Maybe this is why we blog

New Years Day is somewhat sad and wistful. One can look back to a year wasted or eventful, productive or dull. The optimist in me says "never look back - what is done is done" and the realist...well the realist has quite a different view.

When my dad was alive and retired to the deep south and by chance I visited, we always got up at the crack of dawn and played golf on New Year's Day, no matter the weather or how much celebrating the night before. The score didn't really matter (although of course it did).  It was being out doing something that both of us loved to do.  Neither of us can pursue our New Year's ritual, he being gone for 22 years and I'm with certainty, on my way.

He was born in 1910, so this would have been his 112th year.  I got to thinking about that and stuff like that over the holidays as I don’t have many of his things and certainly nothing from his youth.  I

looked around my memento box for his stuff and there is a lot from WWII – much of it now in the care of my oldest son-  and a bunch of golf scorecards and ball markers from all over the place. I do have his HS year book from 1928 and a couple photographs.  Growing up in the time he grew up probably didn't mean there would be a lot of "things" like we have them now. I have his stories though and although he didn't talk to me ever about personal things I got the gist of a lot of what his life was like.

I do remember that when I graduated from high school he was 55 and his birth was exactly mid-way between that date and the end of the civil war which seems like ancient history to many of us. Actually his grandfather was an illustrator of battlefield scenes and was at Gettysburg...just one story that popped out.  

I was at a gathering last night for a short while before my little affliction took hold and exhaustion

set in.  This blog came up as I'm nearing 3,000 entries and was asked "why?"....my readership is in the 100-150 a day so it isn't like it is important.  I've quit writing for the national blogs as it is just too consuming energy-wise so I have even given up ghost writing for others.  It seemed to me that now I write because I have very little in my memory-shoe-box and a memory that is going to pot in a hurry.

My resolution is to not only make sure my granddaughters have what little bits of things I might pass on to put in their shoebox and a blog full of stories that can go along with me. It helps on New Year's Day mornings to resolve to do stuff like that, especially when you miss someone and wish that he had written it all down.