Fishing For Hope In The New Year
Choosing optimism when there's not much cause for it
First off, Happy New Year. I say that grudgingly. Because even if 2024 was about as enjoyable as a syphilitic lesion — unless you’re one of dozens of Fox News anchors in line for administration appointments — my number one life rule is: All change is bad. I’m wrong, of course, a good 20 percent of the time. But the odds of being right are still overwhelmingly in my favor. Though now that we’re locked into 2025, we might as well get on with it.
Since we opted for a low-key family gathering this year, instead of the usual raucous New Year’s Eve party, my schedule was tidied up on New Year’s Day. I didn’t have to sleep off a Kentucky-firewater-induced coma, or spend the early afternoon writing apology emails for inappropriate things I might’ve said after the sixth or seventh Maker’s Mark. I did, however, still observe my New Year’s Day tradition of reading the Dead Celebrity Roll Call, to see who wasn’t fortunate enough to cross the December 31st finish line.
We lost so many great ones last year: James Earl Jones and Donald Sutherland, fly-fishing literary giant John Gierach and John Amos, the latter of whom was like the black father I never had when playing James Evans Sr. on Good Times. We lost Shannen Doherty (who I once spent time conversing with at an afterparty, talking about the ins-and-outs of Bev 9’er plot points), and Dr. Ruth (who imparted to a 14-year-old me, via her cable show, the dark secret knowledge that women can have orgasms, too — which the Christian-school educators of my youth had neglected to mention). We lost freedom-fighting badass Alexei Navalny, and one of the all-time great songwriters Kris Kristofferson, whose music I have played here often. We lost my old profile subject Kinky Friedman — one of the nation’s two or three finest Jewish cowboys — who taught me to always “treat children like adults, and adults like children.”
In early December, I grew curious about the waitstaff at Mel’s Diner, the fictional greasy spoon from the seventies sitcom, Alice. I just wanted to see who was still with us. And then whoosh (or whatever sound the Reaper’s scythe makes), right before the curtain closed on the year, Linda Lavin, who played the title character, turned in her timecard. Maybe I jinxed her. The eight-year-old in me still remembers when she was the “new girl in town/and she’s lookin’ good,” as Lavin sang in her own theme song. But while I wasn’t looking, she turned 87, and contracted lung cancer, and now she’s presumably slinging Adam-and-Eve-on- a-raft in the hereafter.
All good things and people come to an end, of course. And so do the bad ones. The sonsofbitches among us only seem to last forever. (Which is why Matt Gaetz will make it to 105, easily.) Still, the dawn of the new year always gives me a bit of renewed apprehension. Who walks among us now, that won’t be here by year’s end? A morbid thought, admittedly. Though I do keep a wish list, even if God doesn’t seem to be taking requests.