New Year - It's my

New Year - It's my tenth autumn here in the Midway.

I first moved to the Midway in 1987 - and with about a two-year gap from '89 to '91, I've lived here ever since.

I moved into this house ten years ago next month. Now, I spent ten years, maybe eleven, in my father's house in North Dakota, so we're rapidly approaching a personal record, here. It feels strange, given that between college and my first years in the Twin Cities I moved about 12 times in five years.

The rhythm of life here in the Midway has markers not all that different than the ones I grew up with in North Dakota, at least conceptually. The rhythm is the same; the details aren't.

Winter is winter, of course - sleet, then snow, then the months of gazing out at the cold wet blanket from the safety of the warm living room, cocoa in hand, watching the Hamline students trudge past. Spring is marked by the return of bikes to the bike paths, and the shortening of sleeves. Summer? Halter tops.

But fall is the one that hits you. We have three colleges or universities within a mile of my house - Hamline is a block away - and the sights and sounds of college kids moving into the dorms, trying out their stereos, throwing their first tentative parties, warming up the boom cars with the big, beginning-of-the-year displays of audio bravado color the nighttime soundscape. The first slicks of vomit are also turning up in the gutters.

On my block, it's really the beginning of the New Year. The little cold tinge in the night air still gives me that 20-year-old feeling, time to start packing up, vestigial but still there.

Unlike most of the Hamline kids, I was here four (and eight) years ago, and I'll probably be here four years from now, if not forty years from now. I love this place - the trees arching over the streets (the 'hood has finally recovered from the Dutch Elm Disease that made the main streets so sere and barren-looking even 15 years ago), the neighborhood stores, the neighbors themselves...

...and every fall, when most people would start feeling blue with the reminiscences of the end of summer, we have the loud, crass, baggy-pantsed reminders of renewal here among us; walking through our yards, puking on our boulevards, tossing beer cans in our gutters, and reminding us of what we were not that long ago, and sometimes, on wistful nights like this, making one take stock of what parts of that part of our lives need to be exhumed and re-examined and maybe revived just a bit.

Happy New Year.