time

It’s that time of year again when we say hello to the new year , 2022 , and wave goodbye to the old one . Seems to happen every year . I used to have trouble during the first stretch of each new year remembering to write the correct year when I dated checks . That’s not so much of an issue now that I almost never write checks any more .

Along with check writing , I never have a problem any more trying to get the typewriter ribbon in correctly . For that matter , I never have to brush Wite-out onto my mistakes any more either . Wite-out was that white liguid that came in a small black and white bottle and had a little brush applicator . It came along , I think , after the Wite-out correction tape . It blocked out typed mistakes and I guess it was supposed to blend in smoothly on the paper so that it would not be noticed . The liquid never worked that way for me, though . I went through a lot of those tiny bottles of Wite-out , and the finished products always had loads of hardened shiny blobs of the stuff covering the pages .

Ah , the good-old days !

I haven’t stayed in touch with any of the kids I went to elementary school with ( with whom —- sorry , Sister ! ) . I saw a few of them at my high school reunion a few years ago . One was a pilot living up in the northwest . One had invented some kind of a new design of a turbo engine that would revolutionize the industry and he had twenty employees developing it for him . I understood that he was trying to sell the whole enterprise , though , before the corporate competition shut his little enterprise down in underhanded dealing . Another guy was a musician who played a circuit of small gigs . We all chit-chatted over drinks in an old Mexican restaurant bar the night before the official reunion dinner at the school , brought up a few memories of the old days and exchanged bits of information about where we all lived now and what we were up to these days .

I wistfully wondered about some of them , what kind of lives they had led , what kind of partners they had if any and what families they had . What were their hobbies , dreams , disappointments , etc. ” So , what have you been up to for the last 50 years ? “

Useless enterprise . I’ll never see any of those people again , I think . For that matter , I hardly knew them during grade school days . Bits of memories remain , tid-bits here and tid-bits there . I’ll keep those , such as they are . As for the rest of it , all of those people are on their own ! As Bogart once said in an old film , ” ……it don’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world “.

Anyhow , here’s looking at you , kid !

I think that I don’t mull much over the past . Friends of mine might disagree , but either way the world just keeps coming and going and we all just have to hang on for the ride . Joan Didion wrote ,” The future always looks good in the golden land because no one remembers the past “. Not so , I think , but let’s move along .

Maybe I’m a fatalist . I’d like to be a realist but am not sure if I am or not . I’d like to be an individualist , too , but again am not so sure that I would fit the category . I know for sure that I’m not a classicist or a scientist or a lot of other ists . I might be a leftist with rightist tendencies . I’m certainly not a cubist or an insurrectionist or a parachutist or an ornithologist , at any rate. If I were a futurist populist I’d have something more wiseist to say and I might even wake up in the upcoming new year to be a rationalist , (and we can’t have that !)

Better just leave it all here for the moment . I may be slipping into sounding like a narcissist . At least I’m definitely not a pessimist .

Best wishes for the new year ! [ Be an optimist . ]

HAPPY NEW YEAR !