Boxing Day, 2019

For some reason, Boxing Day always seems to me a good time for summing up the previous year and peeking ahead to the new one. Christmas has come and gone and we've entered that interim period of the holiday season between the religious part and the secular part. Nowadays it's not so easy to see anything religious in most of our seasonal celebrations, but that's a discussion for another time. Today is a day of recovery and recollection. This year we were on our own again, friends and family were all either elsewhere or otherwise engaged. But after many decades of celebrating the holidays on our own, we actually seem to be quite content to have ourselves a merry little Christmas, with our three Christmas trees and the O Gauge Polar Express circling the big tree in the living room. We've watched most of our favorite Christmas movies and opened our gifts, and done our best to cook up a modest Christmas feast to savor while we start a new Christmas jigsaw puzzle and watch an entire day of NBA basketball. (No Spurs this year, but they'll be on tonight.)

And so 2019 is stumbling slowly into the past, where I suspect it will stand out in our memories as a very strange time indeed. So many folks seem to be upset about something, but I cannot think of a thing I can do to help them, so I'll just have to keep on keeping on for a while longer, doing my own thing as we used to say back in what many might think were even stranger times. And truthfully, for myself and my dear wife, we are getting by as best we can. Conditions are not ideal, but seriously when were they ever? So we make the most of what we have and try not to worry about what we don't. And one thing we now have is that new EV we said we were going to get, and it came just in time for Christmas. So at last we have joined those fortunate people we keep seeing on the television commercials who buy themselves a new car for a Christmas present. I would like to say we've purchased it for the planet, to combat carbon emissions and global warming, but I'm doubtful this alone will make much of an impact. And yet perhaps we can help others make the transition to electric by showing them how neat it is to drive around in a Leaf.

My main summing up, these days, tends to be a rundown of all the books I've read during the year. I'm afraid that 2019 has been a bit of a disappointment. I only read twenty-one books, and one of those was one I had first read last year. I re-read it for my Men's Book Club. The only excuse I can offer for this rather paltry number is that many of this year's books were very long, and for some reason I never really took a break to read any of the things that I tend to go through rather quickly. But after finishing the year with Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014) and Bill Bryson's The Body: a Guide for Occupants (2019), I started Colin Dexter's Death Is Now My Neighbor (1996), and I suspect I may begin 2020 on a Colin Dexter binge. I've not read any of his books before, but I am a devoted fan of Inspector Morse, his marvelously grumpy and often disagreeable detective, brought to life by John Thaw in the now classic British TV series that ran for years on PBS. As I read Dexter's novel I can both see and hear John Thaw in the character of Chief Inspector Morse, and Kevin Whately as Sergeant Lewis.

All that now remains of my holiday observances is to watch a few more of my favorite Christmas movies, perhaps including The Shop Around the Corner and Comfort and Joy, and to begin the ritual of filling in my 2020 appointments (mostly with physicians, chiropractors, and dentists) in my new Letts pocket diary. Then after the turning of the new year soon follows my birthday, and 2020 will be officially launched. My only plan at the moment is to remain as well as I can manage and to enjoy each day to the fullest with as little concern as possible for all those things that seemed to be bothering folks throughout 2019. After all, what can I do about that stuff anyway, and besides, I've got my new EV to tool around in. That should keep me amused while leaving no noxious emissions behind to disturb my neighbors. And so in the immortal words of Alan Bird, God bless us every one.