Winter                                                                     Moon of the Winter Solstice

2012 has begun to fade into the past, most of its days now tailing off behind, most lost from memory, all passed into history.  It was, as all years are, a bad year.  The death of Regina Schmidt in September marked the first incursion of this finality into the immediate life of the Woolly Mammoths, that is, our spouses and ourselves.  While no death can be said to be bad, since death is a part and a necessary part of life, still it contains the pain of loss, the unsettling reminder that our life, too, will end and opens a hole in the social structure of family and friends.  We will miss her.

Warren and Sheryl lost, in relatively quick succession, three parents, having lost the fourth not long before these.  Sheryl’s father died first, then her mother, then Warren’s mother, then his father.  In the case of the Fairbank’s and Wolfe’s families this left both with sudden needs to reassess, reconfigure and learn how to live without their oldest generation.

Yin lost her mother, Moon, this year, too.  Moon emigrated from China with the young Yin, so they had not been apart for all those years.  The last several years Moon lived with Scott and Yin.

My cousin Leisa continues to mend from a stroke last year and Ikey, the oldest of the Keaton cousins, died this year.

Then, too, there were the guns.  The shootings.  More of the continuing madness, our embrace of the things which kill us in such senseless, brutal, unnecessary ways.  I happened to be in Colorado, staying only three miles from the Aurora theatre where movie attendees at a screening of the Dark Knight Rises were shot.  And, like you I imagine, the shootings in Newton left me weak in the knees.  Children.  Young children.

And the NRA solution?  A cruel satire, armed policemen in every school or, another alternative offered by gun rights advocates, arm teachers and principals and school psychologists.  Yes, we need more guns to prevent more gun deaths.  Can none of these guys see the serious flaw in this argument?

The country stumbled through the sort of end of the Great Recession, re-elected a middling President and saddled him with a congress unable to act.  These are not good things.