January 8 2007

Marching through time like this line of llamas, I enter 2007. As I gathered my ghosts around me on New Year's Eve, I missed my dear Saul the Dog Prince more than ever. Typically Brian is asleep well before midnight on any night; he's a morning person, I'm a night owl with insomnia. It's a combination that works well most of the time - his prime painting time is early mornings, usually before I even stagger out to the coffee machine, and I like the solitude of late nights reading, watching TV, surfing the net or just ruminating. But I didn't realize that a big part of my satisfaction in solitude resided in the softly snoring dog, always nearby, never at all crabby about being awakened from a rabbit-chasing dream for me to wish him a Happy New Year, or pour out my troubles. It was so comforting to have a confidant for whom confidentiality was never an issue! No matter what dire dark secrets of my soul I emptied into his floppy ears, nothing ever came back to haunt me. When Saul was buried last May, it marked the end of 40 years of living with pets: 3 dogs (Mutzie, Max, Saul), many cats (Bernie, Seymour, Roachie, Sweetpea, and Pearl, who lived to be almost 30, plus about a half dozen others), 3 bunnies (Dog, Rachel, Eeny) and too many aquarium fish to name even when they were alive. I wonder if I'm done for good with that part of my life...

The ghosts of years gone always seem nearer at New Year's, or Rosh HaShona, the Jewish New Year. Old dear college and post-college friends like Kent and Willie appear, now almost forty years younger than I, but still missed. My grandparents, aunts and uncles, some gone decades past, and one, my very last beloved "tante", gone only last year, two months prior to her 101st birthday. Very very sadly and for me completely unexpectedly, my wonderful friend and mentor of over 30 years, Patricia, whose wise advice and grace in living were a mainstay that will be missed the rest of my life. Friends' parents, parents' friends, as each of us ages our lists grow. It almost seems to me that we are like comets racing across our lifespan as they do the sky. The older we get, the faster we pass through time, and the longer our "tails" become, as we drag our incrementally increasing history behind us. I guess this is as close as I'll come to understanding the time/space theory of Einsteinian physics.