The change of year.

2015 ended for me much as it began, in the company of hometown friends and family.  December 31 consisted of a trip to a nearby small city and browsing through a bookstore and then tea at a nearby café.  Then it was over to the nursing home to visit my ailing grandfather.  Visits with Papa are not easy.  He cannot walk and the conversation was entirely based on events, people, and places from the past.  The best thing visitors can do is just ride it out with amusement.  Yesterday, he demanded a meeting be set up with someone from Parliament Hill to deal with an unspecified situation.  Germans were also apparently moving into the nursing home.  This is technically true as there are many German surnames on the doors of the rooms, and the facility is affiliated with the Lutheran church.  Last week, my brother-in-law was Acting Prime Minister of Canada.  After wishing the beloved old family patriarch a Happy New Year, I called on some friends along the way home to wish them the same.  A pint of Labatt’s 50 and some beer nuts brought flavour to two hours of laughs.

I met some friends for New Year’s Eve dinner at a popular restaurant in a nearby village.  The German influence is strong in local cuisine here so I ordered a pork schnitzel that was about three square feet with a bowl of sauerkraut on the side.  For good measure, I ordered an ale from an Eastern Ontario brewery.  I can’t stomach lager—even if it’s a more authentic pairing for schnitzel.  The party moved to a friend’s home in a nearby city after.  More people arrived, all of whom I’ve known for many years and was quite happy to see again.  Almost all of them had some kind of connection to the town where I grew up and have called my family home for 25 years.  Games were played, food was eaten, stories and jokes told.  Conservative engineer friends and a political functionary politely yet humourously tolerated my defence of Bernie Sanders, but we all agreed on the insanity of Donald Trump and the overblown drama surrounding Justin Trudeau.  I didn’t want to be too late getting back to my parents place.  It was nearly an hour’s drive, some snow was falling, and I didn’t want to be on the highway when the roads were full of drunk driving twits.  After returning another friend to his home, I welcomed 2016 in relative silence with just the sound of the car engine and the tires on a rural highway.  I sounded the horn a few times at midnight.  Maybe those in their farmhouse living rooms or livestock in adjacent barns noticed.

A New Year is not about drastic change.  It’s about taking stock of life’s priorities and improving upon what we already do.  Some will decide to lose weight.  Others will try to quit smoking.  A more confident, cheerful, and positive attitude are my plans for 2016.  These are not unreasonable resolutions.  They will enable other things that are already a part of daily life to have better results.  There will be times of difficulty and frustration, and the first day of the new year already had its share of those for me.  This does not mean the next 12 months are going to be a disaster.  Life only goes as good as the attitude of the person living it.  I’m not one to believe those silly predictions for the year ahead as made by a variety of so-called experts. 

The first day of 2016 also brought a great amount of joy.  I visited my sister and her wonderful family and played with Mr. Six and Buttercup whom I love so much.  I went for a walk to visit my lonely and elderly grandmother.  I walked through a snow-covered park in a town I’ve been connected with for 25 years and felt amused by how there is a plaque on every structure in the park that was made as a donation because thoughtful citizens believed it was necessary and the town council was too cheap to build anything on their own.  Parks and natural space traditionally get less attention in towns where secular temples for hockey and baseball are in high demand.  I walked over a bridge donated by the widow of a late Ford dealership owner and then along a path built in memory of a late pharmacist that passes by a small garden in memory of a former recreation board member and his wife.  Further along, there was a park bench overlooking the river, the clean, natural location being loaded with irony as the bench was donated in memory of the man who once ran the town garbage dump.

2016 will hopefully be an improvement upon 2015.  I want focus, confidence, and cheerful, positive, determination.  These are challenging, but not impossible resolutions.

Happy New Year!