New Year’s makes me nervous. I know rationally that time is a continuum and any effort on our part to slice and dice it is essentially meaningless in the grand scheme of the cosmos. But there is something about ushering out the “old year” and welcoming in the new that always seems risky to me. It’s like sticking our thumbs in our ears, wagging our fingers and chanting “Nah, nah-nah, nah, nah!” as we dance around the Fates. Much better I think to lay low and make a nice pork roast.
Yet I am surprisingly content this New Year’s Day, 2008. Even my husband commented on it. “Wow, ” he said watching as I ran the vacuum cleaner across the family room rug with a flourish. “You love everything today.”
Yes, I do love everything today. Well, maybe not everything. I can name any number of goings-on in Washington and the Middle East that fill me with despair. I also don’t love that I forgot to turn the oven on to cook the nice pork roast, so the latter is moldering in the trash as we speak. But at least at this moment of this day, in this office, in this house, there is contentment and even a sense of opti …
STOP! Scratch the optimism. My essentially melancholy Irish nature struggles mightily with optimism. Let’s just say there’s hope and leave it at that.
It occurs to me that perhaps what matters more than optimism anyway is gratitude. By tomorrow I’ll be bitching about lowball offers on e-bay, bad TV and the fact that the library hasn’t reopened from the move to it’s new and improved digs uptown. But right now I’m here. We are here. And we have -- I have -- much to be thankful for. Not only am I blessed with a patient husband, great kids, amusing and faithful friends, and a little boy who calls me Gran, but sales at Garrison House Books were up considerably last year. And even after ten years in this wacky, constantly evolving business I still wake up happy and excited to be a bookseller.
I just hope the darn pork roast doesn’t jinx it.
No comments:
Post a Comment