The Countdown Begins

It’s Decem­ber, and that means 2 things: 1) a busy social cal­en­dar and 2) the count­down until the Win­ter Sol­stice. First, about the par­ties and other cel­e­bra­tions, we actu­ally started the sea­son in late Novem­ber at the Narvey’s who held a hol­i­day party plus view­ing of the Canucks game (we lost, but Pam won the pool!). This past week­end we had a nice time with Matt and Oana, who this year decided to cel­e­brate both Kram­pus and Saint Nicholas Day, since Oana’s sis­ter Nico­letta has him as her Saint (I’m not pre­cisely sure how that works, but I guess I’d get Saint David, the patron Saint of Wales, who has his day on March 1, right?) There was lots of great food, includ­ing the tra­di­tional stuffed cab­bages, a Roman­ian spe­cialty that Matt made along with cheeses, sausages and breads. I remem­ber my grand­mother, who was Russ­ian, used to make the best cab­bage rolls or  ‘Prachas’, as I remem­ber her call­ing them (also known as Gołąbki in Pol­ish). Pam and I brought some veg­gies with spicy peanut dip­ping sauce (not exactly tra­di­tional, but prob­a­bly a good foil to all the heav­ier, East­ern Euro­pean fare). This com­ing Thurs­day is the recep­tion and cel­e­bra­tion of the Best of 604 Awards, a brand new event that reminds me that we have a ton of great blog­gers deserv­ing of recog­ni­tion in this area. I’m thrilled that I actu­ally know sev­eral of the nom­i­nees and hope they all win in their categories.

12 Days until we Start Mov­ing Toward the Light Again

Every year, around this week or so, I’ve got­ten in the habit of count­ing down to Decem­ber 21^st, the Win­ter Sol­stice or short­est day of the year. It’s a turn­ing point, as if we’re all tak­ing a stroll toward a darker and colder end of the solar sys­tem and sniff­ing the air, and then turn­ing around and head­ing back (I know, it’s not exactly that, but it helps me visu­al­ize bet­ter what’s going on).

We haven’t stopped watch­ing US news, a habit we picked up when we were fever­ishly glued to the run-up to the elec­tion. After that media extrav­a­ganza, it’s been the steady melt-down of the US econ­omy that has held us with mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion.  Of course, there have been some reports of eco­nomic trou­ble here, such as the news this morn­ing that the Bank of Canada had dropped it’s key lend­ing inter­est rate by .75 basis points to 1.5%, which is report­edly the low­est this bench­mark has been in a half a cen­tury. Nev­er­the­less, there doesn’t seem to be quite the tone of panic, fear and dread that we see and hear from the south of us.

So although it’s pretty gloomy out­side (heavy rain, wind and tem­per­a­tures that are slowly falling toward the freez­ing mark), we know that there will be that turn­ing point, and we know exactly when it starts, at least in terms of the num­ber of hours of pos­si­ble sun­light. On Decem­ber 22, the day will be a minute or so longer, and we are jour­ney­ing back to Spring, and even­tu­ally Sum­mer. My ace in the hole is that I know that as early as Feb­ru­ary (Feb­ru­ary! My yearly neme­sis!), there will likely be some cherry blos­soms here.  All we have to do is hang on another 20 days or so and we start to see signs of Spring!

Will the Inau­gu­ra­tion of Pres­i­dent Elect Obama a month later be the turn­ing point? Wasn’t that was his Elec­tion Speech was about ? (‘This was the moment’) Or didn’t I hear that phrase some­where much ear­lier in his campaign?

I guess we can wait for the turn­around, but the prospect of hun­ker­ing down for one or two years is not very appeal­ing. Life is short, and the inex­orable pace of move­ment on this scale makes plot­ting a turn­ing point some­thing that can only be done years later, when some his­to­rian or econ­o­mist, por­ing over the num­bers and trends points to a date and says ‘Aha! That was when things began to turn around.’ For us liv­ing through it, the eco­nomic sol­stice isn’t some­thing that we can count down to.

A Casu­alty of Eco­nomic Winter

There are also per­ma­nent losses; some com­pa­nies and insti­tu­tions that won’t live through this eco­nomic Win­ter to see Spring. Recently I learned that Out of Town News, the spir­i­tual and archi­tec­tural cen­tre of Har­vard Square (it even had the address of Zero Har­vard Square), will be clos­ing for­ever on Jan­u­ary 31 of next year. While I know that the days of news­pa­pers and news­stands are num­bered, I’m sure that the down­turn in the econ­omy has­tened the end of this insti­tu­tion, which along with the Wordsworth book­store (already gone for years — it closed even before we left), was some­thing that I’ll always see in my mind’s eye when I think of Cam­bridge. I have to admit that I only stopped in there a a half-dozen of times in the decade and a half I lived in Cam­bridge and the prices were nearly as out­ra­geous for mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers as they are at May­fair News near us now on Broad­way (It’s prob­a­bly not their fault; mag­a­zines in Canada are crazy expen­sive!). Per­haps Out of Town News was on the wane long before we even took notice.

Besides the cherry blos­soms, I’m look­ing for­ward to the fin­ish of some new addi­tions (a new Whole Foods on Broad­way! Woo hoo!), and even a new street­car line from Granville Island to Sci­ence world, along with tons of other new con­struc­tion for this city in this spring, and in the com­ing year in prepa­ra­tion for the 2010 Olympics. In the mean­time, time to head down to (hun­ker down in?) our win­dow­less but warm gym in the base­ment to lis­ten to pod­casts and pedal on the sta­tion­ary bike, think­ing of those new places I’ll actu­ally be cycling to in a few months.