the ghost of christmas past, part 9 of n

I didn’t want to say much about it at the time, but December 2, 2008 is when I was offered the job I have now.  Had I known how it would turn out, I’d definitely still take it, but I’d try to be a little more heads-up going through it.  But at the time, just to escape from the world of government sub-contracting…it was paradise.  I had gone to the old country for Thanksgiving and sweated out days of waiting for the phone to ring, so to come back on Saturday and get the job offer on Tuesday – it was a country music record played backward.  Got out of prison, got my wife back, got my truck back, got my dog back…

And just like that, everything turned blue and bright again. The clouds parted and the sun shone on a cool damp green world of Christmas.  The Kanye song about the Good Life that had mocked me the year before was suddenly triumphant. Obama’s inaugural was a month away and we were still basking in the glow.  I was going to have a job above ground, with cellular reception, with actual benefits, with the ability to take the train to and from work…life, in short, was finally looking up after the bottomed-out stretch of 2007-08.

I was actually starting to experiment, too.  I had a virtualized machine on my MacBook running a lean Ubuntu instance, wondering if I could get by with a netbook.  Since the state of the art in cellphones was an iPhone 3G, the need for some mid-range device was real…and ultimately I would deal with it by acquiring a netbook, disposing of it six months later, and finally getting an iPad, which nails the netbook space far better than any actual netbook ever did.  It was also cold enough that I was wearing the international travel jacket and contemplating the peacoat…which I finally bought years later and am wearing today in the midst of a similar cold snap.

The surest sign that the world was changing wasn’t anything to do with netbooks or a new job or a black President, though – it was Vanderbilt in a bowl game for the first time in a quarter-century.  Of course, we backed into it, following up a red-hot 5-0 start by losing 6 of our last 7 games.  Scraped out a win against Kentucky thanks to DJ Moore’s heroic effort on both sides of the ball (2 TDs as a receiver, 2 INTs as a defensive back) only to lose to Tennessee (again) and Wake Forest (AGAIN)…and wound up in a bowl game in Nashville, 4 miles from campus.  And played a perfect game despite virtually no offense, and won 16-14, and our punter was the MVP.

I think the thing about Christmas five years ago is that it came with the sense that my whole entire life was on the way back – that I hit rock bottom the year before and was now, indisputably, trending back up.  There was hope, there was a new day coming, and the future was both visible and bright.  Really, that’s what I’m missing these days: not a solution on a silver platter, not an illustrated guide to the future, but just a sense that things are going the right way and looking up.  If I could somehow find that under the tree on the 25th, I wouldn’t want anything else for Christmas.

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