It is a grey New Year’s day and more rain is on the wind, but the dogs have run and run in the fields, the room is warm, Ella Fitzgerald is singing in the kitchen where I am writing this, and the house is filled with the aroma of simmering beef. 2020 is gone, and in 19 days ‘the rough beast will slouch’ towards Florida leaving hundreds of thousands of dead behind him and a moral stench that will linger for a long time, but Joe Biden is coming, and whatever his failings, it will be a relief of the highest order to know that a decorous, humane person will be leading this country and that 100 awful actions a day will not be slipping by our attention because they will not be occurring.
A New Year’s day is for hope for what may come and for gratitude for the ordinary miracles of this old old world that keep me (us?) young in the eyes. I love how each day teaches me anew how to see more. Two ravens flew over me very early this morning calling out into the quiet. When I was readying a corncob long toss to the dogs, they quivered in front of me, each with one paw tucked up the better to make the pivot, their gaze so fixed and shining as to forever make me happy to just be with them in that moment. I’m reading the Century Cycle of August Wilson, in the order of the decade, and two plays in, I have been swept into his marvelous world of ‘ordinary’ black men and women, their rich talk and passions, and thus the reminder that no one of us is ordinary. Each life hums like dynamo and dreams as deeply as I dream.
My wife and I have books and food, a few dollars in the bank, big windows, hot water. I work with marvelous colleagues in a bookstore owned by a good man, my legs push me up hills, I have friends, and for now, democracy has been renewed. I hope this day finds that you, my friends, wherever you are, will find 2021 to be the year when all your strength gathers to you and those you love, and your joys too expand beyond what you imagined, and that the wider world catches a few breaks as well. Happy New Year and Vaya Con Dios.
