New Year's Eve 2019

It occurred to me yesterday with a shock that after midnight tonight, my life will have spanned eight calendar decades, or parts thereof - though I am only a youngster in my sixties.  How extraordinary.

The years pass by quickly now, as my grandmother warned me they would.  Sometimes one might wish to say, O beautiful time, stop and linger - but like birds on a fence, the moments of life flicker and are gone before one can speak a word.

I had intended to close the year with some philosophical ruminations - but the clock is running out on me, and really, I have nothing new to offer beyond what many other older and wiser men have already said about time and life and love here on this small and fractious planet.

On the whole, it has been a happy year for M.P. and me, despite assorted health problems and financial difficulties at various times - but for the moment all those worries have subsided, and we are spending the holidays in quiet comfort and good cheer, thanks be to God.

So among the anxious changes and chances of this transitory world, I will end by simply wishing all my truckbuddies health, wealth, and happiness in the new year--and I leave you with this timely quotation from the fourth inaugural address of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945:

I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled: "Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights--then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend."