4 January 2025

Perhaps I am not alone, Dear Reader, slouching my way into the new year:  this holiday season has been a curious mixture of alternating cheer (largely solitary) and anxiety.  Leading up to Christmas there were promising developments (the arrival of the Rye Beach Landscaping crew and their marvelous French excavating machine, appearing like an early gift from Santa at my front door the week before Christmas to prepare the way for better daffodil access come spring), some auspicious signs (my tutelary barred owl George made a welcome appearance), and some semi-successful attempts at celebration (a couple hours spent at Strawberry Banke’s Candlelight Stroll in Portsmouth on the night of the winter solstice (crowded, and BLOODY cold!), as well as preparation of a pork-and-apple stew for Christmas dinner (tasty, but consumed alone).  Christmas Day itself was bright, and a walk at Wallis Sands helpful:  dogs cavorted and taciturn Yankees for once exchanged greetings.

But I was having to work at staying on top of bad news, personal and general.  This first Christmas without my sister in the world was never far from my thoughts, and as all those who grieve know, the latest loss recalls all the others.  Public radio, my constant companion when I am not reading or writing, kept dropping distressing reports.  Barred Owls, considered “invasive” in the Pacific Northwest, are being shot to save the Northern Spotted Owl from extinction, and NPR offered that particular sound byte (Oh, no!  George!).

Then NHPR replayed a most annoying interview with novelist Jodi Picault flogging her latest book, By Any Other Name, by trotting out her “research” provocatively suggesting for the ill-informed and gullible that Shakespeare’s plays were all written by Emilia Bassano.  Gawd.  That tired old canard, bolstered by one stupid assertion after another (e.g., Shakespeare was a litigious businessman who didn’t have the education to write those plays, and could not have written any plays published in 1623 because by then he was dead!  And!  There is a character in Othello who speaks a speech no man could have written, and that character’s name is Emilia!  Oh, Pah-LEEZE!  Let your fiction stay fiction.

And then Jimmy Carter died.  President Carter gave the commencement address at Centre College in Kentucky in 1987 when I was on the faculty and, like all my other colleagues, eager to shake hands with the Great Man.  Now, it’s true that Centre is a small college with an appropriately small faculty.  But imagine my surprise when as I extended my hand to tell the President what an honor it was to meet him, he said, “Why, Georgeann, the pleasure is all mine!”  HOW on EARTH did he know my name?  Well, as it turns out, the explanation is that someone had shown President Carter a faculty facebook—well before Facebook, simply a page in the annual with all our photos and names—and with his eidetic memory plus a genuine interest in his fellow citizens, he had learned all our names.

How proud I am I got to tell that dear man how much I admired him.  And how it rankles that his departure from this dimension so closely precedes the inauguration of the anti-Carter, our soon to be Felon-in-Chief.  That January 20 would have been the 67^th birthday of my late sister, who heartily detested “the Orange Man,” only adds insult to injury.

I awoke with a scratchy throat on New Year’s Day, and the first thing I heard was that some maniac had plowed through the revelers on Bourbon Street, killing 14 and injuring dozens.  OMG.  2025 not off to a great start.  In the summer of 1977, my first in New Orleans when I was a graduate student at Tulane, I worked on Bourbon Street, waiting tables at Potpourri, the restaurant in D. H. Holmes, then still a thriving department store as well as one of the country’s first, having opened in 1849.  I mostly served dinner to the elderly ladies who lived out their solo lives in the French Quarter; didn’t make much money, but ate like a king (oh, that bread pudding!).  I spent plenty of time standing on line to get into Galatoire’s just up Bourbon Street, and even took acerbic critic John Simon to dinner there on behalf of EGO, the English Graduate Organization.  Not to mention the Carnival hijinks I enjoyed in the Quarter before I left NOLA in 1984, including the 1979 Mardi Gras police strike, when the National Guard were deployed to keep order—and partied right along with the rest of us.  Now those streets always sniffy with discarded Hurricanes (and worse) had to have the blood washed away.  And for what?

Trying to put that behind me, I took up my annual Posting of the Calendars, four upstairs and one down.  But where was the 2025 Canyonlands Natural History Association Calendar to replace the 2024 one?  There was the cardboard mailer, right where it should be.  But it was empty?  Could I possibly have forgotten to order it, my most-often-consulted resource hanging just to the left of my computer screen?  I logged on to the CNHA site:  sure enough, no order posted for the 2025 calendar.  Which was now sold out.  Oy.  Such forgetfulness.  Not a good sign at my advanced age.

Okay, okay.  Ordered another calendar version of Utah’s parks and monuments and tried to cook my way out of my funk while listening once again to the New Year’s concert broadcast from Vienna.  But then I had to hunt for the latest Christmas card I’d written and carried downstairs to post the next day, finding it only when I realized I had dropped it in the recycle bin along with yesterday’s New York Times.  The mushroom bourguignon I made for dinner was very tasty, but my throat was even more sore.  Three episodes of Ted Lasso (second time through this anti-depressant series) finally put me to bed.

I woke on January 2 with no voice, and had to croak my way through my cardiologist’s appointment, moved up from the one scheduled for month’s end because of the increasingly frequent—and scary—episodes of a-fib I’ve been experiencing.  The news:  not good.  The Flecainide I’d been taking since 2013 to address arrhythmia was now causing it, and another ablation, one that could only be done at Mass General in Boston, was the answer.  I had to bail on my weekly and now much-needed conversation with my Greensboro friend Cameron:  no voice to speak my distress.  And it was January 2, the seventeenth anniversary of the day my mother died in Florida without my being able to get to her because my husband David had been suddenly so stricken with inexplicable anxiety that he could neither speak nor eat.  And it was semester’s end:  I had his papers as well as my own to grade.  And there was a blizzard; no one could get in or out of our driveway.  A Christmas best forgotten, but impossible not to recall.

The laryngitis persisted through the next day when I had to sort some TD Bank business, finally removing David, an absent presence now going on six years, as signatory on my accounts and figuring out what to do with our safe deposit box contents if I were out of the picture—which my erratically pounding heart suggested was not an entirely theoretical scenario.  The good news:  a call from Mass General offered me an ablation appointment only a little more than two weeks away.  The bad news:  I’ll need someone to drive me down to Boston and back; I’d had David the last time someone was going to work on my heart.  Now that heart was broken again, in more ways than one.  And I’d already streamed through the entire final season of Ted Lasso.

Friends to the rescue!  My emailed SOS quest for a driver received a prompt and unanimously generous response from all I contacted.  Spirits greatly improved.  A simple dinner of vegetable broth with Dumpling Daughter^TM dumplings (heard about on Boston Public Radio, and now available at Market Basket) worked wonders on my throat, and watching Cillian Murphy (no relation, but proud to share the name) and Emily Watson absolutely nail their performances in Small Things Like These, a disturbing but ultimately redemptive film, put me to bed in much better shape.

So, I’m starting the new year over today and counting my many blessings, including anyone interested enough to have read through all my whinging this far.

Wishing you all a healthy, happy, hopeful new year, with thanks for your much appreciated support. Coraggio!