There was no meeting with an old lover in a grocery store as a piano softly played and the snow did not turn to rain in 2024. There was the potential to meet an old lover as we were in the same county in another state. I turned an invitation over and over in my mind as I watched boats on the canals of Fort Lauderdale. I crossed the Everglades, still turning it over when I stopped in his county. I withheld the invitation and neither did we happen upon each other through a chance encounter. The arbitrary boundaries on the map that compressed us into the same few square miles were not strong enough to force a meeting.
Dan Fogelberg's song is nice enough, but as much as songs may sometimes underline our reality, they do not create it.
I did speak with an old lover a few times this year. I wanted his side, his recollections and then after he read an advance copy of Shadow's Gravity, I wanted his opinion. Had I gotten enough right about us? His verdict was that I had in the condensed space there was for him. He said I made him sound too beautiful, but he was and still is. He invited me to meet him on a levee again, to watch the sky, talk about the future and spar over George Michael. He vowed not to slap me the next go-around. I rubbed my cheek and I chided him that I had not drowned.
There were deaths among my family and I saw some relatives who I had not seen in too long of a time. Life is filled with gaps and silences as much as we may say we are busy filling that time with the noise of everyday living.
My favorite moments this year were meeting my great nephew a few times and watching my nephew get married. I am not much of an advice giver, but I wished him good luck.
I loafed, gardened, finished writing the end of the Aviary Hill Series, read other writers, listened to music new and old, swam in the ocean (too far out as per usual), hiked and walked more miles than I could ever write about.
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| Carter campaign memorabilia on display at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Photos by me, March 2016. |
Goodbye, President Jimmy Carter. Thank you to him for helping to preserve the Chattahoochee River.
At the end of this year, I kept asking myself where the time had gone, not just 2024 but all of my fifty-one years. I reflected and remembered what I wrote in Dweller On The Boundary: time is a wild river like one I swam in as a boy or watched beside the Indian mounds. Time is downstream from where I type this and it does not matter. The world keeps on spinning.
My favorite new song of 2024 was And Nothing is Forever from the Cure's 2024 album.
My favorite new to me old song for 2024 is Cars and Explosions (1979) by a long ago Atlanta band called The Fans.
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