Victory Lap

Some of us who started this year are not now among us as it ends. If in the course of your day you have a moment to remember absent friends, I hope you shall, and do, because sometimes missing people is how we measure the cost of our own lives and love. Someday there may be an easier way to do that, perhaps we'll evolve as a gimmick-driven species with a display or a gauge on our foreheads, but we're not there yet and, speaking only for me perhaps, I'm not in any hurry to get there.

This last week of 2010 was special for me as I renewed the acquaintanceship of someone I knew when we both were in a previous life in another hemisphere. It was nice reminiscing with Karen and helps remind me that sometimes we gain and keep friends as we move through life-it's not always a series of hellos and goodbyes. In this case, it was hello again.

In that spirit of sharing I wanted to pass along a custom we observe every year in my house, brought with us to the New World from the Old Country. This is, I think, the first year in the last twenty-eight (!) that my wife and I will be alone for the New Year. We started watching this presentation when it was just us and I hope you enjoy it as much as we always did when we watched it with our children and still do by ourselves (again). Guten Rutsch!

-bill kenny