It's 2013!

When I was a child, I imagined the far, far away turn of the century.  Like most kids then, I calculated the age I'd be then and wondered if I'd live to see the ripe old age of 52.  I remember telling my mother that I didn't think anyone would get to be that old.  Since she must have been about 40 then, she just laughed and said she'd hoped that we both would be alive to see it happen.  She added that when that time came, I probably would marvel at the feeling that I hadn't really "grown up" in the way I thought about it then.  She was right on both counts. 

Now I'm one year into retirement and still feeling a sense of new beginnings and adventure but also incomplete and insecure.  I still can't decide if I retired too early or if I've really not given myself a chance to experience it fully since I've completed several large research projects in the time I've been here in Ireland.  We've done a lot of new things here, met new people and reinforced friendships with visitors from America but there's lots more to experience.  In the coming year, that's my goal, to try and work less and have even more fun than I did last year!

Which brings me to The Gathering  This year, all of Ireland is putting out the welcome mat for the diaspora to "come home."  The actor, Gabriel Byrne, calls it the Irish shakedown, but he's taking a more negative view than I am about the effort to encourage people to come to Ireland and explore their roots (if they have them) or just experience the country and its people. 

I've been looking for a unifying theme for this blog.  Sometimes over the past year I've felt that my posts might be a little overbearing.  "We went here, we did that everything is cool and exciting!"  After reading several Christmas letters that have seemed that way to me, it's given me pause.  I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it, but at the end of this adventure I want to try to write a publishable memoir.  I've noticed that the ones I've read and liked have some kind of context or unifying theme and so I'm going to try to make The Gathering that theme for my posts this year. 

As I write this, I still don't know what that means but I'm hoping an idea comes to me between now and my next post.  In the meantime, visit www.thegatheringireland.com and consider your own adventure here in 2013!