Hope and Other Four-Letter Words

I'm often on an emotional roller coaster, maybe like you, with cheeriness alternating with cynicism sometimes in the same day, often within the same opinion.
 
I strive to offer a public face of relentlessly cheerful optimism, letting a smile be my umbrella even if I risk gargling snow and being accused of being a 'cheerleader for Norwich' (never sure why that is a bad thing). Conceding the obvious, I plead guilty as charged.
 
Except, deep down in my darkest moments I am more often a semi-professional pessimist, nearly seven full decades here on the Big Blue Marble, who will acknowledge and defend that the inherent appeal of my pessimism is I can only be surprised and never disappointed.
 
Here's one of those sadness and euphoria moments I’m talking about.
Not that long ago there was an article (near the start of the year) on one of my personal favorite 'hope springs eternal' projects, reviving/repurposing/rebuilding the Reid & Hughes Building in downtown Norwich. 

I didn't grow up here (and according to census figures, more and more of us didn't either) so when I pass the boarded-up windows that line the property along Main Street, from just beyond the Chamber of Commerce offices while I make my way to the Otis Library, I don't see anything through a prism of back-in-the-day memories and I-remember-when nostalgia. Sorry to be blunt, I see nothing at all.
 
And apropos memory, mine is not what it once was but I'm pretty sure the Reid & Hughes building was derelict and abandoned when I and my family arrived here before Thanksgiving thirty years ago. Of course, in a downtown lined with broken and battered buildings as Norwich was at that time, that's not really saying much.
 
But don't get me wrong, I wildly cheer all efforts to convert empty spaces into vibrant places anywhere in Norwich, but most especially in downtown where we've always had more wishes than wallet when it comes to transforming potential into kinetic energy. I hope this time something good happens, but it just seems to me that being an optimist sometimes takes more faith than I possess.
 
And maybe that's why the pessimist in me can't help but wonder and worry, having read this news story any number of times, about when, not if, Lucy Van Pelt is going to show up with her football near the new roundabout over on Franklin and promise this time to hold it steady if we're just willing to try to boot it. Again. Honest. This time for sure. Really.
 
I'm trying to convince myself I'm probably a little fatigued from another COVID winter and that's maybe why my flame of enthusiasm is trimmed a little low right now. Perhaps I could take heart from another news story, near the end of last year, about that property we've all seen on I-95 in East Lyme near where the fork for I-395 happens, that's sat empty for decades but has now been sold to a developer who reportedly has both concepts and capital. I mean, it could happen, right?
 
I'll keep my fingers crossed for those folks in East Lyme, but most especially for us. Besides, those crossed fingers will help me explain my terrible typing if not so much my mood swings.
-bill kenny