New Year's Reflections

Happy New Year!  I made a collage of 2011, as detailed as the end-of-year letters I get from some friends.  But I can make out the print in their letters.  I’m not sure they can make out what’s in my collage.  I hope they like the colors.

Of course, my mother is the center of the year, which began over a reflecting pool in Angker Wat and ended with the resurrection of Javier (whom I'd buried in August) and the DVDs of Vision (about Hildegard) and a picture I took of the scene in which she says, “I hear the Caliph of Cordoba  allegedly had a library of 400,000 volumes,” which fits in to my sabbatical, with its focus on the Middle East and a course in Western Cultural Values (Hildegard) thrown in. 

But aside from continuous reflections on Mom, the only two things I want to mention here are these:

When Diamond Dave turned 74, a birthday he was celebrating at the Occupation, I made him a couple of giant cookies, which he shared (crumbled, I guess) with the other students in our Demystifying the Middle East class.  He told they the cookies were made by “Tina, the other elder in the class.” 

My niece sent me a message on Facebook asking for a loan of $3000.00.  

Every year Javier and I write resolutions and/or reflections for the coming year.  Then we look at the ones we wrote last year.  This year I couldn't find the ones from last year to compare them with reality.  But let me be honest about Javier:  He's sweet, charming, and funny, as I told him yesterday and then added, "The only problem is your inability to tell the truth," and he said, "Let's not talk about the past."   I was able to use that line too, but in a different context.

In this, The Year of the Protester, (Time Magazine's Person of the Year), Javier said, "Give women a right and they want the whole Constitution."

Today I wrote a couple of year-end letters, and I also wrote to Jean Michaud, whose address I finally have.  (He returned the call Jonathan helped me make.)  I decided to tell him not about myself, but about him, and how wonderful he always was.  I also sent him pictures of him, not me.  Maybe that's how all our Christmas letters should be too.  Not about us--about our friends.

 If you wait as long as I have to send out greetings, you'll have a lot of personal data to respond to!