I don’t know if 2008 was actually more eventful than other recent years, but ’08 certainly felt more… I don’t know… frenetic? That’s not quite the right word, but it’s in the neighborhood. Certainly ’08 was more exhausting than other twelve-month blocks of time. I recall experiencing more moments of feeling utterly drained and used up in the last year than in the entire decade preceding it. Of course, that could be simply of my inexorable trudge toward middle age. I am 39 years old now, and I’m finding, to my horror, that I just don’t absorb the hits as well as I used to. Or it could be that the hits lately have been more intense…
This was the year, after all, that Anne lost her Rusty, and I and my parents said goodbye to our Shadow.
Somewhat less traumatic but still a loss: Krazy Kat, the part-time feline buddy I’ve mentioned a couple of times, stopped coming around sometime in the fall. Krazy was one of a long line of feral barn cats my parents feed to encourage them to stick around the Compound and control the mice. You can’t get within 20 feet of most of them, but we found Krazy and his sister when they were still babies, before their eyes had even opened, and started handling them so they both grew up with no fear of humans. Krazy’s sister Kate — Anne originally tagged them Kate and Sawyer after the characters on Lost — vanished in their first year of life, but Krazy survived to adulthood and, for some reason, he took a particular liking to me. He’d literally come running when I called him, and he enjoyed being inside the house and hanging out with me. Especially at mealtimes. But he rarely wanted to stay inside through the night, and for some reason I was reluctant to make him a full-time housecat, so we continued our weird friendship of convenience. And then one day I realized that it’d been a while since I’d seen him. I never found any trace of him, no body, no evidence that he died… he was simply gone. I like to think that someone else in the neighborhood took him inside and forced him to stay; I think he could’ve been persuaded to domesticity fairly easily. But I have my doubts. If he is dead, I hope it was easy for him.
Fortunately, not everything that happened last year was a downer. I got some traveling in, including an April roadtrip to Wendover with Anne and our friends Jack and Nat to see my man Rick Springfield, as well as that spur-of-the-moment run to Pittsburgh and Gettysburg with my pal Cranky Robert. And of course The Girlfriend and I went to San Francisco together for a week in October. I never did get around to saying much about that. It was our longest trip together with none of our friends or family around, and I was frankly a little bit nervous at the start. Not because I feared we wouldn’t get along or anything, but because I have a history with San Francisco… it was the first place I ever journeyed to as an adult, way back in 1991, the first big, cosmopolitan, exotic place I’d ever been, and I’m very fond of it. I was afraid, quite frankly, that Anne wouldn’t love it the way I do. I’m happy to have been wrong.
In August, Robert paid me a visit here in Salt Lake, and we had a great weekend playing with our new digital cameras.
And there were lots of entertainment events in ’08: in February, Anne and I saw The Peking Acrobats (an eye-popping show that was followed by an even-more eye-popping spectacle on the train ride home) and The Celtic Women, a singing group composed of, as you might imagine, Irish women (Anne enjoyed this show more than I did, although I was pleased with myself for correctly identifying the group’s fiddle player as the same beauty I remembered from Lord of the Dance a few years earlier). In May, The Girlfriend and I enjoyed seeing our friend Geoff perform in a live play at the restoration-in-progress Empress Theater in Magna, Utah, and then in June we saw the dance troupe Stomp, attended the Utah Scottish Festival, and went with my parents to an annual exhibition of one man’s tremendous collection of antique cars, trucks, motorcycles, tractors, and just about any other kind of machine you can think of.
July was a big month for nostalgic rock concerts; first we saw a triple-header of Journey, Heart, and Cheap Trick, and then only days later we caught The Police on the final leg of their reunion tour, with Elvis Costello opening (neither of us were crazy about Costello, but The Police were awesome).
The final item in my notes for 2008 was a visit with The Girlfriend and her parents to Body Worlds, the touring exhibition of “plastinated” human bodies. Anne and I had seen a similar exhibit in Vegas a few years ago, so some of the novelty and impact of seeing real bodies turned into life-size Visible Man and Woman models had worn off, but it was still a Big Event type of experience. I’m very pleased to see that Salt Lake is beginning to attract more things like this; when I was a kid, this place really was a backwater, and you had to travel to see a lot of the Big Events.
Coming up shortly, my annual media wrap-ups (i.e., the list of books and movies from ’08), and then we’ll be able to move on with the business of the current year at last…
