Jack has an excuse this time for being a tad late – again –

I started writing this on the last day of the year and then realized it was the last day of the decade. So I’m in reflective mode –

At the end of another year and another decade, and as I enter my seventy eighth year, I can’t help but think of the friends and family who’ve passed on. The quote below pretty much sums it up –

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900–July 31, 1944)

“Bit by bit… it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich; and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us of their shade.”

It’s true and it is the ones that you fell out with and then made up with, even family members that you had awkward relationships with. They’re the ones you end up holding most closely and remembering most dearly.

I’m missing Mum and Dad, Margaret, Roy, Philip, Mike, Davy, Jim, Dominique, Gordeanna, Anne, Maureen, John, Tony – so many.

But happy to have reconnected and newly connected with just as many others who used to hover but have come much closer.

As we enter the roaring twenties again – hang on – – –