By Erika Kar
By the time you read this, Christmas will be over. This is weird because I am sitting here writing it almost a week before Christmas. So, while I’d like to write some heartwarming holiday prose, it would come off as a little strange and perhaps confusing. Instead, let’s skip ahead to the New Year.
One of the best parts of the end of the year is the opportunity to make predictions for the fresh new year. Do you ever read New Year predictions?
When I was a young girl, I both loved to read, and was scared out of my wits, reading predictions in the National Enquirer. My dear little grandma was a National Enquirer fiend and she would save them for me in big stacks. I loved getting her grocery bags full of the smut. There were juicy tidbits about Sophia Loren and Grace Kelly and scandalous photos of Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson. All mixed in with home cures for arthritis, the status on the world’s first test tube baby, and the top foods for weight loss (grapefruit, in case you were wondering).
Every January, the National Enquirer would have predictions for the New Year from all of the leading psychics. Jeanne Dixon was supposedly the most accurate. Some of the predictions were fun to read, but then there were always the ones that caused terrible anxiety — usually about Russia or aliens. I would go to bed at night after reading these and wait for either a nuclear war or else for the aliens to make a stop at my home in order to abduct me.
Here we are 40-something years later and we haven’t been nuked, and as far as I know, no one has been abducted by aliens. Although I am positive that there are some that would argue that last point.
So, considering that Jeanne Dixon made a good living dispensing her predictions that were nothing more that possibilities, I asked around Mazama for predictions for 2019. Here they are:
• Impeachment and jail for Trump.
• Snow.
• Divorce for the Trumps.
• Divorce for the Kushners.
• June opening of the North Cascades Highway.
• Aliens will contact us.
• Dogs will be lost and then found.
• More wildfires in the Methow.
• A new restaurant will open in the Valley.
• The Chinese will clone a human.
• The lonely female elk in Big Valley will finally find a mate.
• The Mazama Movie Night will see record attendance!
Speaking of Mazama Movie Night, there will be a showing of the classic, “A Fish Called Wanda,” at the Mazama Community Club on Tuesday. Jan. 8, at 7 p.m. Admission is free, as is the popcorn. This is a great opportunity to meet some of your neighbors, get a good laugh, and make that prediction No. 12 come true. Here’s to a great 2019!