What's New? (year)

     What's new, asked Linda Ronstadt back when she was a heartthrob for young souls such as me, her voice penetrating me as if a modern Siren trying to alter my direction.  The arrival of a new year brings back those times to me both with surprise and pleasure, for it's a point of time when many of us tend to look back at what we did, or where we went, or what made the news, as well as looking forward to what may be ahead.  Both of these time qualities --the past and the future-- are apparently uniquely human traits.  To our knowledge, animals and other life forms live only in the present moment, something that science and few religious practices advocate.  One thing that believing in a future accomplishes is often an urge to make something better or more efficient.  In my personal view such efforts sometimes flop, such as the recent James Bond movie (No Time to Die) or the Brene Brown book (Atlas of the Heart), both characters and authors I've previously enjoyed.  And then there are those (again, in my personal view) that prove quite inventive such as the biotechnology company Huue that replaces damaging and toxic indigo dyes with dyes made using natural sugars (think 4 billion denim garments made each year, said Nature); or L'Oreal's Water Saver now being tested in hair salons that attaches to a faucet and creates micro-ionized droplets and cuts water usage by as much as 80% (those and more were featured in the 100 Best Inventions article in TIME).

     Perhaps all of this merely reflects my own growing older, a question highlighted in a recent short piece also in TIME which asked whether many of the old camp of Congress should be moved to a grassy field somewhere; said part of the piece, which was titled, "Should Aging Government Leaders Have to Pass Cognitive Tests to Serve?": The top echelon of American politicians is getting up there in age.  At 78, President Joe Biden has faced attacks on his mental fitness, as did his septuagenarian predecessor, Donald Trump.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is still negotiating reconciliation packages at 81, while the Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell is still trying to block them at 79.  Senate Republicans are a geriatric bunch too.  Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, 88, is planning to run for re-election next year.  Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma is 86; Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama is 87...Some 30 states have age-based drivers’ license renewal requirements, including many that require seniors over 70 to take extra tests or apply in person to keep them.  That standard that would apply to nearly 30% of the U.S. Senate.  Except you don’t have to prove your mental acuity to continue driving the country.  

     Again from a personal viewpoint, I still try to "keep up" with things; but beyond checking the usual media outlets and such, it's more and more difficult.  Just as with physical abilities such as eyesight that seem to diminish with age, my own "vision" of the world seems to be narrowing.  Old haunts and cities I once lived in seem to have drastically "changed," as have the schools I attended.  The way I remember them is no longer, words I can remember my parents saying.  Get with the times, I would think about them back when I was a teen.  Now I understand their resignation at just letting all of that nonsense go and deciding to just move on with their lives.  That said, here are a few holiday things that I've watched ebb away over the years:  --Christmas cards with a handwritten note inside, which morphed into a printed page of family outings, which soon became just a scribbled signature, and is now just a printed photo collage with no signature at all. --Landlines, CDs & DVDs which are basically gone from today's homes, as are the RCA cable hookups and SD storage cards (gulp, we still have those).*  --Cars more than 10 years old (okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration but quite honestly I can't remember when I've ever seen so many new --and expensive-- cars on the road); throw in EVs and e-bikes and my wife and I find ourselves clinging to our 2010 vehicles (each with a CD player inside).  --Plain old regular water.  Peer down a grocery store aisle and once you get past the fancy and flavored waters, you'll come to the electrolyte, alkaline, Ph, and volcanic bottled waters; if you're lucky you may still glimpse an old and dusty gallon of distilled or spring water, "cheaply" priced at the who-would-ever-buy-THIS-water price; best get home to your Brita.  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  

     I bring some of those g-rumblings up because of reading a recent book by historian Blair Imani titled Read This to Be Smarter.  In her book she discusses everything from updating your sense of economic systems to understanding disability, raciscm and sexuality; she begins with this: First things first: you are already smart.  Intelligence is that ability to learn and apply information, and that is something that we all do every day.  Even though we are already smart, we can always get smarter about the world, topics we're not deeply familiar with, and the lived experiences of other people.  She then goes on to throw out terms in use today but many of which I've never heard:  LBGTQIA+ ("to specifically include the intersex and ace communities"), and that the six most common chromosome pairings (I remember learning two) are: X, XY, XYY, XXXY, XX, and XXY.  Then she brings up the pronouns now being used to describe individuals such as xe, zir, em, and thon, as well as the African ideology of ujamaa which has its emphasis: ...on mutual respect and the inherent humanity and interconnectedness of all human beings...Cooperative economics isn't exclusive to compensating people; it also includes the understanding that resources we do not need should be redistributed to those who do need them by virtue of their humanity and our collective interconnectedness.

    Add to that a recent issue of Bon Appetit which asked young people from throughout the world what foods they were looking forward to over the holidays and I read terms such as zobo drink (Nigeria), sufganiyot (Israel), hallacos (Venezuela), tazukuri (Japan), and chivo guisado (Dominican Republic).  Having never heard any of those terms it wasn't much of a surprise that I had also never heard of Black Twitter (said WIRED: ...Black Twitter has become the most dynamic subset not only of Twitter but of the wider social internet -- that same magazine reported that only 2.3% of Twitter users utilize two-factor authentication, a security measure implemented nearly 10 years ago).  Or this from Sierra: In Somali culture, leisure hiking is not a thing.  Years ago, the first time I told my mother I was going on a hiking trip in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, she asked why.  When I responded "because I want to," she went on to tell me that I was bored and should find a second job.  She could understand hiking from her rural Somali village to another.  Somali nomads trekked for a purpose.  For food, shelter, and work—but not for leisure, never for enjoyment.  I somehow seemed to agree with a self-described tech-nerd coming back to nature (again from WIRED ): My magpie brain can't comprehend much of it, but I'm learning about ice bubbles, normal distributions, pluvial flooding (vs. fluvial), and of course, wet-bulb temperature...after a while you realize that science itself is just an API to nature, a bunch of kludges and observations that work well enough to get the job done.

     Interconnectedness.  I was fortunate enough to be given an illustrated copy of The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (mentioned in an earlier post),  In his book he starts with his own view of seeing things in a different light: When I began my professional career as a forester, I knew about as much about the hidden life of trees as a butcher knows about the emotional life of animals.  Because it was my job to look at hundreds of trees every day --spruce, beeches, oaks, and pines-- to assess their suitability for the lumber mill and their market value, my appreciation of trees was restricted to this narrow point of view.  About twenty years ago, I began to organize survival training in the woods and log-cabin tours for tourists.  Then I added a place in the forest where people can be buried as an alternative to traditional graveyards, and an ancient forest preserve.  In conversations with the many visitors who came, my view of the forest changed.  Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value.  Walking with my visitors, I learned to pay attention to more than just the quality of the trees' trunks.  I began to notice bizarre root shapes, peculiar growth patterns, and mossy cushions on bark.  Suddenly, I was aware of countless wonders I could hardly explain even to myself.  Life as a forester became exciting once again, and every day in the forest became a day of discovery.**

     Basia sang about a "new day," part of her lyrics saying: Your shoulder's where I sit; the half, nobody sees of a silent partnership.  I am here your help at hand; I'm never far away.  A clear view from where I stand; I'll be there if you need me...it's gonna be a new day for you.  A new day, a new year.  One of the things I enjoy about the annual changeover to a new year is the reflection by book editors of what they felt were books --old and new-- to take time to read; one example was from Book Page where different editors recommended books such as Wintering by Katherine May (When the sun begins disappearing earlier and my mood starts to sink, May's beautiful words help me to remember this season's transformative power and embrace its long hours of darkness.) and On Immunity by Eula Biss (Biss' book touches on so much of what we're experiencing right now, from the urgency to protect the ones we love to the difficulty comprehending other people's ill-advised choice, but surprisingly, her penetrating book is seemingly without anger,  It could even be seen as an inoculation against such anger.).  But it was the recommendation of a novel exploring "the lives our parents lived before having children," All My Mother's Lovers (It’s a stunning reminder that as people, particularly women, get older and their preexisting identities get overshadowed by titles like spouse, parent and worker, their capacity for complexity doesn’t cease.). 

    This is a time of standing at a precipice, a chance to see both worlds as if graced with a complete view, a chance to look at our own past as a grand story or one to be cast into the wind to be lost or to lie waiting for someone to discover; imagining our parents when they were young and single, dancing and dating, fighting in a war or helping someone heal, scaling a peak alone or drinking through the night with friends...some things will likely remain beyond our capturing.  It was in picking up my dog's ashes that I came across a book on their counter, Old Dogs Are the Best Dogs, a book which may have summed up this reflective time of watching the clock once again tick midnight and slide into another year.  In part, author Gene Weingarten wrote: What dogs do not have is a sense of fear or a feeling of injustice or entitlement.  They do not see themselves, as we do, as tragic heroes, battling bravely against the pitiless onslaught of time.  Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives...They are without artifice.  They are funny in new and unexpected ways.  But above all, they seem at peace.  This last quality is almost indefinable; if you want to play it safe you can call it serenity.  I call it wisdom.  That said, I still miss my dog...but as the new year sneaks in I know that that's okay.  It's now a time to toast those we miss and those whose lives we may have missed...and to toast to the new year and the lives still waiting to be discovered, perhaps even our own.

*That said, we decided to drop our cable TV since we were already steaming so much, and went and got one of those flat panel antennas that stick onto the back of your TV...two quick plugins and voilà, 124 clear channels appeared.  We also opted for switching over to the 5G internet and nearly tripled our streaming speed; but getting the phone company to drop us down to "just" their basic landline service with no internet saved us a meager $19 due to the increase in taxes and fees for doing so (what??).  See, we're not total fuddie-duddies, even if we do still have a landline...

**For a different perspective there was this from National Geographic on the effects of deforestation, saying in part: Deforestation affects the people and animals where trees are cut, as well as the wider world.  Some 250 million people living in forest and savannah areas depend on them for subsistence and income—many of them among the world’s rural poor.  Eighty percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests...in case you missed that, the figure is 80%.  Yikes...