Ten YEARS ago...?

I can barely remember ten MINUTES ago.

Seriously.

The last ten years have been so packed with stuff that every time something new happens, it pushes something old out of my brain. It's like this--you can really only fit so many clowns into the clown car before they eventually start pouring out the other side. You know?

Let's see... I do know that I didn't have a publishing contract ten years ago... I don't even think I had a finished book. John and I didn't have a house. We didn't have a herd of cats....

We did have the theatre company. I was writing. We were as acutely busy as we are now (well... maybe not quite--but close). But the rest is kind of a blur--a continuum of activity that I find hard to differentiate into 'events'. Believe me when I say that I would make a terrible memoir writer.

That's why it's hard for me to think in terms of a linear progression of what has happened in those ten years. I know the decade started with the fact that the world didn't end with the dreaded Y2K flip-over, much to the chagrin of the disaster-preparedness people in the office where I worked. They were so sure. Heh. Buncha clowns...

What's happened in the interim? Things have gone on.

I know we lost people from our lives.
And, along the way, we gained some too.

I know that all the significant things that happened to me over the last decade have led me to this place that I'm at, even if I can't list specifically what all those things are. But I have a suspicion that, even more than the significant things, it's the utterly insignificant (seeming--at the time) things that have led me here. I guess that's why it's impossible for me to catalog them. I don't really do milestones. I'm terrible at remembering birthdays and anniversaries. Sometimes, I actully have to ask other people how old I am. Because I honestly can't remember.

What I do know, beyond all shadow of doubt is that the last ten years have been extremely good to me. As I sit here in my nook, working on my revisions for my third book, contemplating the fact that I just announced my deal for a fourth in a whole new project, I cannot help but think that the next ten have got some pretty big shoes to fill. Clown-shoes big.

Shiny red clown-shoes. And I kinda like that idea--even if clowns do kinda freak me out.
Cue the circus music... and ask me again in another ten years.