New Year's Day is an arbitrary date

On the cusp of a new year, gray clouds hover overhead, and a cold breeze chills my aging bones. The January 1 date for turning the calendar's page is an arbitrary choice. No celestial or terrestrial event marks the date. Many businesses use a different calendar to divide their years (July 1 to June 30 is a popular choice).

On this night, people will celebrate the dawn of the new year, as if something had changed. But 2018 melts into 2019 imperceptibly. The death of one year and the birth of another brings fireworks, resolutions, and hope, but Jan. 1 is seldom noticeably different from the day before.

It is natural to wish for a better year as the old year ends. Many people will make resolutions to do better, do more, be better, be more helpful, be more generous and caring. But the resolve of Dec. 31 slowly dissolves into the hustle and bustle of 2019. Few resolutions and few hopes for the new year are followed or fulfilled. The year may change, but we remain the same.

A few years ago, as I toasted the new year quietly at home with my wife, she said, "I hope next year, no one we love will get sick or die." It was a deeply felt desire. In the previous consecutive several years, we had faced the deaths of parents, siblings and good friends. It was difficult to be hopeful about a new year that did not include our departed loved ones. She expressed that hope about the new year twice before a year finally came when we didn't travel to a funeral.

We all hope for a new year that was better than the last one or less painful than the last one. But pain inevitably comes, and as we grow older the pain of lost family and friends grows more frequent. Still, we wish for others and for ourselves a happy new year, a year without death and despair, a year with happiness and fulfillment, with comfort and achievement.

This is the day, an otherwise ordinary winter day, when we resolve and wish for what will come.

Visions of retirement from a four-day weekend

I was fortunate to be able to make New Year's a four-day weekend. Monday was a holiday, and I took Friday as my last personal day (read: vacation) of the year. Unfortunately, the weather was not conducive for doing the chores that called me outdoors, so we did some of the unappealing organizing, discarding and sorting activities we had pushed to the bottom of the priorities pile.

Nevertheless, we accomplished a few things, and still have some similar tasks to do the next rainy or snowy day off. We skipped social activities, except for a New Year's dinner (with black-eyed peas) at our daughter's home, and mostly just did the things we needed to do inside the home. We slept later than usual, but not obscenely late, and we set aside a little time most afternoons for some reading and potential napping. We downed an extra cup or two of coffee every morning and started dinner late. I found some good college football games on the television and watched a few impressive feats of athleticism. On a rainy Monday afternoon, we drove to the gym for an enjoyable workout of nearly an hour.

We enjoyed ourselves and our time together, the feeling of accomplishing some things without a strict time schedule. All of that made it harder to arise Tuesday morning and head to the office for work. That Tuesday feeling makes us more eager for the time when we will retire sometime in the next six to 18 months, when we will have the time to get to the bottom of our priorities, when we will have time to read every afternoon (or almost every one), when we will be able to travel to see kin, friends and places we long to see. We promise not to "flunk retirement" as one friend my age claimed he did. There will be time for volunteering as well as for the other important things in our lives.

Meanwhile, we anguish over the prospects of income after retirement, of health care costs, of long-term care, of our health, of the uncertainties of life. Retirement now is the dream we share, just as we shared a dream 45 years ago of a quaint, comfortable house, children and grandchildren (if we could imagine such a thing so long ago) and happiness unbound. Our long-ago dreams did not materialize just as we had imagined, but in some ways even better than we had dreamed. We will continue to dream.