A Long December

Twenty-five years ago, I was a high school kid in the 90s, and in most summers, I used whatever money could manage to save from working to get to as many concerts as I could. I first saw Counting Crows in the summer of '97 and I was hooked. I liked how their style incorporated parts of lots of different types of music. I learned to play a few of their songs on the guitar and quickly found that the lyrics could hook a teenage girl's attention as well. Adam Duritz is the lead singer and songwriter for the band and after visiting a friend in the hospital that had been hit by a car one night, he scratched out the lyrics to Long December on a napkin on his way home. The song is a melancholy ballad that looks back at a tough year but also embraces the idea that the next "year will be better than the last." How appropriate. 

I'm not usually one for thinking that things magically change on a New Year's Eve or that the number of a year brings more luck than another, but somehow this December does bring about a bit of optimism that others haven't. Maybe we are turning a corner, but not just going back to the way things were. We learned a lot about ourselves and about each other. We learned what makes people tick and what makes them give up. We learned when we could be strong and when we've had enough. It's only the 17th, but it's been a Long December, and we've all had the feeling "that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls." Maybe it was full hallways and fights or phone calls to parents that were sometimes tough that made it difficult to get through, but as things started to get back to normal I started to feel better about what I was doing again. And while I know we all have our tired days of figuring out how to make things work again, we are all starting to see glimmers of hope as kids figure out how to get to where we know they can be. 

When I first came to Greene Central nine years ago, I had delusions that I was going to fix everything that I thought was wrong overnight. Six years later I started to see some of the changes happen that I expected. Change didn't happen then as quickly as I wanted it to and the same is true for right now. It takes work. Hard work. But there is optimism when we see things go the way that we want them to, and this time around I can see it coming. Thanks for showing up and for doing the hard work. I genuinely appreciate you all. "It's been a long December, but there's reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last."

(I realize that I'm getting older and that a lot of our staff were children or may not have even been around in 1997. If you're young or just unfamiliar with the song, here's a link to it and a glimpse of the summer of my freshman year in high school.)