8 minutes before midnight

It is almost 2011. Bern and I didn't go anywhere. We hate going anywhere on New Year's Eve.

There's so much to say about a new year--possibilities, promises, resolutions, all that.

But I noticed a piece of paper Bern had put on her little computer space. It was about a lost dog.

LOST DOG! (it said) REWARD

on it went:

SADIE, a blond, 40 pound Lab mix, escaped from...

on and on it went. Bern took this down from somewhere because the picture of the dog was so similar to our dog Sadie, BB before Bela, who was a Lab mix--Lab and cockier spaniel, go figure and ponder that--who we loved, loved, so profoundly loved. And our Sadie was dead and some other person's Sadie was missing. Painful it was, but she kept it.

So the new year will begin and there will be lost dogs.

Maybe that is how we should approach this new year--knowing there will be 'lost dogs', lost love, lost loved ones, lost stuff, lost and not forgotten, lost and forgotten, lost things.....Like the sheep and the coin and the son from the Gospels, like that.

2011, like any other year, will be a year of loss.

Loss is, it seems to me, a part of life and reality and 'what IS'.

So celebrate and rejoice.

And ponder what last year's losses were. And what this new year's losses might be.

it's now 12:05, my computer tells me.

Happy New Year to you all. It is now 1-1-11. What a remarkable moment.

Watch out for lost things in 2011.