producing endless prose and packages about the decade passing by, I’ve been rehashing a lot of the reflective thoughts that went into our decision to make this move -- not to mention all the adventures the last decade took Kates and I on … It blows my mind to think that I’ve ended the decade in the same place where I started it. I’m married to the woman I was with in those early days of the decade, and now we have a beautiful, energetic baby girl. My hair also is a bit greyer now.

It also has been interesting to recall all of the different places Kates and I have spent our last four New Year’s Eves. We were in Chicago for 2005 and 2006, we ended 2007 in Toledo, we spent 2008 at home in Wisconsin, and here we are in Missouri to end 2009. That’s four different states. And each of those New Year's Eve days produced their own significant highs and lows, I might add.

Next year -- I’m going on a limb here -- Nevada! Seriously, I just want a weekend in Vegas -- just once. If only to experience the Vegas Strip.

I’m rambling and really don't have point here other than to bid 2009 a bittersweet good-bye … And welcome a fresh start …

As Ellen Goodman said recently, I'm letting go ...

" ... There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over - and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out ..."

So with that, I’m saying good-bye to 2009 -- you long, strange, twisted year.

Here’s some of the good year-end reading that caught my attention, made me think and helped illustrate my take on the decade …

From The New York Times, Tiger Woods, Person of the Year ...

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

From The New York Times, "New Year" ...

We’re all surging forward — some with more impetus than others. And now we have 2010 before us, a year that seemed unimaginable until we were right at its border.

From The Washington Post, "21st century's first decade is slipping away without leaving its name" ...

Our mouths seem destined to stumble. On New Year's Eve, in the moments before the ball drops in Times Square, Ryan Seacrest will smile into the cameras and take on the challenge of summing up the years that will be remembered for a terrorist attack on American soil, a near-depression, the election of the nation's first black president and Tiger Woods's contingent of girlfriends. "Let's count down now as the -- what? -- slips away."

Finally, from The Boston Globe, "Name that decade: It was all about you, except when it wasn’t" ...

These last 10 years will be dubbed, inevitably, the You Decade. After all, no matter where you went, there you were - on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, or in silhouette in the early iPod ad, gyrating with abandon, earbuds tuned to - who else? - U2. And when you had something to say, there was nothing holding you back from reaching millions. You could read about carnage in Sri Lanka or hear about teacher layoffs in your local school district, and with but a tap and click, you could enter the debate. Or start it ...

Time magazine celebrated the Information Age by putting a funky little mirror on its cover and telling us the 2006 Person of the Year was “you.’’ But did anyone who gazed into it stop to notice how blurry the image was? As 2009 draws to a close, we step unsteadily into the next 10 years. How it unfolds will be far more complex than anything you could say in a 140-character tweet.