I’d racked my brain to come up with a suitable blog post to close out 2009 and welcome 2010, without success. I know,  know, the real estate howzamahket thing: buy a home, sell a home, prices up, down, sideways, short sales, loan modifications and mortgage rates. I’d discarded several drafts on this stuff and finally decided that if I were sick of writing about it, everyone else was just as sick of reading about it.

 Fortunately, my cousin in Cleveland came to the rescue. She did a Facebook posting that said something about taking her dog, Lulu, for a walk and forgetting the poop bag, and was that an inauspicious start to the  New Year. I commented that the poop bag might be a metaphor for 2009.

The year 2008 had not been a good one for me. In fact, I thought it had been the worst to date.  I won’t go into the reasons why—the personal issues, expectations and disappointments, let alone the plunge of real estate values and sales to 2000 levels. I couldn’t wait for 2009.

Well, if things were bad, they tapered off. The relentless personal issues.  Death and illness in the family.  Delayed startup of a new business. Whine, whine, P & M, P&M.

Here’s a metaphor for 2009:  One of the 2009 dog poops was our house value plummeting to less than we’d paid in 2005.  Remember watching the DJIA tank and you’d say to yourself, “It’ll never go below 9,500,” then it did and you said, “It’ll never go below 9,000,” and it did, and so on, until it drifted below 8,000? It was like that, only the pain wasn’t the abstraction of the DOW.  It was our home, a significant part of our personal assets and retirement portfolio.

It was as though we’d been camped out on a sand dune when an unpredicted tide slithered in and washed out the foundation, and the underpinnings of our world slipped away. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” Yeats wrote.  The notion of collecting the  catastrophe of 2009  into a biodegradable plastic bag and throwing it in the trash was most appealing.

 So I did.  The year 2009 has gone into the poop bag and has been thrown away, and 2010 already looks at least different, if not better. It’s not that any great things are happening yet, although there are encouraging portents of things to come.  But throwing away the poop back of 2009 forced me to hit the reset button.

Or, really, the reboot switch. You can bemoan your fate or you can start over from where you are.  Instead of complaining about what isn’t there, you can look forward to what might be.  

Yeats wrote the above words in “The Second Coming.” A reboot could be my own Second Coming.

Bag up 2009 and throw it out.  It's time for another morning walk in the park.