Wednesday, January 2, 2013

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Good Morning, 2013, and welcome! Yesterday we ushered you in with a midnight boom and our traditional New Year’s Day celebration. January One has always belonged to Diane and me. We used to tell our kids not to bother us unless there were copious amounts of blood or broken bones involved. Otherwise, sort it out for yourselves, because we’re going to have Champaign (or Method Champanois), or lots and lots of coffee, and watch twelve hours of some sort of marathon TV event. One year it was all of “Brideshead Revisited,” once it was all the Harry Potter movies in a row (as many as existed at the time), once it was all of “Firefly.” This year it was Season One of “Homeland,” although the kids still in the house mostly curled up on our laps and purred or – in Meg’s case – looked up at us plaintively saying with those big brown eyes, “Keep me warm.” I haven’t written a blog in several days. This usually means I have been busy with family and/or am working on a large project that demands most of my attention. In this case, both are true. Besides that, life always finds a way to intrude, with its exciting mixture of tedium, treasures and trepidations. Now it is January 2. The real business of the New Year begins for us, just as Congress finished theirs for 2012. Wasn’t that exciting? We actually did jump off the fiscal cliff, but somebody managed to hand us an umbrella on the way down. I think it was someone named Biden, but I can’t be sure. So we managed to slow down the fall and find a narrow ledge to stand upon while Congress takes a short recess, then dies and is reborn on January 20 with very little real change in its composition. This means more cliff jumping. Keep your umbrellas handy. On the home front, Diane’s recovery is progressing beautifully. She no longer is experiencing any pain from her injuries. We are enjoying the cold of winter in our cozy warm house, and loving the Big Sky. There still has not been much snow here, and I suspect the winter will continue to be mild. I saw yesterday that the draught conditions that are plaguing southwest and eastern Montana and Wyoming and more, will continue. Here our precipitation levels are about normal, though there is less snow pack in the higher elevations. They haven’t even started draining Flathead Lake yet, which they do every winter so the lake can handle the springtime runoffs. But for us, it is ideal and tranquil and beautiful, we have family to keep us warm, and we have love in our hearts for all of you so far away. The Memorable Year 2013 is filled with promise. All new things are filled with promise, and in order to encourage us to hope and endeavor, we create lovely arbitrary and real starting lines, with finish lines off in the distance that are never the end, but just the finish of one start and the start of the next. It makes life fun, because promise and hope are what keep us going. There are 364 days left in 2013, this one included and better than half over. There are 363 new days, each with promise, eleven more months, the seasons, the holidays, our birthdays – all with promise, all offering hope. I see no harm in any of this. Therefore, my New Year’s Resolution is a simple one. I promise to hope. Winning the lottery wouldn’t hurt, either.

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