There are too many places in print this week that have put forth all kinds of lists about the best and worst of everything and anything that happened in 2011. I read most of these lists when I run across them even if they are comparing and contrasting things about which I have absolutely no interest. "We rank the best and worst sheetrock of 2011 this issue of Sheetrock Hanger Forum". I will actually sit and read that crap.
So, on this last day of 2011, I wanted to sit down and take a moment go over the best and worst, major and minor things of this year as they impacted my life. And I was building up steam as I realized that this was the year that my wife and I got out of debt, the year I left a job I had held for almost half my life, and the year that the worst moment of my life gave me insight that actually helped someone else.
I watched my wife ache to be with her family as quickly as possible after the death of her uncle. My wife CANNOT fly. She cannot. Following the death of her father's brother, and her uncertainty of what that grief would do to him, she agonized over the possibility of getting on a plane and shaving hours off our travel time. She cried bitter tears at her fear that did not, could not listen to reason. Irrational fears find their power in the fact that reason cannot touch them.
This year Bin Laden was killed or he is hidden on the outskirts of Cuba. At any rate, only his memory is a threat to me and mine after ten years of hiding. Some people chide my country in the fact that it took us 10 years to find him hidden in such plain sight. I think they miss the rather ominous threat of the fact that we put a bullet in his eye in May or are water boarding him right now after ten years. Do you think we would have stopped after 15? What about twenty? Think on that Oh Enemies of My People. An attack on us is not a moment of your life. An attack on us is not a fraction of a second's decision in the course of your life. An attack on us becomes your LIFE. We will run you like rabid dogs that never tire for your WHOLE life. Until we end the race in tooth and claw and blood.
I met my latest nephews that come to me from people my wife has known for years and years and who are polite, loving strangers to me. I learned again the lesson I had learned years earlier that Uncle is the greatest familial rank one can ever hope to hold. You are not fearful discipline or salve of all hurts or target of all whining. As Uncle, you are solely and fundamentally and exceptionally FUN. Best job in the universe by far and one I am honored to bear.
And it was on the waning days of 2011 that a cousin of mine introduced me to the writing of Pat Conroy in the surest way ever invented to get Ray Mancil, Jr. to do anything. I have read his memoir My Losing Season within the hour of typing this and I am in awe of the way the man gets words to dance. But I think I am good at that as well. What impressed me, embarrassed me, shamed me, and confounded me was the total, brutal, unflinching, unwavering, unapologetic honesty of the words that spun and twirled and dipped and even curtsied to the rhythms of truth that only a writer could tease from life.
I read that book with (and type now) with a lump in my throat and water welling in my eyes not from the narrative but from the artistry of the work. I once watched Katerina Witt skate at one of her last performances on ice. I was still living with my parents but had my own television in my room so that I could give my tyrant soul full reign over my entertainment choices. And then found myself free of my parents and subject to basic cable.
But on this night I was forced to watch Witt skating what the announcer said was the simplest, least technically challenging routine they had seen that night. Channel surfing as I was, I paused long enough to be offended. It may have been simple and I may have had no working knowledge of ice skating, but I knew perfection when I saw it. I was a young brute who learned to cuss at a sawmill full of men with limited vocabularies who taught me the artistry of using one particular cuss word almost like punctuation as well as verb, adjective, and noun. But rough hewn and small and petty though I was, I knew perfection when I saw it because without reason or understanding my throat got a lump in it and I cried. Apparently my emotions recognize beauty and perfection before my intellect does and has to send rather strong signals to get through.
This is how I met Pat Conroy through his book My Losing Season. It will be the first of all of Mr. Conroy's books that I read. And I hope (I plan / I dream / I promise) that it will be the second most memorable exchange I have with the cousin who brought Conroy to me.
But I sit here and realize that trying to capture 2011 is futile. I have written more this year than I have in years but I have failed to record much of the year. There have been massive shifts in the world - my personal piece of it and the one that we all share. There are things that if I put together a few words to commemorate the year, and leave those things out, that I will hate myself. And I don't want that.
And that leads us all back around to the title of this whole thing. I regretted the fact that I had not kept a better record of my life this year. And that sentence right there makes me regret not keeping a better record of my whole life as I have lived a life and time as a writer that not one other has ever lived. I say that with a humble arrogance in that I am aware that my life is nothing special and yet it is the only one like it in the whole of the universe all at the same time.
But this day, this magical day at the end of the year, at this made up moment in a shared reality that is so mundane we don't even realize the enormity of our world's imagination, this day gives me leave to not have any regrets. This is the one day that all the things that have worked and all the things that have not, all the plans that have born fruit and all the plans that have met utter defeat - this is the day that REGRET dies. This is the day that all things are reborn as resolutions for better. This is the day that we turn to the future with smiles across faces looking up at the heights of dreams that will become improbably, preposterously, wonderfully true.
Happy New Year.
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