New Year’s eve has always shared space with my dad; he was born at quarter to midnight, on the last day of 1933. Some time during the day, we’d celebrate his birthday, and as he did not drink, we would not raise a glass to him; instead we’d talk about books and ideas. He has a notion that it’s important to “not let people get in your head”, and to him that meant governments, teachers, and even parents. However, to a certain extent he had an exclusion category, and that was storytellers. He would happily allow a book to transport him to another time, another world, and into another characters head. He just didn’t want anyone in his own head.

He’s passed on now, and left this world in 2007. I’ve had the notion for the past few years that he was wandering in books, and whispering stories on the wind himself. He was going to write a book about the Silk Road, and never got around to it. I wonder if it may be a story that I need to write for him some time, if I can find that inner storyteller, and do the tale justice. It feels like something it might be time to start this year, even if I only write it for myself.

The story and the characters seem familiar, from many conversations we had over the years, and he shared so much love of learning and travel that I feel the part of him that lives on in me will carry him with me when I visit places he visited from his armchair and imagination.

Wherever you are dad, I was thinking of you on your birthday.

Copyright 2012 R Loader all rights reserved

2012 is the year to make time for happiness. Rumors of meteors and end-of-the-world prophecies abound; there are even movies about it. My philosophy about all this is to take a single day at a time, live like I mean it to be forever, and make time for happiness. I am leaving the doors open, metaphorically speaking, to possibility. May it enter through the door, present itself in front of me, or meander in on a vagrant breeze.

And on the subject of the (supposed) end of the Mayan calendar, Mayan mystics seem to be carrying on as if the end of one year simply means the beginning of the next. Around winter solstice this year, we’ll be partying again as if it were 1999, another year when the world did not end.

Things to celebrate this year are a new planet found in our stellar neighborhood, the progress forward of health care for everyone, the end of big war in Iraq, and the lovely experiment in alternate fuels that’s been going on in Brazil for some time. As an old friend said once, “how can we fail to be happy in a world that has kittens and rainbows in it?”.

Copyright 2012 R Loader all rights reserved