Goodbye to 2008

The changing of the year is a man-made construct. I know that. In Steve's and my life, if there is an annual sense of renewal, it comes not now, but in September, at the tag-end of summer after our Nags Head vacation. (That, in turn, is rooted in the universal experience of the school year: the end of vacation, the start of a "new year.") Still, the infrastructure around us that makes life possible--the banks, government--goes through a slow-down/start-up cycle at this time of year, and despite the fact we don't necessarily feel "renewed" when we add the annual digit, we are unavoidably carried along with the tide. So such a time is as good as any to formally say "goodbye" to something, to a time, to the past. My regular visitors know only too well what 2008 was like for me. It was dominated by hopes and fears about our house; indeed, the whole idea of this blog is to document those hopes and fears, and I'm grateful for the space in which to do it, and for your patience in reading about them. Next year promises more of the same. I've said enough about all that.

So here is a farewell song I wrote. It's from 1973, at the end of my time in Boston, where I'd lived a life of contradiction, full of great joy commingled with an equal amount of frustration. I was headed to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to begin a new life as a recruiter for the Peace Corps, and I sang this at my sendoff party.

I had arrived in Boston with the idea of taking the city by storm as a singer-songwriter. I left with new knowledge, hard-won: that I didn't have the ambition required for the stage, and that at the ripe old age of 28, I needed to start everything over, from the ground up, having prepared myself for absolutely no practical occupation in the workaday world. I arrived believing there should be a "life after Peace Corps;" I left returning to the Peace Corps' embrace. It took a period of just over a year for these realizations to sink in. During that time, day-to-day living was full of joy because of the people surrounding me, but the over-arching lessons in life were very, very hard.

I've hardly ever sung this song since that party because I never mastered the guitar part to my satisfaction. It has great vocal leaps that I also never mastered because I never practiced it enough--because of the guitar problem. But I love the sentiment in it and it stands for any goodbye time, including a goodbye to 2008. It's in three-quarter time, if that helps you imagine it.

The Music Goes On

One more walk down the road,
One more tear, one more load.
One more page to be turned,
New lives and loves, with new ways to be learned.
So let's all have one more toast to the past;
One more hand for the cast.
And then I'll be gone with the break of day;
When more has played out, we'll find the way back to each other.
The music goes on.

I'm not perfect, I know.
Now too fast, now too slow.
But love has filled all I've done,
And I know this time, I've lost much less than I've won.
I know they say, "Out of sight, out of mind."
But I hope you know that I was never that kind.
I'll take all that comes, I'm bound to explore,
I'll fly to the moon and maybe much more, and you'll still be with me.
The music goes on.

So bring out the bottles and empty the jars,
For I know right now, wherever we are, we'll still hear the laughter.
The music goes on.

See you in 2009. Have a good and safe time tonight.