Whispers of a Dying Year

It's easy to see that this year, like all others before it, is determined to come to end, quite quickly now. I don't want to characterize it one way or another, as good or bad.

It was complicated.

Another year like it simply cannot follow. Some things must change. Two years ago this time, I would never have predicted what 2010 would bring. I will never consider 2010 to have been a good year, for it was a disastrous year.

As years go, I despise its memory. As a year, it betrayed my trust and left me talking to myself.

Given all that, 2011 represented a holding pattern -- a year of standing still. Others would not agree and would say I moved ahead resolutely, accomplishing much. For my family, it was a year we can collectively be proud of.

But for me, another year best forgotten, more or less. What might suit others, for perfectly good reasons, doesn't cut it for me, or for what I expect of myself.

There was some good writing that emerged from these fingers tapping this keyboard -- I'll allow that much.

But nothing great or memorable. Nothing likely to last in any meaningful way. That I made our limited resources stretch to cover the essentials is fine, I suppose, but I expect more of myself, really.

Of course the economy sucks. We are in the midst of historical readjustments. Our expectations for the future cannot match those of our past.

They can't. The future can never be what the past was, let alone what we imagine we remember it to be.

The very nature of memory is romantic. Story-tellers are romantics; I used to be at once a story-teller and thus also a romantic.

Unless prompted, I rarely tell stories any longer. I'm no longer convinced anyone wants to hear them, outside of my closest family members.

With them I still joke and recall the past, both the ancient past and the more recent romantic versions of our collective family history.

As the paternal keeper of our past, and the elder, I have a certain responsibility to them to get the stories straight if they often were crooked in nature, or at least I think they may have been crooked in real-time.

Life never proceeds in a straight line. Here I am, long after everyone else around me is asleep, pecking out letters and words -- why? Is it that I sense how time evaporates and takes all meaning with it, like echoes from a tunnel when you exit, blinking into the bright sun of everyone else's reality.

There are those who would be surprised that they still play starring roles in our family stories. They would conclude, logically, that they would by now have been written out of what we share with one another, but a family like ours -- a family of writers -- doesn't work that way.

Just because you die or split or try to become a stranger doesn't mean that we don't remember you, that we don't know you, that we do not know how to fit you into our shattered mirror of reality as we have known it, from all sides now.

Families like this one don't work that way.

I may be the elder and the keeper of the story but that doesn't mean my stories hold the most weight. No, every other member of this family has her or his own version, and if you listen carefully enough, you'll pick up on that music.

You can come. You can go. But you can't stop the family music.

What's that? I thought I heard an echo of someone, of something. Ah. It's easy to see that this post, like all others before it, is determined to come to end, quite quickly now.