It was Christmas Eve, 1986. Life was pretty dang good, I reflected as I drove north on Cedar Avenue, the lights of downtown shimmering in the distance.

It had been a long day. I had been feasting like a vulture on all the board shifts nobody else wanted to work that day; I screened calls for the Mike Edward morning show, ran the board for Geoff Charles, the mid-day syndies (Owen Span and Michael Jackson), the Vogel Show (Don did a special Christmas show), and was planning on running again from 10AM to 6PM the next day, for a bit of extra money. I was learning to love holidays largely as a revenue booster – I had worked pretty much every holiday in the past year.

After the Vogel show got off the air, I started on my evening’s plans. I’d gotten a few invitations – to a couple of my roommates’ families places, and to one of my coworkers’ families house. I stopped by an evening church service, and then off to Edina (hors d’oeuvre and eggnog), Bloomington (a vodka sour and swedish meatballs) and South Minneapolis (dinner, cheesecake). By the end of the night, I was full, comfy, and pretty darn happy.
Things had changed a lot since Christmas of ’85, my first in the cities:

I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza – at $3, a bit of a splurge – and a couple of beers (Stroh’s, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I’d gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of ’em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).

By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope’s mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me…

By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for “Gab Line”, a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt’ know about their seedy reputation). “Only 10 cents a minute”. I dialled in.

I did what I usually did on night like this; took a drive. I did a turn around Lake Harriett, then Calhoun, and finally Lake of the Isles. It was crisp and cold, but not brutal that night.

I pulled over at Thomas Beach. The lake was frozen, and I had the whole place to myself.  I walked across the street, to the frozen sand, and perched on a bench to look over the city skyline gleaming in the distance.   It had been a pretty busy year, and I had a ton to be thankful for. I’d made some good progress on at least some of my life’s big goals. My “career” in talk radio – a business I’d barely known existed a year earlier – was going well beyond anything I’d dreamed. My band was going to be debuting in four days – we were so ready for that! And the girlfriend thing…well, we’d work on that soon enough.
It’d been a great year. The next year, I thought, could be a whole lot better.