1 B.C. One day B.efore C.onstruction. B.C. represents an ancient time, a prehistory before an epochal milestone. And while I'm fairly certainly we won't be birthing the Messiah in the next 24 hours, we enter a new era nonetheless. No matter how exciting the new age will be, today is a moment to reflect on the age that ends.
When the converted patio room is torn down tomorrow, it will take memories of my home office for 6 years and countless ghosts of owners past. The hiding place where childrens' Christmas presents lay in wait from snooping eyes.
When the back porch goes, it will take with it cool autumn evenings, and the last refuge for our departed beagle, who spent her final months incontinentally pissing it all away. (I won't really miss the urine smell that no amount of scrubbing ever got clean.)
When the pool is drained and the pump we nursed for years removed, it will take so many lazy Sundays sheltered from triple-digit heat. And the diving board. Not even you, so triumphantly installed during 1960s permitting requirements immune to neck-breaking pool physics, will escape to see the new dawn.
You have to burn it down before it will grow again.
Today is one ending and tomorrow another beginning. December 31, 1 B.C. When you think about it, it's not at all real. No one living in 1 B.C. called it "B.C." No one when to bed one night in B.C., only to open the paper the next day to the headline, "Savior Born in Bethlehem, Citizens Reset Sundials to A.D." ("In other news, Romans edge Gauls 112-109")
So B.C. never existed in B.C. It's not real time, only real history. Tomorrow starts the real, the new age. With a crowbar and a sledgehammer, B.C. becomes A.D.
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