Well, the old clock on the wall says that not much remains of 2004. So it goes. It wasn’t a particularly loveable year, was it? Even if you had the good fortune to count its passage with, say, a Dilbert or Garfield calendar, or one with puppies or varieties of the orchid, your probably felt a certain suction. Like putting your hand over the bathtub drain when you were small, and the water was draining away. Now as the year makes its final swirl, let’s put the rubber ducky of hope safely in the soap dish and take a deep and sober breath.

In truth, it was a year of needless, heedless war. It was the year George Bush got elected in Ohio and Britney Spears got married in Vegas; events of comparable inanity. It was the year of the cow. And I don’t mean on the Chinese calendar. It was the year of bovine intelligence, deliberate ignorance. Millions of Americans still believe there were WMD in Iraq, and Saddam was behind 9/11.

For me, it was a year of God’s mercy because my own failures of productivity could have left me in much worse circumstances. I had family challenges and in the summer we lost our Grandma, but God is with us. I think my high point may have been my nephew’s third birthday in the Spring. That child is a steadfast and shining consolation, a joy.

The year closes with Tasha still with me; her small and selfless respirations continue apace in her place beneath the desk. For this – and the continued health of my family – I am profoundly grateful.

I’m at a loss to circumscribe the year with meaning, except to say that those of us who survived it, and watch it end now in sufficient affluence to do so in front of a computer, have seen the mounting of death tolls and the blooming of flowers. Most of us have attending funerals and weddings, and born our burdens with the means to pay way too much for coffee and gasoline. Those of us who write have had the leisure to write a lot about a little or vice versa, and it hasn’t changed much except to present us to the world in some form of hope. For me, I thank God for the Internet, but for which I would have murdered too many trees.

This blog will now observe the last hour of 2004 in silence, in prayerful, astounded sorrow for the loss in southern Asia.