“Once more unto the breach, dear friends….”

I suppose quoting Harry in the middle of a battle is a bit dramatic for the beginning of a new year, but I’m afraid there are too many comparisons to ignore it.  On the other hand, approaching 2012 as another year of opportunity instead of conflict is much more optimistic.  I’m too much an optimist to start out dreading what might come….

My favorite quotation, as my students will attest, is Thoreau’s comment in Walden about building castles in the air and then putting foundations under them.  I tell them to note that the dream comes first; then the brick and mortar.  This also, however, means that some reflection has taken place beforehand, contemplation of what has brought us to this place and why, who has helped prepare us for the dreaming and building and, perhaps, been our foundation all along.

In other words, the start of a new year is a good time for reflection as well as looking ahead!

This reflection is easier for me, I think, at the start of my 62^nd year than it is for my students in their 17^th or 18^th.  My memory may be bad, but I have more to remember than they do. 

The last year had its usual assortment of ups and downs for me.  Nothing terribly tragic occurred in my family even though it might have appeared so at the time.  My sons continue to make me very proud, as does my daughter-in-law.  My grandsons are quickly coming into their own distinct personalities and add so much delight to our lives.  Our wider family and circle of close friends also add to the warm glow that is every day.  Best of all, Nancy and I continue, after 39 years together, to discover and grow in our love for one another.

History has always interested me, particularly when I can make associations and connections from the past to the present, see the cyclical or spiral nature of events.  I’ve enjoyed reconnecting with people from my past—former classmates, students, colleagues—and drawn on some of those relationships as I look to the future for new opportunities and endeavors.  It will be fascinating to see what the new year brings.

I look forward this year most of all to my new grandchild.  Most are hoping for a girl, but I think the odds are against them.  Boy or girl, I am sure this addition to our family will bring us joy as well as his or her own challenges and changes.

I am hopeful that everyone will find opportunities to grow.  Clayton and Britnie are settling into their new jobs—parenting three children will bring its own…opportunities.  Matthew is at a crossroads of sorts in his music as he becomes once again primarily a solo artist.  I look forward to hearing new music!

My alma mater, Tarkio College, seems poised at rebirth after twenty years of closed doors.  Talk about challenges and opportunities!  This should be fun.

Every day I’ve been in the classroom I have seen all of this promise, the future building on the past, in the faces of my students.  My career is winding down and I look forward to new things, new faces in the next year or two.  It’s always great to see what they will do with their lives.  I am often surprised by them.

To paraphrase my favorite poet, Robert Frost, I enjoy looking into the woods so dark and deep with memories and the promise of peace, perhaps, but I, too, have “miles to go before I sleep,” and it’s time to get on with it.

Happy New Year!  Grab a brick.  You have castles to build.

Thanks Giving

Thanks.

What a small, inconsequential word.

“Thanks for…

…holding the door for me.”

…passing the butter.”

…the ride to school.”

…your help raking the leaves.”

…doing the dishes and taking out the trash.”

How about “Thanks for…

…creating the flu vaccine that will save my life.”

…putting out the fire that engulfed my home.”

…stopping the thief who stole from me.”

…fighting the enemies that are attacking our country.”

Thanks.

What a small, inconsequential word.  Not at all important.  Right.  Tell that to my mother.

No.  Please.  Tell my mother.  She’s the seventy-five years young lady at the nursing home.  The stroke victim who hasn’t been able to speak for the last seven years, or hold her great-grandsons or go to her youngest grandson’s wedding, or tell me that I have to say “Thank you” when someone does something for me, no matter how small and inconsequential.

Or tell my father who has sat by her side daily just to keep her company and bother the nurses and harass the doctors so that Mom has received special attention because he’s such a nuisance.  Why does he refuse to leave her side unless my brothers and I all but load him in the car and force him to go to dinner with us?  I think it’s his way of telling Mom “Thanks” for sixty years of marriage.  For thousands of the best meals.  For clean homes.  For three successful sons, three wonderful daughters-in-law, four terrific grandkids, two healthy great-grandsons.  For being the love of his life.

They’ve had quite a life.  We all have in the last 50-60 years.  Fortunately, we’ve lived here, in this country and in the Midwest where we take care of one another.  We work hard, sometimes at awful jobs (sometimes two or three at the same time), so we can one day do better or give our kids a better chance.  And we’ve helped others, too, because you never know when you lend a hand to others that they will one day be helping you up.

Yes.  I say thanks every chance I get.

I give thanks.  It’s a small gift, but not in the least inconsequential.

I hope you take the time, too.  And thanks for reading this.

To Each His Own

Many years ago, on a very cold November evening, I happened on a scene similar to the one described here.  That experience was the eventual inspiration for the following narrative essay that I have used as an example of both narrative and descriptive writing in my writing class.

“To Each His Own”

After the supper hour on a late December evening, the small Iowa town was winter dark. Leafless trees reached to one another for warmth and companionship across a silent street on the edge of town. At the end of the lonely avenue, a single streetlight struggled against the darkness.  No moon silvered the snow-laden clouds.  Flickering shadows cast by a front-room television were ghost dancers on the dirty snow in front of the single house in the middle of the last, long block.

I was out for a walk, believe it or not.  I suppose I was young enough then to ignore the cold.  For another fifty yards or so I would have the taunting north wind at my back, but soon I would have to turn around and force my way home against its frigid hammering.  The wind shouted at me, deriding me for my foolishness, cutting through the seams of my heavy coat, snatching at my wool cap, pushing me, taunting me, daring me to turn and face it.  It wasn’t the wind that was making me shiver, though.  A desolate, despondent loneliness assaulted me there and chilled more deeply than the icy wind.

I had driven this street before, but it wasn’t a neighborhood that invited site seeing.  I felt a stranger there.  Despite the temperature and the wind and the occasional needle sting of driven snow or dust, I found my steps slowing as I carefully took in the details of the small, one-story house that was the last evidence of the community.  Just beyond the streetlight’s dim glow, barbed-wire fences and corn stubble also marked the city limits.

Since there wasn’t a garage, there was no need for a driveway, but a rusted-out Duster sat forlornly near one corner of the house.  Without wheels and nothing else to support its sad weight, the hubs were buried in the old snow.  The car seemed to be sinking into the earth.  In contrast, a companion pickup truck faced the street nearby.  A heavyduty electrical cord ran from under the front door of the house to the grille of the truck, a life-sustaining umbilical in the cold.  Nearly new, the monstrous F150 must have been recently washed despite the weather.  Not a speck of dirt marred its glossy black finish.  Although I couldn’t see into the cab—the headlights were almost to my shoulder height, the body elevated on oversized tires and lifts—I assumed it would be spotless and state-of-the-art.  The gun rack in the rear window was empty but ready.

The house itself must have remained upright through stubbornness alone. It seemed to lean into the wind in old defiance.  Tarpaper shingles clung desperately to the roof.  If the clapboard sides had ever known paint, it was a vague memory.  One ill-fitting door was centered in the porchless front.  I did not need to move any closer than the curb to see inside.  A window, curtained by streaks of dirt, showed all of the single room.  Only the television provided illumination, but the huge screen seemed to fill an entire wall.  Next to it, like the trophy case of a perennial champion, proudly stood a gun cabinet even larger than the television, its prizes gleaming: an assortment of shotguns and rifles, scoped and strapped and, no doubt, lethally effective in the skilled hands of their proud owner.

He was seated close by, feet raised high in his La-Z-Boy, a magazine—Field and Stream or American Hunter most likely—open across his wide middle.  Head back, eyes closed, mouth open in a contented snore, he was unaware of my impolite observations until I coughed.

He couldn’t have heard me over the noise of the television and the wind whistling through the doorframe and around the window, but the dogs did.  I moved on as their clamor rose against the gale and discovered their kennel on the other side of the house.  Almost as large as the master’s home, the doghouse was a spotless palace with walls so thick they must have been insulated, a well-maintained roof—unlike the house nearby—carefully drained away from several runs and doors that provided at least half a dozen hounds access to their warm beds or their exercise yard.  They bayed me on my way.  As I walked into the shadows a few yards away, I heard them quickly silenced with precise commands shouted from the door.

I turned to face the remaining distance home.  At my own fireside would be my loving family and pampered pet, probably oblivious to the wind and cold.  I wondered, as I battled on, at the priorities I would have if circumstances forced me to choose between necessity and appearance and what impressions I would give to the world peeking in my windows.

01/18/04