According to the word processing app, if I packaged this year’s 365 blog posts into a book, I’d have a tome of more than 130,000 words. I’ve been averaging more than 10,000 words a month, each month a novelette’s worth of words, a novel every six months, or an epic novel for the year.
What would it be a novel about? A novelist who can’t finish novels but waxes philosophic day by day, keeper of golden retrievers who love treats and doggy daycare, who wonders where all the hate comes from in a world where we worship a man who taught, “Love thy neighbor.”
Early on he would watch in horrified fascination, with his beloved across the room in her easy chair, as sportscasters struggled for words while a football player fought for his life after his heart stopped on the field. Almost 12 months later he would have to double-check to remember the young man’s name — Damar Hamlin, who did recover and return to the football field, but his playing time this fall has been limited.
The next day his beloved would make her own first trip to the hospital, beginning their last story together. That story would end, halfway through the year, as he stroked her hair with his left hand and read the Bible to her, steadying his laptop with his right hand as he spoke: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
He would think about those words over and over for the rest of the year, and like Longfellow during the Civil War, he asked himself what is humanity’s problem? “In despair I bowed my head; ‘There is no peace on Earth,’ I said.” Well, there ought to be, he would think: People want peace, their loved ones safe from harm.
As we approach the end of the epic novel that is 2023, perhaps in the final pages the novelist who can’t finish novels — but who did finish and publish a well-received novelette — will come to a realization about how intensely he feels about pursuing those two commandments and make plans to spend the next year shouting to the world, gently, about the search for peace and love and understanding.
“I have discovered firsthand how fragile life is, how short it can be, how there is never enough time for everything so we should focus on what is most important, and that is loving one another,” he will say quietly to one of his golden retrievers, who will stretch, jump off the love seat, circle three times and lie down on the floor with a sigh.
It would be a disjointed book, not as puzzling as Ulysses perhaps and probably more accessible to the average reader than Joyce’s book. And it would end with hope — a commitment to life, a commitment to a message of peace, a commitment to making the world a better place with whatever time is left.
Perhaps, in the last scene of the movie adaptation, he will pour a glass of sweet cherry wine and raise it toward the shelf where his beloved’s ashes rest, and an ancient pop song will rise in the background to play over the closing credits: “No, we ain’t gonna fight; Only God has the right to decide who’s to live and die.”
