A Bright New Year

So here we are, alone once more and at last. I am returned from New York City, where I heard Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall, visited the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side, and discovered that my daughter's new Significant Other has this blog bookmarked on whatever it is he carries around with him (clever man!). I've traded the emergency furniture I lived with for so long for a lovely assortment of newer old furniture at a Furniture Exchange. I returned to find the latest edition of a rather fine African-American topics magazine in which I have not one, but TWO articles published. And I have somehow (I swear this is unclear to me) wound up the new best friend of a rather large brindle mutt I rescued yesterday afternoon from the local shelter only a few days short of a day he was not looking forward to and who will, I'm sure, answer to his name as soon as he has one. ("Anonymous" has been suggested. "Charlie" suits, but I date a man named Charles off and on. And "Buddy" came to mind, but that's SO plebian.) So, I'm feeling rooted and solid and happy and strong and ready, I guess, for what comes next (I write "I guess" because how does one ever know?).

Anyway, it is a new year. A year a new beginnings, we hope. A year of challenges, we suspect. What will I remember -- looking back -- about last year? That I was diagnosed diabetic (sigh) and threw myself into such a rigorous regimen, I lost nearly a third of my body weight, becoming a slender shadow of my former self, so close to the designation of "underweight" on the BMI scale, I've been ordered to stop losing (?!). That I was offered and accepted a permanent full-time Instructor position at a public university in a part of the country that originally scared the be-jezzus out of me. That I watched a cadre of younger folks catch my fire on that campus and organize themselves to implement social change in every imaginable direction and with great heart. That I was elected Third Vice President of a branch of the NAACP that is hunkered down against the forces of evil in that same location, having reawakened the dogs of war on segregation after fifty years of waiting for change. That Barack Obama, a dazzlingly bright and doggedly determined man of color was somehow inexplicably elected President of the United States, a nation increasingly recognized around the world for it's unapologetic commitment to the paradigm of White Supremacy. A busy year, indeed, laying much groundwork for an interesting one to come.

I've ordered my Amnesty International wall calendar for my office and my Women Artists datebook from the Syracuse Cultural Workers Collective. I've committed to make a presentation next week to a group of nearly one hundred mostly Black high school football players about how to prepare for and make it in college. I've committed to meet with the new Gay-Straight Alliance group on campus before classes begin. And I am ready for the games to begin.

So, as we say good morning to a New Era of commitment to change, I salute you, my Faithful Readers. I trust you, too, are shaking off the disappointments of the past, facing your personal realities with unabashed courage, looking squarely in the face of whatever you see that needs changing in this world and "jumping at the sun," as Zora Neale Hurston once said. Let's boogie on out and do it!
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The poster featured above is by Ricardo Levins Morales and is available from Northland Poster Collective.