Sarasota, FL December 30, 2000   It's eleven o'clock, and I'm sitting in a quiet living room in a quiet house. My brother is upstairs asleep, and I'm still winding down. It's always good to be back in Sarasota, where I lived from ages one to fifteen. Of course, winter is a particularly nice time to be here. This time I made a surgical strike, though, and didn't even call the good friends I still have here. I had two hours to hang out with John and his girlfriend, then went on to my scheduled event for the evening. I attended a fairly unusual school from grades four through ten. It was tiny, for one thing, with about sixty people in my entire grade. Stranger than that, though, it consisted mostly of portable classrooms on a wooded campus. The great thing about that was that we all felt like we were outside all the time, and much of the time we were. At lunch we had free reign over the campus, and would play frisbee or football or just sit in the grass and talk while we ate our baloney sandwiches on white bread. Actually, I was more the sit in the grass type, being skinny and non-athletic and terminally self-conscious (read: a nerd). It was a school for 'the gifted', so there were geeks a-plenty. I had friends, but was not what anyone could call 'popular', even among my bookish tribe. I don't mean to sound like I'm moaning about a tough childhood, I have enough friends who really had tough childhoods to know better, but it's important background information to explain the weight with which I determined to attend an "all-class reunion" there tonight. Each year between Christmas and New Year's they invite any alumni who would like to attend to just show up on a certain night, and I've been wanting to make one of them for years. Tonight I decided to ask my insecurity to dance, in spite of the fact that I've never been much of a dancer. That's kind of the point, huh? I pulled into the parking lot promptly at eight, and noticed a clump of guys in their mid-twenties walking out. "Must be a pretty lame event if they're leaving already," I thought to myself, and went in, only to find that I had written the time down wrong and it was just ending. So much for bravely facing my past. So instead I went driving around, looking at places I walked, grew and lived through as a kid, and tons of memories came back to me. It feels good to visit those scenes. I looked at a fence across the road from my old house that had morning glories on it years ago. That image is filed in my head to be called up each time I encounter those flowers for the rest of my days. And I walked around in the lot where my house used to be. Some of the trees are still there, and I know about where the tree was that had my tree house in it. And the palm and the oak that grew right next to the garage are still there, so I know that boundary. And the walkway up to the front door still leads to the space where it isn't. Another year is turning, and I guess I'm especially conscious of time moving on these days. Sort of like my life odometer is turning over a number with lots of zeros. I visited with my great aunt Evelyn in Jacksonville yesterday, who only missed the turning of the last century by a handful of years. Spending an afternoon with her always leaves my head swimming with time. And there's the fact that next month it will have been ten years since I've worked for anyone besides you. Incredible. Ten years of playing music as my only income. I'm estimating it's been about 1300 shows. Blows my mind. But we don't call it Old Year's Eve, do we? Looking back always seems to lead naturally to looking ahead. And I like looking ahead. I'm really enjoying writing these days, and looking forward to the next recording project, and to more writing, and to more late night conversations and tears shed and more baloney sandwiches. Oh yeah - I've been a vegetarian for about ten years, too. Scratch the baloney. You get the point, though. In the short term, I'm looking forward to doing a cool live performance radio show next week with my good friend Beth Wood, and D.C.'s excellent duo The Kennedys. We'll be sharing the bill in Pensacola at WUWF's Radio Live, which is a concert with a live audience that's also broadcast on lots of Florida radio stations as well as the internet. Then on to Mississippi, then Texas and New Mexico. And then home, and that's always something to look forward to. I'm sometimes told I go a little overboard on the gratitude stuff in shows. That may well be true, but if so, it's because I really do have so much to be grateful for. It is a great gift to listen, and your support has allowed me to spend most of my time making music for the last ten years, to see much of the U.S. and go around the planet, and even to buy a house to come home to, not to mention keep strings on the guitars. What massive gifts those are. So thanks, once more, for giving me so much to look forward to. Happy New Year.   David