Where I Am, How I See It

I wrote the tidy passage below in late August 2015 -- almost 17 months ago -- as the conclusion to the report to my college graduating class that the school invites us to submit every five years. It was printed and published with my classmates’ reports and contact information in a paperbound book by the reunion committee for our 35th reunion last June. I did not attend.

So its official publication date might be said to be 2016. A few things have changed since: my wife was struck down and injured rather dramatically (and not just because it made the local news) by a cyclist less than two months later, then diagnosed with breast cancer a year after that. On a more trivial level, I can no longer claim not to own a smartphone; my carrier forced me to get one last May, but I’ve never surfed the Web, read a book, or watched a video on it. I have sent text messages, though; probably fewer than a hundred in eight months. Mostly I call my wife.

I can’t say the three paragraphs below are necessarily the best thing I published last year, but they’re probably the most significant: the most pointed and honest. I think about them more often than anything else I’ve written in many a year. Not a few times in conversations, I’ve tried to reproduce the gist from memory to someone because it sums up where I’m at in my life and in the world. I usually forget one essential detail or another.

So, only slightly edited, I offer the following as my statement of position for this year and, undoubtedly, a number of years to come . . . 

More Play With Words

Last March, I gathered up the best examples of puns and wordplay that flowed across my Facebook page in 2015. Another good crop developed last year, but (everybody could use a good chuckle, right?) here are my best from the year before, 2014:

Jan. 10: So, we're talking a mega-crossover with the Star Wars franchise for the final Hobbit movie. They won't let us use any of the major Lucas characters in Middle Earth, but they'll let us have the Wookie.

He would be the Tolkien Chew.

Jan. 28:  I think my favorite mixed metaphor will always be “you’re beating your head against a dead horse,” but I just ran across one that’s almost as good: “There are four ways for habitual wallflowers to come out of their shells….”

March 7: If you have twin redheads in high school, is the one who was delivered second when they were born the beta carrot-teen?