2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Thank God It’s Over!

Thank God It’s Over!

Hello, everyone.

I love music!!  My grandfather helped me develop and grow a love for classical music.  I love the oldies from the 60s because they take me back to my college days and the early years of my brief teaching career.  I was involved in church music for around 50 years, and I sang and played some wonderful church music.  I also sang and played some sheer doggerel as well, but that is another story.

But there is one song that I absolutely hate, despise, detest, and abhor.  It is the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”  Every time I hear Andy Williams croaking that song, I want to take a 12-gauge shotgun and a dozen rounds of buckshot and blow him and the idiot who wrote that song to kingdom come.  I like Andy Williams – he also is from Iowa – but I hate and despise that song!!!!

The reason that I feel that way is quite simple.  That song is a lie.  The Christmas season is NOT the “most wonderful time of the year” for a lot of people for a lot of reasons.  Given the crass commercialism of Christmas in this country, people grieve because they cannot afford to give gifts to those whom they love.  Also because of that commercialism, people expect the moon when it comes to presents.  Poor people have to choose whether to pay for food, pay the heating bill, or pay the rent with the little pittance that they have.  And hardest, of all, some people have lost loved ones and had awful things happen to them during the Christmas season.  I am one of the latter.

“The most wonderful time of the year?”  Not by a long shot!!

It can be the loneliest time of the year.  One day when I was doing my laundry, in my going back and forth from my apartment to the laundry room, I passed an apartment down the hall on the way to the elevator.  There was a sign on the door that said, “Who cares?  No one.  Not a single person.  Life is hell.”  I decided that the social worker in our building needed to know about that note, so I told her.  She then went to visit the guy and talk to him.  The next day, the sign was gone, so maybe she and I did some good.

But I can identify with that guy.  And so can tons of others.  I lost my beloved wife on December 16, 2007.  Like my neighbor, I know how it feels to be left out of the celebrations.  People don‘t want to have much, if anything, to do with you if you don’t feel like whooping it up.  Or they are too occupied with Santa Claus or the Baby Jesus to have room for anything or anyone else in their hearts.  Or they are wrapped up in their own circles and don’t have the room – or the desire – in their hearts to broaden those circles.  “The most wonderful time of the year” is a long ways from being that for a lot of people.

Like I said earlier, I am one of those people who have had nasty stuff happen to them during the Holiday Season.  I won’t list the litany, but I will mention three:  My first serious girlfriend and I broke up on December 13, 1963.  My first wife was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma on December 21, 1981.  I lost my beloved Carol on December 16, 2007.  A lot of others have had their significant blows as well.  So we cannot be condemned for feeling a deep sense of relief when “the most wonderful time of the year” is finally over and we have had no major calamities happen to us.

So it is with a deep sense of relief that I can say, “Thank God it’s over!!”  I had no serious events happen in my life this year.  The worse was that I lost my cell phone somewhere here in my apartment, but even that was a blessing.  I got another phone that I love, and a good service provider.  We had a nice Xmas pot luck, which I attended and had a wonderful time.  I had a nice visit at Carol’s brother’s house.  I had a couple of delicious dinners delivered.  Plus I had fun watching videos of Christmas productions I was a part of when we lived out in Atascadero, California.  So all in all, the season was OK.

But I am still glad that the season is over.  I have 11 months to enjoy before it comes around again.  I have no idea what it will bring – whether it is a simple thing like losing my phone or a major whammy like losing a loved one – but I will be prepared for it in any case.

At the end of 1968, I watched Walter Cronkite’s wrapup of the year on CBS.  That was quite a year – the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, the catastrophic Democratic Convention in Chicago, the election of Richard Nixon.  All that was atoned for by the Apollo 8 flight around the moon.  Cronkite concluded his broadcast by something like this:  “1968!  It indeed was quite a year.  And somehow, someway, we all managed to survive it!”

The Christmas season is over.  And somehow, someway, by the grace of God and my own determination, I managed to survive it.

May you all have a wonderful and blessed 2016.

Bill