Month: December 2025

The year in review

I will always remember 2025 as a wonderful year.

I will always remember 2025 as a horrible year.

Still recovering from an unspeakable loss two years ago, I found a new soulmate. I called her The Hugger in the early weeks, and then dropped the coyness and have just called her Mary, which is her name. I will never forget Carol Jean, with whom I shared 26 of the best years of my life, but Mary has carved her own joyful space in my heart and I am alive again.

But then I lost the best friend I never met. Wally Conger and I connected when we both were teenaged Spider-Man fans back in the late 1960s, when I lived in New Jersey and he in California, and we reconnected about 20 years ago after we both had become libertarians and borderline anarchists — Wally was closer to the border than I, but we shared an intense distrust of government “solutions.”

I was looking forward to introducing him to Carol Jean, but we lost her before that could happen. I knew I would rectify that and take Mary out to see him someday, but all those vague plans came to a crashing end April 21 when Wally died. I still have no adequate words.

Otherwise this was shaping up into an unbelievably lovely year. Mary and I went to see Amy Grant in Madison, Lorrie Morgan in Green Bay, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in Wisconsin Dells. She came to my college reunion, and I came to her high school reunion. People in church started calling us “the lovebirds.”  

And then, on the morning of Aug. 28, Mary got that call no parent ever wants to receive. Her youngest daughter, Tracy, had died in her sleep. It was a complete shock that sent Mary reeling, and she will never completely recover. You don’t recover from the death of your child, you just adjust to a surreal world where she is gone.

And that is 2025. I will always remember it as the wonderful year when Mary and I got to know each other well enough to know we want to be together, for better or for worse, as long as we both shall live. I will also remember it as the horrible year when we lost Mary’s daughter and the best friend I never met.

And so thank you, Lord, for this most amazing year, and for giving Mary a companion who was there to try to comfort her after a loss where comfort is impossible to find.

And what will the new year bring? Well, let’s find out, starting tomorrow morning.

Ten thousand words later …

As I spend way too much time on social media, I’m discovering that in this era of ever-diminishing attention spans, writers are taking longer and longer to get to the point.

An ad about a new product that solves a problem spends paragraph after paragraph describing the problem in infinite detail, then outlining failed attempt after failed attempt to fix it. After awhile the reader starts scrolling ahead, ready to scream, “WHAT IS THE SOLUTION AND HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?!?!”

And so I’m going to skip all that and get straight to the point, so you can get on with your day:

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else flows from there.

Mission: Be cool

I moved the snowman in sunglasses from his long perch atop the bookcase to a spot on top of the Bose speaker. He has a wry smile as if to say, “It’s cool. I’m cool. Everything’s cool.”

Of course he would be cool if he really was made of snow. But he’s a plush toy. Actually, he’s an electronic toy — there’s a place to insert batteries in his bottom. So maybe his main purpose was to move about and sing a song or something.

I don’t need him to be anything more than a smiling snowman. Have I diverted him from his mission? I hope not. He is enough for me as a silent, whimsical guardian of the music.