We have started a new year and a new decade. It’s time to put it in perspective.

Unlike the start of previous decades, this one comes at a time when change is the operative word.

Forty years ago, I rang in the New Year by watching the movie Citizen Kane at a friend’s house. In the era right before video machines became prominent in homes, seeing a true Hollywood classic film was more of a special event.

In 1980, we knew the New Year would start a decade of life changes.

Later that year, I married my wife Vaune, and then moved twelve-hundred miles away from where my first job was in the northeast United States to take a new position in the south.

As the decade progressed, two children would bless our family and two more job changes took place.

We bought our first house, paying less than what some full size new cars cost.

It was the decade of beginnings.

The shift to the 1990s found me entrenched in the task of parenting. My family would celebrate New Year’s Eve about four hours earlier so that our children could make noise and be in bed close to their regular bedtime.

Later in the decade as our daughters became teens, we started a tradition of going out to dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant, and then come home to watch the movie Apollo 13 on our VHS tape machine.

That decade would see me leaving the television journalism field for new adventures running a local chamber of commerce.

By mid-decade, I would add on a part time job as an adjunct teacher at an area college.

Both jobs made an indelible impact on the person I hoped to become. Community service would become an important part of life.

It was a decade of change.

We marked the start of the new millennium in 2000 with a house full of noise from a teenager sleepover and the television on with Peter Jennings anchoring ABC News coverage of the event.

As the whole world was celebrating the year 2000, the broadcast networks were all in for reports from practically every time zone in the world as each part of the planet welcomed in the New Year.
Over the next few years, I would mourn the loss of my mother to cancer, move to the west coast, and effectively push the restart button on my life.

It was the decade of transformation.

Ten years ago, my wife and I were getting serious about moving out of an apartment and settling in again in a house.

By 2010 we had been in Merced three years and spent all that time sitting out the fall of the local housing market.

We weren’t sure even in 2010 that the worst of the recession was over. But we took a chance, met a fine local real estate agent, and found the right place for us.

A grandson arrived during the past decade. His birth has brought new meaning to the words transformative, change, and beginnings.

We opened our home to my wife’s parents when the time came for them to move from their home of more than fifty years.

I’ll never forget my father-in-law calling me shortly after he heard that I was okay with the idea of in-laws moving in with us.

He said, “They tell me you are fine with this, but I need to hear that for myself.” I told him I was fine with it, adding that I saw it as a gift to my wife: I was giving my wife her parents.

The past decade, the tens, was a decade of reframing.

And that brings us to the start of another new ten-year span. We know there will be changes starting with my decision to retire from my full time job later in this year.

What else is heading our way is not known, but if the past four decades have been any indication, it will be an adventure.

I don’t have a bucket list. The closest I came to one was in a column I wrote in 2019 about flying a kite with my grandson.

Some of the other items on my Grandpa’s Bucket list include:

• Watch him perform in a school play
• Enjoy an adventure that ends with the two of us at a real diner (my grandfather did this with me and I never forgot it)
• Attend his high school graduation and his college graduation
• Play some Sinatra and Elvis and explain to him why these artists are so important to me

So with any luck, I’ll knock off everything on that Grandpa’s Bucket list.

I might even start a new list.