Well, our lease on 2012 is about to expire. Time to pack up and move on. Time is a fickle friend…it never gives, it only lends. And our loan’s coming due.
It’s been an interesting year. But now it’s time to fold up the old tent and find a new spot to erect it. There’s something sad about packing up. Like moving from one house to another…some things are just worn out, past their useful life. We have to leave ‘em behind.
The problem with tents is that they are at best temporary. My favorite recollection of tents is the ‘pup tent’ we used to camp along creek banks, back yards and dense woods. Purchased used from Army-Navy stores, we were warriors on the move, armed with Daisy, lever-action BB guns and firecrackers. We were terrors to small creatures. Now we are small creatures subject to terrors. Life turns tables.
A couple of times a year the carnival came to town. It was exciting, seeing the set-up, anticipating the sideshows with their grotesque and parallel universe of characters. We paid real money to see these tent spectacles. Reminds me of Congress today. At least the carnivals moved on when our money ran out or the novelty wore off.
Life’s like that. Like it or not, it demands we clean up, pack up and move on. Which, on the eve of a new year, is exactly what we’re doing at our house…ruthlessly casting out the old rubbish, making room for the new.
No, The Hearns are renouncing the urge to make rash resolutions this year. Why? A futile endeavor. Like promising yourself you’ll shed those unwanted pounds, only to realize that you covet the chocolate more than you hate the heft. That’s what resolutions are for anyway, to expose the weakness and frailty of human flesh.
Mark Twain was prescient when he wrote in 1863:
“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter. We shall reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time.
New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”
Today I’m resolved to organize the cabinet. The photograph explains why. Enough clutter…cast out the duct tape and floor wax and mosquito repellent and empty oil cans and gummy emulsions of suspicious origin that occupy perfectly good space. I keep only the $9.99 Home Depot rubber knee pads. Successful marriages demand husbands keep a pair handy and wear them early and often.
We were forced to fold our Friday Forum lunch tent in October. We had our own sideshow for eight years, a pretty good run. Fed about 22,000 hungry islanders with Chef Mike’s down-home, country cooking, sprinkled with spices of occasional insults and humorous gravy. Alas, it was casualty to Chef Mike’s knee gone gimpy and accentuated by local governmental powers gone berserk. You know, small bureaucratic minds inside of big empty heads on the public dole.
But all sideshows, tents and bright lights lose their luster sooner or later. Like all the clutter we collect and keep. Outta sight, outta mind, you know. We’re like dogs burying bones in the trackless desert sands on the way to Mecca…we’re not coming back this way!
Soon, one short second, an infinitesimally small measure of time, will forever send 2012 packing, DOA and toe-tagged, soon to be buried in history. We can hold a wake for it, look back with longing, but we can’t go back and retrieve the bones we buried there.
Meanwhile, History moves on in its inexorable pace toward an unforeseen and indeterminate conclusion, kept entirely secret in the sole counsels of Divine Wisdom.
Here’s hoping you find pleasant meadows in which to stake your claim and erect your tent in 2013. For your evening revelry, I offer this toast from Benjamin Franklin: “Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors and let each New Year find you a better person.”
Happy New Year. Bottoms up and Auld Lang Syne!
Bud Hearn
December 31, 2012
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