Grace Notes

It’s the middle of January and we are finally taking Christmas down.  The decorations and the tree, that is.  I hope it is always beyond our capacity to take Christmas down.

We’ve had a rolling holiday this year.  Daniel drove in from Nashville on Christmas Eve in the middle of an ice storm, so we felt like one of those coffee commercials when the grown son enters the house in the wee hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, bearing a large load of laundry and luggage.

Then we drove down to Austin (we live near Dallas) so we could celebrate with our daughter’s family for her little boy’s first Christmas.  Back north to Dallas.  One son leaves, another son and his wife arrive.  Now that they have returned to Boston, we can take the jingle bells and lights down. Oh well. Other than the fact that we couldn’t arrange for more than two out of three sons to be here at the same time, it was a wonderful Christmas.  Lots of laughter, lots of memories, lots of making new memories.  No one with any sense could ask for anything more.

I am genuinely happy that my kids are pursuing their lives.  I just wish that pursuit was within, say, a one or two hundred mile radius of us.  That way we could all do what we need to do without getting in each others way and still manage to get together a few times a year. I can dream, right?

Now that Christmas is packed away instead of Ho Ho Ho I’d like to let out a call of Hi Thee Ho! (which is another way of saying ‘hither thee hence’ or, more colloquially, ‘get your butt over here’.  New Year, new possibilities.  In the meantime I’d better hi thee ho my own butt into a productive routine.

Wherever You Go, There You Are is the title of a book I run into often.  So far, I have successfully avoided reading it.  The title puts me off. If I’m stuck with me wherever I go, why do I have to read a book that from the get go dissolves any hope of discovering the new improved me?

New Year, fresh start, right?  Sure, kinda, sorta, but….  It’s the buts that will get you every time.

All the ads/resolutions to lose weight, exercise more, (funny we don’t see ads to improve our minds and souls and all that jazz, but I suppose you cannot really market that) and except for the determined few most of us end up just goin’ on being who we’ve always been.  Ourselves, that is.  Good ole regular, flawed, face-for-radio, elastic waist, lazier than we know we should be folks.

Ah, not picture perfect.

I do admit, however, that I feel like I have accomplished something when I manage to push Publish on this blog or write a new scene in my novel.  But, really, and this might be the crux of my lack of ambition, I feel fabulous when I see my kids and grandson and just share a laugh, a good conversation, a funny movie, get together with friends, hang out with my husband, all the regular, ordinary, wonderful stuff that really makes up a life.  That level of ambition still nags me a bit, but, when it comes down to it, wherever I go, I keep running into myself.