The year 2009 was an exciting one for the Riego household. Beth and I experienced a lot of change, most of it good, all of it challenging. As each new event occurred though, I struggled mightily to capture each moment with words to record each event in this here journal. Once the changes started, they seemed to just keep coming in rapid succession, leaving me without my requisite chance catch my breath and process and ponder. It is this phenomenon to which I attribute my speechlessness.

Last night I found myself sitting at my shmancy iMac, a plethora of multimedia opportunities before me, and I figured there was no better company to invite into my silence than a little video of pictures from the past year set to the tune of one of our favorite songs “Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. I can attest that the final product, while not perfect and certainly not comprehensive due to the shortcomings of my photo collection, is a sweet reminder of the year gone past. I had every intention of sharing it here, until I ran into some technical and legal difficulties in the late hours of the final night of 2009. I’m in the process of resolving the technical difficulties; the legal challenges imposed by YouTube’s very intelligent copyright-defending song matching tool is too powerful a foe for me to focus my energies there. Battling the technical difficulties I found myself with some idle time that afforded me an opportunity for reflection and inspiration and unfortunately for you, partaker of words, the following tome. (Can you believe the previous sentence originally had five commas? I’m think my high school English papers are the inspiration behind the Wikipedia entry for comma splice. I’ll have to see if any of my former teachers are authors of the article. Bonus points if you can guess where I had them.)

Goodbye, 2009. As with years past I feel like I hardly knew ya. It is amazing to me how fast the year flies by even though I or someone or everyone says it for the last month and a half of every year. You’d think we learn, that maybe we’d realize that the upcoming year is going to go by faster than we think and we should try harder to savor each moment. Or maybe the reason we find ourselves in awe of the pace of the previous year is that we, despite our greatest efforts to the contrary, are incapable of conceptualizing time. I’ve come to the conclusion that this capability eludes me so I’m just going to stop there and move on. There are, indeed, more important things to discuss like the following passage from Job to start which I think sums up the year that Beth and I had and probably the life we will continue to have perfectly:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.”
Job 1:21

What follows is what I call our Goodbye, Hello list because this year felt like a succession of goodbye moments followed immediately by hello moments. In the above passage from Job I think we often characterize “The Lord gave” as strictly positive and “the Lord has taken away” as strictly negative. But as I reflect on the Goodbye, Hello moments that Beth and I experienced over the past year I see merely an equality, a continuity in life that leads only to one ultimate outcome and that be that “the name of the Lord be praised”. And so, without further ado, I bring you our Goodbye, Hellos.

Goodbye, school. Hello, working world. In May Beth wrapped up her fourth and final year of vet school, marking the last of 40 years of formal schooling between the two of us. In June she joined the working world as an honest to goodness vet for a pretty good sized animal hospital in Raleigh.

Goodbye, North Carolina. Hello, paradise! Okay so that wasn’t an actual goodbye to North Carolina. Although for a while I’d say there was about a 30% chance we were going to leave NC and almost a 60% chance we were going to leave Raleigh. We ended up deciding to stick around for at least a few more years, but we did say goodbye to NC for a little while and aloha to Hawaii for about ten days in June. In reality, neither one of us would ever be able to be that far from family and friends, but it was difficult to leave Hawaii. Maybe in 2010 we’ll have to look at condos in Honolulu.

Goodbye, 2001 meticulously manicured Mitsubishi Mirage. Hello, Mazda3 / Mazda Bob. My first car was a 1994 Jeep Cherokee that I got when I turned 16. I squeezed about 100,000 miles and five years out of that car before it was time for something new. I was still in college when I surrendered it to my parents in exchange for a “brand new” 2001 Mitsubishi Mirage. At the time, I still wanted an SUV but gas prices had gone up due to 9/11 and since Mom was breaking her self-imposed “1 car for her only son” rule, I had to be sensible with the budget. I expected to drive the Mirage for the rest of my college days and then immediately “trade up” when I got my first job. Just a few months shy of eight years later, I finally traded up for a gently loved 2007 Mazda3 Hatchback. Throughout the process I was torn between the Mazda3 and a Honda Accord. When I realized that the black Mazda3 was the car version of our black bobtailed cat, I decided I had to have the Zoom Zoom. Looking back, it’s no contest – so glad I chose the Mazda3 as my first “grown up” purchase!

Goodbye, Big Brown. Hello, Big Green. In the absence of deplorable circumstances, it’s hard to walk away from your first employer – the company that gave you your first gig, especially if that company was on a short list of those offering gigs at the time. And even when I felt like the job was at its worst it was hard for me to really justify leaving when I put the job in the perspective of the present state of the economy. But when I realized I was leaving a relatively stable job, with above average benefits for an even more stable job, with similar or better benefits, a better work-life balance, and a job description that I would have regretted passing up I had to follow my gut. I still believe in the company I left – much to the surprise of most of those around me – and my belief in the company runs deeper than it did before I worked there. I now have the perspective of the people who work there, how hard they work, what they endure and what they sacrifice in order to provide service to their customers. And I hope that perspective sticks with me as a move on with my career, especially now that I’m in an organization whose passion is rooted in something a little less tangible than profit. Because even though money plays an important role in our society, it will pale in comparison to the role the environment will play in our lives if we’re not careful with it.

Goodbye, landlord. Hello, mortgage! I mentioned earlier how quickly the changes of 2009 occurred in succession for us. Imagine walking into a mortgage broker’s office and telling them you’d like a loan for a house but you’re in the middle of a possible career change and your wife just started her job a little over 6 weeks ago. Surprisingly, it didn’t turn out to be as much of a headache as we anticipated and so at the end of September we were handed the keys to the next 30 years of financial dependence. I don’t know that the renter’s life was as bad for us as many make it out to be but the government subsidized path to homeownership was too good for us to pass up. And more than that, it’s quite rewarding to call it our home complete with our very own garage door clicker.

Goodbye, Abbie. Hello, silence. I often hear first time parents talk about how amazing it is that they can love something so much even before it’s been born. I haven’t yet felt that exact emotion and I’m not sure it’s even within the realm of my imagination when I think about how much I loved Abbie. And she was a dog. And not even really my dog, at least not at first. Then again, she wasn’t even really Beth’s dog when it comes right down to it. It’s hard to put a finger on Abbie’s exact ownership. According to the story, Abbie followed Beth home one day when she was out walking one of the family dogs. Beth’s family put flyers up but nobody called and so they ended up keeping her. Ironically Abbie didn’t get along with one of the other dogs in the family and so they actually gave away the dog that was originally part of the family. Fast forward a few years later and Abbie the family dog became Beth’s vet school study buddy and they were inseparable. Even though I met Abbie when she was still the “family dog”, my relationship with her evolved simultaneously with my ever evolving relationship with Beth. Eventually Abbie became our dog. More than that, she was our daughter. And boy was she ever feisty. There are a million things I could tell you that I loved about Abbie, but what is most notably missing from my life is what frustrated me the most – the noise. The bark on the other side of the door when the key won’t turn fast enough or when a doorbell rings on TV. The slight whine of frustration she gave when you made her wait for dinner. The pant of anticipation for anything exciting like peanut butter, a car ride, or even just a walk. In the moment, those were annoyances. Loud, frustrating annoyances that I would endure for a million years in exchange for more time with her. The silence, as they say, is deafening.

Hello, 2010. You’ve got big shoes to fill. I have my own set of hopes and dreams for you but I’ve learned never to rely on those too heavily – not out of fear of disappointment, but rather out of fear of ill-preparedness or missed opportunity. I don’t usually offer a formal announcement of my New Years’ resolutions – I prefer a more malleable order of goals and milestones – but I will offer this frequently referenced bit of wisdom from the New Testament:

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Matthew 6:34

I don’t know what good fortune or great challenges 2010 will bring, but if I can remember one thing throughout the year, I hope it’s to take each day as it comes – to not let any illusions or delusions about tomorrow get in the way of what must be done today. Happy New Year, everyone!