Dispatched from Home – New Year’s Day 2023

Good morning on this, the beginning of another New Year! In keeping with last week’s Christmas Day post, I’m posting another one of my journal scribbles from 1984. It’s long, so you might want to get a cup of java or, better yet, a bit of left-over bubbly from last night’s festivities.

“Jan. 1, 1984, New Year’s Day 10:00 P.M. Pokey, tis the new year my friend!! Old has given birth to New. Over the past months since the entry above, Life and Time have rushed by me in a torrent of activity. Here it is New Years, and I am still writing about the year gone by. Let me begin with a number of updates.

Granny did have cancer. She couldn’t have stood surgery, so they gave her cobalt treatments – 30 in all. Granny is recovering nicely but is still very weak. The doctors have given her an excellent report and feel they have isolated the cancerous cells. It looks like they got it all. God, in His wisdom, has let her stay with us a little longer. As she said last night, “God’s not through with me yet.”

Christmas – 1983 – will be one I will never forget. When it is 8 degrees with a wind-chill factor of below zero in little old Gulfport, you can rest assured it’s cold everywhere! It’s been the coldest winter on record. Our gala Christmas party was a huge success – I lost count at 146 people –and David was on top of his game, as always! Thank you, my young friend!! But the party was marred by the events of the next day. I awoke to frozen water lines, no electricity, and no gas. Lights and gas were finally reconnected at about 3:00 that afternoon. The water lines thawed about Monday…results? Three broken pipes. The plumbers, in hog-heaven, I’m sure, finally came on Tuesday to correct the problem. My car battery went dead, and my favorite wool sweater got washed—now size 2—so you can see Christmas ‘83 was not all it was supposed to be.

As is my custom, friends and I danced in the New Year to the strains of SATIN DOLL and IN THE MOOD. It was festive, and I enjoyed the evening’s fun, dancing until there was no dry thread on me. I am very particular about who I spend my New Year’s Eve with. It is an important time—a time of reflection and joy, laughter and tears. As I was writing this, I paused to read last year’s New Year’s Day entry. As I surmised, my life and its events changed very little in 1983. I am up to my teeth in Gulfport Little Theater as Chairman. I am discovering what the phrase “It’s lonely at the top” is truly all about. Ha-Ha! Between work and the theater, I am constantly busy. Sometimes my life is so full of everyone else’s problems and triumphs that I oft times forget my own. During those times, I dash to my little, upstairs room and sit there in the still and quiet to regain what’s left of me. This old house has seen many come and go, but it still beckons me home to the peace and serenity it offers. I call it home, and I love it as a person, not just wood, brick, and glass.

Pokey, I am depressed tonight for reasons of my own doing. What is it in human nature that causes us, God’s children, to do what we know is wrong? And what is it in human nature that drives us, God’s children, to repent and start anew, only to stumble, fall again and start anew once more? In His loving nature, I guess God wanted people, not puppets, to be his children—even with all their faults. But I do believe this–for all the bad, there’s a heap of good. For all the evil in this old world, there is a heap of love, and for all the sin, there is a heap of forgiveness for all.

I truly believe this is a good world, not a bad one, and there is love, and not all is hate. I believe in the honesty and the purity of mankind and know in my heart that mankind is not dying but lives anew and bubbles with hope. It is this hope for tomorrow that we must all seek, and when we find it, we must pitch it, with all our strength, into the next day, the next month, the next year—for it is the future to which we must gaze, letting the past fade into the misty corridors of our minds.

The past…the haunting refrain of a song, the words of some forgotten poem, or the sound of someone’s voice long forgotten. If God has given me any talents, I believe it to be the ability to see, ascertain, and remember that which is now or was long ago. It is in these volumes that I write, not only for future reference but, more importantly, to put down in writing the thoughts, problems, mistakes, pitfalls, and mountain tops of my small, insignificant life. These volumes are to be read by none other than myself — in my happiness and also my loneliness. Yes, loneliness. I so wish there was someone to love, to hold, to cherish…

So, my dear pen-and-paper friend, we shall sail together into the New Year, hopeful for tomorrow but sometimes peering back into the past for the silent strength it brings and the bittersweet remembrance of that which was and can never be again. Happy New Year, my friend! As always, I am your Andy.”

AND THAT, MY 2023 FRIENDS, is the New Year’s Day news from almost 40 years ago. My 30s were not easy times for this ol’ boy, but I survived. I survived because my dear parents and my dear grandmother loved me. My dear friends loved me. But most of all, God did. Mom, Dad, and Granny are Home now. So many of yesterday’s friends are gone too. But God is still there!

As type this, sentimental piano music plays on the Victrola. Being the sentimental old fool I am, I have tears in my eyes. Knowing that I have more years behind me than before me, I will still start 2023 with renewed hope. Hoping that I can help sooth a hurting heart, love unconditionally, and help others seek the true peace that only comes from above.

But, as I’m often prone to do, I’ll look down the long misty corridors of my mind, and remember something I wrote on New Year’s Eve, 1974, about the summer of that year. “And in the end, we remembered only that which we wish to remember. Because, in so doing, we were able to retain our sanity and never lose what little there ever was of that intangible commodity that we called love.”