A Toast to Innocence

This is a day I always get wrong. Do I look back at everything I failed at this past year or failed to accomplish and attempt? That takes care of the sins of Commission and Omission that Father Costello used to warn us about in those uncomfortable lectures he did after Mass on First Fridays at St. Peter's Church. 

My other choice is to look forward, but to what and how far? Should I be preparing to celebrate a cure for the heartbreak of psoriasis or having a fruit cup with thick syrup? Don't trivialize my choice of alternatives, okay? But feel free to see them as a cautionary tale for yourself if not tonight then at some time.

Do you make resolutions and what are their subjects? I stopped a long time ago before I met my wife before we had our children (technically, she had them) and before we came to the Land of Round Doorknobs. The only resolution I can recall ever making, and the one I encouraged our two children to also make, is to do my best every day. I'd encourage you to do the same and I don't care what it is you do or don't.

We spend too much time every day interacting with people who did us a favor showing up, be it for work or for whatever the life event is. If you have no passion or reason for doing or being what you are, where you are, spending any amount of time with you is too much, at least for me. In the year that arrives on little cat's feet in less time than it takes to tell you about it, promise to never be that person, ever.

Be an exclamation, and not an explanation. Live out loud and at the top of your voice as more than one person I know is fond of saying. Be happy that you're here because you won't be here that long, and don't worry how others feel about you; that's their business, not yours. Leave nothing undone and even less unsaid. 

Some left us in the course of this year and I hope they were so marvelous we shall always feel their absence and miss them forever. Make it a point to toast absent friends, knowing that all of that is part of all of this and the dance goes on even as the partners change because they must. The same procedure this year? The same procedure as every year.
-bill kenny