We’re in the middle of a brief stretch in a long year when we pause to count blessings, give thanks and acknowledge our good luck.
We are finished with 2025, and look where we are: deep in the 21st century in a time of magic and a place of rare, unequalled bounty while surrounded, mostly, by friends or at least people who don’t hold a particular grudge against us. Lots of people in lots of countries are unable to say the same.
Welcome to America. Merry Christmas to you.
The magic of living here and now is in the miraculous wonders that surround us. Heart transplants? Got ’em, and hundreds more life-saving medical breakthroughs.
Travels to Mars? We’re workin’ on it, and in a few years we’ll be selling tickets. Bonus: Elon Musk plans to colonize the Red Planet. Mere flying ‘round earth has become nothing but inexpensive and easy; leave Ukiah today, fly to Rome for dinner and be back in time for Monday Night Football. It would have taken longer for your grandparents to walk to Hopland and back.
For the first time in history hunger and starvation are all but conquered. America’s impoverished are well-fed, own automobiles, TVs, a full fridge, air conditioning and free schools.
An iPhone half the size of a pack of cigarettes holds more information than Harvard University’s library and the next teenager you meet has one in her back pocket. Everyone has a big flatscreen TV and a car with built in navigation systems that all but do the driving for us.
And of course there are cars that already do 100% of the driving for us. Wealth and luxury are everywhere.
Yes, we are blessed with valuable possessions and belongings, but simultaneously cursed by having so much stuff it won’t even fit in the garage, despite parking all three cars in the street and the boat under a blue tarp on the front lawn.
All these advances, all these breakthroughs and all this comfort swaddle us as if in fat satin quilts, a dozen soft pillows and a pair of warm and cuddly Golden Retrievers. And yet we are anxious, nervous and a little fearful we might lose everything or have it taken away.
We are told our planet is overcrowded, yet we are lonely. The world has never been so easy and safe to live in, but we are spiritually lost and confused. Our trust is tenuous; our faith is watery.
And now comes Christmas, a season of joy and a time of sharing, but our expectations are muted. In 2025 it’s difficult to know what it is we celebrate.
I believe we are kinder, gentler, more caring during Christmas. We slip a folded twenty into a Salvation Army kettle outside Raley’s to help someone we’ll never meet. We offer generous and meaningful holiday greetings to friends and strangers. We hear the bells and the old ancient carols and we pause to listen, and perhaps we move our lips to whisper the timeless words, the heart-healing sentiments.
On clear nights I sometimes stand in my back yard, looking up at the moon and the stars. I feel ignorant and insignificant. No insights, no profundities, no visions revealed.
So off I go on the treadmill called life, accompanied by all the magical gizmos and astounding leaps in technology that engulf us and make our lives grand (and confusing).
Care to join me?
’Tis The Season
Plenty of publications hoping to lure advertising are running “Best Books of 2025” by various literary sorts. I’ve not seen a single title on any list that I’ve read or will ever read.
Here’s a handful of books I recommend, none published in 2025:
1) ‘The Awakening Land,’ a trilogy by Conrad Richter written in the 1930s about pioneers exploring and settling into unnamed, untamed territory. I’ve not read anything with a better sense of place.
2) ‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt. She’s a gift, a sculptor of paragraphs and a marvelous storyteller. This is her first; you’ll finish it and go on to ‘The Little Friend’ and ‘The Goldfinch.’
3) A three part interwoven series by Kent Haruf, ‘Plainsong,’ ‘Eventide’ and ‘Benediction.’ A couple old farmers, brothers, take in a pregnant teen with nowhere to go.
4) ‘Postcards’ by Annie Proulx was written prior to ‘The Shipping News,’ also very good. ‘Postcards’ follows a broken family of hardscrabble Vermont farmers after WWII. Their inability to cope with changing times is a modern tragedy.
5) ‘As I Lay Dying’ by William Faulkner. Your introduction to the 20th century master. I’ve read it several times. A tip: It’s one wild story about one mad journey told by half a dozen family members; some of their versions overlap.
(Tom Hine has been writing the weekly Assignment: Ukiah column under the TWK byline since 2006. He/they (what are your pronouns?) has never missed a Sunday deadline.)
Be First to Comment