2024 – THE YEAR IN REVIEW
Well?…they can’t all be winners can they? About a month before I sat down to write this year’s end of year newsletter, I found myself bombarded by social media messages urging those who had a great year to consider keeping it to themselves lest we trigger those spring loaded to reflect on the year with despair. I think the social media campaign is misguided firstly because it suggests any conventionally great year would arouse envy when in fact the moments I would feel most accomplished earning admiration for are the average, the ordinary, and the way I live the chalky blah foundation that generally makes up what is most of my life and not the stuff of posts. 2024 wasn’t what I would call a bad year, but there was a lot of grown-up, utilitarian genuflecting, even more than last year, the kind of methodical git’er done experience such that when the end of the year came I felt there were several Tuesdays that lasted for two to three weeks. -No meadowed story of puppy dogs and daffodils here. -And secondly if any of my readers feel that their lives ARE a boring, chalky blah, I’ve come to believe when I feel bored that I am usually guilty of simply not paying attention.
I am only on one social media platform, and for me that is plenty to manage. -And like many have expressed on that platform, often times through the recycled posts and memes of others, I am not convinced any one person’s offerings are evidence of any kind of joie de vivre nor am I convinced as one of my more cynical friends believes that outwardly happy posts bely an unrecognized emptiness and misery on the part of the person posting. In my own experience throughout 2024, the vast majority of my peaks AND troughs went wholly unrecorded in the digital world. Indeed the only thing I grew certain of was that my cynical friend could not take HIS friends at face value even to the extent that the post might be just a snapshot in time, true if even for only a moment. -And what is wrong with a moment or for that matter, why give a real sh** that anyone reading them is convinced of anything durable?
I don’t know if it makes for good reading, but last spring Theresa and I took a week off simply to get work done around the house, and what a busy week it was. Apart from teaching my judo classes, every day of that week was very full of painting, cleaning, sorting, boxing, and purging unwanted stuff. We did, I think, treat ourselves on most of those days to an easy meal at some nearby eatery, and when the week was over, the only real regret I had, if it could be called such, was that our efforts weren’t a little more than a dent in the big picture of things needing to be done, -that and perhaps the regret of returning to work. I had a solid week of good company I did not want to end. I wish we had had three weeks like that, but then I would simply have three dents to tell you about. Still as homely as the story might seem, I spent the week exactly where I wanted to be.
Some of the most dependable high points of 2024 were the quasi-weekly visits of my kids to the house to do their laundry. They’re great visits! What might seem to some as an errand of otherwise pedestrian chores invariably turns into a chain reaction of accidental laughter. Someone always walks into a zing. Theresa always treats the kids to a meal, usually the best of the week. Our dog, Todd, gets loved on mercilessly, and I get caught up on the goings on in my kids’ lives. It is not the sort of scene that anyone can make happen as one might booking a cruise, and if the fun were to occur around some other hygienic chore like shaving or toothbrushing, any post about it would probably seem very odd. To be sure the joy of these experiences runs marrow deep, and I don’t know what I am going to do when my two kids eventually get a place with an in-house washer and dryer. Sabotage might be an option.
I think it is a fact that I took more x-rays than selfies in 2024. There were two sustained distracting and preoccupying forces in my 2024, and one of them was the perhaps long overdue servicing of my joint issues, -hands, shoulders, hips, and most recently an elbow. I could probably have tossed in my left knee, but let’s not get crazy. Unlike the healthcare assassin recently in the news, I am generally grateful for my healthcare. I would have been sidelined in my thirties had I been left with the medical options available a hundred years ago. For most of human history most people simply didn’t get any solution, much less the solutions I’ve gotten, and had to accept that some body parts are simply not going to do anymore that thing they used to do. I mean, there is some of that too in my story, but at 55 I live a very active life many standard deviations from the norm. For me, life is still getting lived mightily, -full measure.
The other force that kept me occupied was a five-month work project such that if I weren’t going to one of my seven doctors in 2024, I was pulling marathon coding sessions in my office. If it sounds like a complaint, it really should be a brag. Worthwhile things take time and effort, and my project worked out beautifully. Between the doc visits and my work, I only logged 3300 cycling miles this year, the lowest mileage I’ve recorded in more than a decade. Date nights too were fewer or simplified, -darts and nachos at a dive bar near the house became de rigueur. It’s become such a convenient, no-brainer outing that we sprung for our own set of darts which seem to have thrown the game my way lately. It’s cheap, easy fun.
I learned this year that there is a practical reason boxer tails are bobbed at birth. They’re long and thick and have a mind of their own. I can’t blame Dottie for her lack of tail control that seems more available to our other dog, Todd. More than once I’ve stood holding our back door open for her only to be in full view of the neighbors doubled over and groaning in my bathrobe thanks to her boney meat sledge perfectly finding its mark. She of course looks on fully unaware of the thorough coldcocking she’s pulled off. Dottie, our boxer mix Theresa adopted at 14 weeks last Mother’s Day, is, if you’ll pardon the indelicacy, a total treat whore. There is not a person reading this she would not hunt down, kidnap, and drag back to my house for a Milkbone dog biscuit if I could make the command understood (that’s the key though isn’t it). She reminds me of actress Grace Jones in that there is barely a feature about her that suggests to me femininity yet her chiseled physique is without a doubt magnetically impressive. We’ll soon do DNA testing on her, and who knows? If she is anything like Todd, we’ll find out she is the unboxer, boxer-free boxer. -So?…yes, there is a puppy dog in this year’s story, but no daffodils.
Bulleting out the rest. Mom turned 80. -Nice visit from my sister and nephew around that. Keagan got on full-time with the school district, and we had a very pleasant road trip to Vegas for her 25th birthday. Emerson continues to snowboard like a native boss, and Theresa is still a not to be duplicated force of nature. I made nidan. That’s a judo thing by the way.
I’ll end with this. For many years throughout my marriage, I’ve been pretty regular about writing handwritten notes and letters to Theresa. I imagine, with a fairly high level of confidence, there are married or partnered women out there reading this who might want to lean over right now and nudge, See, honey, why don’t you do that? It sounds like an automatically romantic idea, the sort of thing to make the other wives green with envy, until you inevitably get the note that makes you think, Meh, is that all there is? and Do I have to read ALL of these? They can’t all be winners, and I promise you they weren’t. I am not even offering this paragraph because I’ve received a recent complaint or have myself lost interest in the practice. I just know an unpolished landing must be the occasional case, and the temptation might be, for any man trying out this practice, to stop the first time he is not met at the door in lingerie and a candle lit dinner on the table. I think most well-lived lives are the Money-Balled variety, the steady stream of base hits in a world that too often looks for the homerun. The homerun expectation is unsustainable, and I am here to tell you my 2024 was a lot of base hits which is…perfectly fine. Hell, you tell me. This year’s newsletter might be nothing more than a bunt.