Kirkepiscatoid

Psalm 65:11:

"You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness."

When I fell asleep on the couch with the TV on the night of Dec. 30, I had absolutely no plans for New Years Eve. I was figuring I would spend the evening reading and watching TV, and maybe I'd stay up, and if I happened to stay up, fine, and if not, fine. I was on call for the holiday anyway; it wasn't like I was going to be doing much celebrating.

As it turned out, I ended up sleeping on the couch all night, and I awoke to the strains of Doris Day singing "Que Sera, Sera" in the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Man Who Knew Too Much." I'm going to be up front; I hate that song. It's too cheery and sing-song sounding. I posted on my Facebook page that waking up to that was a little creepy. Within minutes, Fran and Larry had both chimed in how they like Doris Day, and the next thing you know, the conversation sort of morphed into celebrities that were gay icons, and I am commenting that I feel a little like Elizabeth Taylor since it seems a lot of my Facebook friends are of the GLBT persuasion.

Then the next thing you know, Larry announces that I am organizing "a gay New Years party." Suddenly, despite the fact I felt a little like a bunch of people showed up unannounced on my doorstep, on a day I expected to be alone and quiet, well...the thought of a rural redneck organizing a party with divas and queens and RuPaul sounded...well...kinda fun. So I announced in my status update that I was having a virtual New Years Eve party on my Facebook wall, and all were welcome to stop by and post music videos and virtual food and drink. At the time, I expected a little trickle of activity...what an understatement!

By late afternoon, several of my Facebook friends were posting videos and commenting and posting pictures of yummy snacks and exotic foods, and this went clear into midnight! People were free to come and go as they pleased, and we had musical selections ranging from the 1940's to the 1990's. People were reminiscing, they were dragging out music they loved in high school, and it was suddenly a huge virtual party! I mean, HUGE!

Larry described it best--it had the feel of those times in high school when you all went to someone's house with your stack of 45's and played records and danced and snacked. The best part was that I had no mess to clean up after this party, and no one needed to worry about driving home even after several virtual drinks, and no one would be hung over the next day. No leftovers to figure out what to do with, either!

I sat in my living room and imagined what was going on in living rooms from North Carolina to Alaska. I could imagine my friends with family having a good time picking and playing music, and explaining to each other "who's who," just like at a real party. Fran was desperately trying to explain the disco era to her stepdaughter. Deb and Harvey were dragging out track after track of what I now lovingly call "70's stoner music." Larry called me on the phone and was beaming. "Isn't this great?" In short, a good time was had by all!

When midnight arrived, and I was finally done virtual partying for the night, I sat back and realized that I had been shown "the end of a year crowned with bounty." Amazing bounty, in fact.

2009 has been a very strange year for me, mostly because it involved a lot of changes--changes at work, changes in a variety of parts of my life outside of work, changes in relationships both good and bad, and, most disconcerting of all, changes in myself. I moved back to Kirksville to have a life with more "sameness," and in some ways, I DO have a lot of stable "sameness", but in other ways, this has been more of a year of metamorphosis than I had expected. Yet in these changes I find many healthy re-adjustments going on in my life. On my 49th birthday, I asked God to "free me of my slaves"--to start the 50th year, the "jubilee year" of my life--in a more palpable spirit of freedom--even if the "freedom" was to be "free of myself."

But when the virtual party was over, and my virtual living room once again became quiet, I realized that these changes didn't matter so much because I have been blessed with abundance. I don't consider myself a terribly social creature, but I realized how many friends I've made, even among people I have never met other than blogs and Facebook. I realized how the power of internet social networking can connect us in our humanity in ways that were, until recently, pipe dreams. How else could I have a party living in the middle of nowhere that had such a wide variety of people from many different walks of life, and from so many different parts of the country, on a whim, with only a few hours notice?

So in a year where some days I felt things had been taken away from me, I discovered in the last hours of the last day of the year, how much had been GIVEN to me...and I'm incredibly grateful.

May each of you have a blessed and prosperous 2010, and I look forward to blogging with you during the coming year!