New Year in the Wind

It is an exceptionally cold night.

All of eight degrees out there, a brisk, no, a blistering wind is ripping off the Bay.  It howls down the wind tunnel formed by the Eastland Hotel at the end of Doctor's Row and the Baptist Church. 

I've been out in it - despite my stuffy state.

Purely by chance the car started up. I nursed it in rush hour traffic to my garage in Westbrook, then had to walk to pick up a bus back into town.

You meet interesting people on the bus and I'm going to invest more time in riding it.  

Take tonight, for example.  There was a garrulous fellow from New York who kept up a constant conversation with the driver, mostly about changes in the subway system over the last, say, forty years.

The wonderful thing was that the conversation wasn't one sided (at least, not all the time).  The driver would respond and prompt exchanges with brief questions and acknowledgements.  I liked the obvious connection between the two men.

Sadly - or not - the jury is out - I've put Mrs. Beadle in the shop and she may not make it out.  I might do very well without a car at all - it might be a total mess.  We shall see.  If it costs too much to get her fixed and inspected then my life might change even more.

Those thoughts kept me warm during my walk to the hospital where I had a simple dinner with C., Chief the Wonderdog's Mom.  She's working throughout the holiday and it's sad.  She's extraordinarily good at what she does and needs a greater challenge.  Perhaps that will come in the new year.

The cold and wind provide quite a challenge.  You have to really want to sample the life of Portland on a night like this.

I love it.

I've always felt this way about Winter weather - my Father says that I was always more excited than any of my siblings when snowy weather came to Tulsa.

Of course, that happened only once a decade or so - I don't I ever remember the schools being closed for snow during my whole twelve years in the system.

So being out in the cold - especially this kind of challenging cold - is a great gift to me.  

Also, I've been cossetted for the last few days due to my cold and incipient bronchitis.  Seeing the snow blow horizontally, feeling the knifelike quality of breathing - it's all an intense experience and a joyful one.

I did run into some tango friends as I got closer to Bosnia and home.  One was a dancer who needed a bit of help - well, not really needed it but it was fun to help out - getting the Maine Ballroom Dance space ready for their New Year's Dance Party.  Much bustling, had to go next door to the Mexican restaurant to borrow a cheese knife.

These were the kinds of helpful tasks I could handle on a cold night like this.

During one of my knife-fetching trips I ran into E. and M., half of Tango Mucha Labia having dinner in the Mesa Verde.  That led to a dinner invite - or salad - and a chance to chat, meet SD, a local writer and just take time to quietly get into each other's head.

It would be better to make great New Year's pronouncements after the year starts.  I always have such a clear sense of how time moves in a situation like this and transitions have always been very apparent to me.

But right now, with just a few minute more than an hour to go, I want to watch and relax, feel time slip by.  These "years, months and weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds" are all artificial anyway.

We just are, in the time that we have, in the place that we are given.

Happy new year, indeed.