Commentary

“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”

–Madeleine L’Engle

The step over from 2020 to the New Year will be robustly celebrated by most as the twentieth year of this century (gratefully) passes into history.

What 2021 will bring, of course, remains to be seen.

I was 11 on New Year’s Eve, 1969, and when the ball dropped in Times Square, I remember thinking: I wonder what the next decade will bring?”

We went from Nixon to Reagan; from bias ply to steel-belted radials; from Mad Magazine to National Lampoon; from 24¢ a gallon to 80¢; from the thrill of Olympic victory to the terror of Munich, 1972; from trust in technology to suspicion when Murphy’s Law was invoked at Three Mile Island.

Fifty years later, on New Year’s Eve, 2019, occupying our attention were the issues of the day, financial obligations, deadlines and coping with–guess what?–computers.

New Year’s Day 2020 offered promise of continued prosperity, continued relations with friends and family, and new challenges.

Hey, 2020, you turned out to be a real dud.

John Wayne had a great monologue on making the best of each day, and we think the words “next year” could be substituted. “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life,” the Duke said. “Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

Hopefully we’ll heed this wisdom as we embark on a new year.

There are challenges and it will be uphill. We hope that the vaccines will address the fears of many governors who have devastated their states with shut-downs.

We grieve for the young people, especially those in high school, who are making the most of their most memory-making years in spite of there being no athletics and most everything being canceled or severely restricted. We hope that “normal” will return at some point in the next couple months so some of it can be salvaged.

Stress over the disruption of society is not good. Many civic and fraternal groups have stopped meeting. My prayer is that we don’t get so used to their absence that, when “normal” returns, we don’t go back to those meetings. Hopefully, everyone is sick and tired of binge watching stuff on Netflix or YouTube.

As we age, we gather and build into our “warehouse” of experiences, as L’Engle infers in the quote above.

Yes, we remember the “ages” we’ve been, and, for me at least, as I plodded through 2020, it was a solace to escape from the present and remember experiences and events from life: the birth of our children...learning to drive a car...feeling the love of family...the exhilaration of winning the big game...visiting with old friends...surviving treacherous winter camping...watching silent movies with my Dad....

Twenty twenty one comes to us clean on January 1. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from last year.