A Long December

I've always liked the song "A Long December" by Counting Crows. The line 'maybe this year will be better than the last' is sung several times, looking ahead to a better tomorrow, a better year to come.

2010 was a memorable year for me. I moved to the UK - twice, saw a lot of family, was an extra in a movie, traveled across the Atlantic six times, and ended the year a wiser person. I wish 2010 never happened.

The year began by me going on leave from my job, moving to Oxford. This was my first move to the UK. The second was the move from the US to Edinburgh in late August. In both cases, I felt like a complete outsider, a lonely man in a lonely place, with no sense of belonging. I still feel that way, several months after moving to Edinburgh. I've moved a lot in my life, but these moves have been among toughest for me (moving from Nigeria to the US as a 12 year old was tougher).

I saw a lot of family over the past year, but how I wish the circumstances were different. With my mother passing away in March and having funerals in the US and in Ghana, I interacted with more family in 2010 than in any other year of my life. Unfortunately, most if this interaction was filled with sadness for the small, powerful, and well-respected, woman my mother was, to everyone in our extended family.

I was happy to be cast as an extra in a movie only a few weeks after my mother died. It was a distraction from the pain I was going through and took up many hours of my day, for a week. The thought of seeing myself on screen, even for a movie so bad I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, pepped me up a little. The movie ran out of money and was never finished; the money I was owed for a week of being an extra never came to me. My chance to be in the big screen vanished.

I traveled a lot in 2010, but not by choice. Between moving, my mother's passing, Lauren graduating, and my mother's Ghana funeral, I racked up more air miles than I have in any other year. I also contracted the chickenpox in the midst of one of these trips. I now have permanent scars on my body, and still don't feel like the person I see in the mirror is me.

All this travel not only led to illness, but bad travel experiences. Two of my six transatlantic flights were canceled, leaving me in a tough spot to get to where I was trying to go.

I was talking to someone a few years ago, shortly after their mother had died. They said that they felt like a wiser person after the passing of their mother. I didn't get it at the time, but now I do. When my mother died people tried to compare what I was going through to them losing a grandparent; those two things are not at all similar, and I felt somewhat insulted when someone tried to use that to relate to what I was going through.

With my mother's passing, I've lost that protector that mothers are - the mother bear protecting her cub. Even though I'm an adult, I now feel like I have to fend for myself more, pick up some of the wiseness that only a mother has. I feel like I've become a wiser person.

I'm looking ahead to 2011, not because I have anything great on the horizon, but because, to paraphrase my dad from a conversation we had in mid-December, 2011 couldn't possibly be any worse than 2010. That's something to look forward to, I guess.

I want to end this blog by hoping that 'maybe this year will be better than the last' and wrap up my last 2010 blog post with something I wrote shortly after my 34th birthday, looking ahead to, what I thought, would be a better future...

"It didn't immediately occur to me on my birthday that it was my birthday. I had to get from Edinburgh to Towson over the next 30 hours, so more pressing things were on my mind. When it did occur to me, at some point along the trip, I was tired and wanted to get home, which in this instance was Towson. Even though I was tired when my birthday crossed my mind, I was happy; 33 was over. The year that took me from the job I loved and took the person I loved more than earth from me. The year where I never felt settled was over. I looked ahead to the new life that lay ahead of me. The life without my mother, the life where I would keep trying, for my mother's sake, to be the best person I could be."

Edinburgh Snow (or Edinbro Snow or Edinburgh Snurgh)

picture I took from the top of Calton Hill, looking over Edinburgh

I've lived in cold winter climates for about 40% of my life, having lived in De Kalb, Illinois for one winter, Towson, Maryland for five, and East Lansing, Michigan for seven. This winter is my first "cold" winter in a city outside the United States. My readers in California might think they have a cold winter, but trust me, you don't. If the phrase "salting the sidewalk" doesn't mean anything to you, or creates an odd image in your head, you've never lived through a cold winter.

That being said, I am left to wonder if the people of Scotland know what it means to salt the sidewalk, because getting through the snow we had here a couple weeks ago left me thinking; this country has a long way to go, when it comes to winter preparedness.

The snow started on a Saturday night, less than an inch came down by my estimation. Nothing was done at that point, in terms of clearing the streets. Understandable, I thought - this kind of snow fall basically clears itself by people moving around in it. Then, the big storm came.

I would guess about 7-9 inches (I'm using odd numbers here, because I find that snow measurements are almost always in terms of even numbers, which has always bothered me). At this point, I began to wonder why nothing was being done to clear the snow - no plows anywhere to be seen, so one shoveling their walkways, and yes, no salting of sidewalks was going on. In fact, I didn't see a shovel for the next several days. I did get a lot of beautiful pictures though, as I walked around town, through the uncleared streets and sidewalks; you can see them here.

The snow fell for several days, a few hours each day. The airport closed (actually the airport was open for part of that time, but the runways were closed - the airport wanted all of us to know this). Lauren had a flight that was cancelled, and over the weekend, it was said that on Monday, things would be better.

Still no shovels. Still no plows, but somehow, things would be better. It wasn't.

The forecast changed, and even though schools opened on Monday morning, they were closed a few hours later. Snow fell on that Monday like it had not fallen during the entire storm. People were stuck on the major freeway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, for many, many hours. The freeway was eventually closed for 40 hours.

Still no shovels. Apparently there were plows somewhere (I would hope on that freeway), but I didn't see any.

What I did see was lots of people pulling around their kids in sleds. How is it that people can be prepared enough to have pull-sleds for their kids, but not a shovel? People were using brooms to try and clear the now frozen snow on their walkways and cars; a woman across the street was attempting to use a dustpan as a shovel.

Getting around was impossible because none of the streets has been cleared, and, of course, no salting of sidewalks had happened. The city was now covered with a 6-inch coat of ice. The city was virtually shut down for a week.

People were mad now; they were calling for the transport minister to step down (he did a few days later), they were complaining how there were not enough grit bins in neighborhoods so people could put grit on the sidewalk (I've learned that gritting sidewalks is done here, as opposed to salting them). The army was called in to Edinburgh, to help deal with the ice-coated city. The only ones who didn't seem to care were the neighborhood cats, who continued to be around as they had when there wasn't any snow, continued to walk along their "cat path" in our front garden, except now the path was through snow.

the cat path, after the snow started melting

I sat at home and thought to myself, why didn't anyone start clearing the snow as it was falling? Why was there this wait to start to do anything?

When the snow started to melt, it melted quickly. Slush filled the streets, big pools of water everywhere. The snow cat someone made in our back yard turned into nothing more than a clump of snow, and our front garden was green again within a couple of days.

In the days when the snow was melting, I was talking to someone. I said I didn't understand why no one tried clearing the streets earlier, why there was this wait for the snow to stop before doing anything. She looked at me in this way; in a way of someone hearing about something amazing for the first time, and said "I hadn't thought about that. That would have been a really good idea".

Maybe I should become the transport minister because Edinburgh has a ways to go, when it comes to dealing with snow.