HAPPY NEW YEAR

I took off for a weekend last month
Just to try and recall the whole year.
All of the faces and all of the places,
wonderin' where they all disappeared.
----Jimmy Buffet

Yet another year gets a shovel load of earth on 
her once fresh face...I find the years go by so fast that 
we scarcely have time for reflection save a nervous
glance in the rear view to make sure you did not run over 
the neighbors child. Part of the reasons I scribble out these
monthly missives, is that it is almost a way to keep track of what has
passed me by like a caffeinated Long Island railroad commuter
trying to sketch the landscape out the window. 

It is a cold late January now and your resolutions have probably gone
out that very same train window. The world spins all too fast on its 
wobbled axis these days the evenings of lemonade on the porch only exist in
old Norman Rockwell Prints. At best you huddle together on the holidays
with old friends and family and try to "catch up" Unless you are the idle rich
(which probably just means you are bored) as humans were not meant to be idle,
rich or poor. Unless you are Dali's old neighbor in Spain who Dali
called the laziest man in the world because he would sometimes say "you know,
there are some years where you don't quite feel like doing anything"

But we are restless birds by nature and only at home when we are on the wing.
we must do things, lots of things. Even for Jimmy Buffet, there is only so much beach a
soul can take. We fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way and by the time train
rolls into the station you realize I there really was was the journey.