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Reporting live from the edge of 2021

On December 31, 2021

Shouldn’t it be enough that I bothered making a list of resolutions to begin with?

For the last several years, I’ve been taking stock of how well I kept my New Year’s Resolutions–a typewritten list stuck to the fridge with a magnet that in the last couple years haunts me more than anything.

2020’s list became laughably out of sorts as soon as we dove headfirst into the cesspool that became the pandemic. Lesson learned. I created 2021’s list with global disruption in mind–but I somehow failed to account for the personal disruptions that would come along this year.

Which is to say, another year gone, another list of resolutions left unresolved. At some point it might be worth pondering why I do this and whether I should keep doing it. And conveniently, I’ve already packed my typewriter. Makes it easier to avoid having a neat little list ready to go tomorrow morning.

Even so, there’s something worthy about having goals, even if you don’t meet them all. We all need something to aim for, and even if we don’t cross the threshold of accomplishment, we’ve at least moved forward.

I dialed back my typical list of 10 resolutions and came up with seven. Here’s my report from the last day of the year.

Waiting for Grief

By James D. Hogan

On December 13, 2021

In writing

I find myself staring at a bag of dog food.

We buy it in thirty pound sacks, this median-grade kibble, a nutritional blend made especially for senior pups. It’s cheaper to buy on Amazon, and following some unknown interval, the hockey puck wizard device in the kitchen will light up, and I will ask it what’s wrong, and it will reply nothing, nothing serious–just maybe it’s time that you bought another thirty-pound bag of dog food? Shouldn’t we do that?

And more often than not I agree, and soon the gray, boxy van stops in front of the house, and someone schleps a thirty-pound box to our front porch. I break down the boxes and slide them under the Wagoneer to catch little drips of oil.

The most recent bag sits in the basement about two-thirds full. Around the corner, draped across two memory foam dog beds, our oldest pooch, Taylor, quietly naps, her breath slow and measured, the kind that comes with precious, deep sleep. There are pregnant pauses between exhale and inhale.

And We Must Go

By James D. Hogan

On November 21, 2021

In writing

On beginnings and endings, change, and staying un-stuck.

Something there is about the ends of things, the delicate parts where the golden light shines on everything about you before it fades to dusk. Something there is when you know that ahead, just across the horizon, lies the big, the unknown.

For the past nine years, our growing family has made its home in a quiet neighborhood dotted with brick ranches and mature trees. For nine years before that, we lived a few hundred yards away in the next neighborhood over in a cozy split-level on a cul-de-sac.

Kelly is a native of this town, born in the old downtown Davis hospital the college razed a few years ago. She grew up in another brick ranch and tall treed neighborhood not much more than a mile from where our house stands now. She attended school in the same building where she now works, the same place our children learn. Save for the four years she spent away at college, she’s never lived anywhere but within a handful of several square miles in Statesville.

Those college years were formative in many ways.

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