Happy, Happy 2017

It's still over an hour before 2017 and I'm going to bed as soon as I write this New Year's greeting. And though I had wine for dinner and champagne for a toast to the year that was, I'm perfectly sober.

Unlike such days in years past.

We had dinner with Jack and Sherry, long-time friends from New Haven. It was Hoppen-John: pork and rice and collard greens and black-eyed peas--something people from below the Mason-Dixon line know is required eating tonight and tomorrow. Jack and Sherry's son, Rob was there. He's 44 and was Josh's older playmate growing up. John, our friend from WV, who is a psychologist for the VA was the only other human. Between Jack, Sherry and Rob, there were 4 dogs and 2 cats. Southerners and their animals, you know....

We had agreed for our happiness to not say the name of the President-elect out loud. But we invariably did.

We  have three weeks for the thing that isn't just a river in Egypt. After that we have to wake up in a new reality.

We are all from, basically, White Working Class backgrounds, and none of us have yet figured out how we so drastically left our roots--the folks who made 'he who will not be named' the President elect.

But we've known each other for decades: Bern and I knew John in Morgantown when we were in college. John is an Episcopalian, like me and we met in church. Sherry was a member of St. Paul's in New Haven when I came there as Rector in 1980. Lots of years of friendship in all that. Plus Josh and then Mimi growing up around Rob.

Somehow we simply slipped away from where we came from and became Liberals.

And now, waiting for 2017, we are perplexed, anxious, angry, confused--each of us in different areas of those emotions.

But the year will come.

"It's not how many times you get knocked down that matter--it's how many times you get back up."

That would be my motto if I didn't realize that the saying is attributed to Gen. George Custer, not long before the Battle of Little Big Horn....

I know I'll 'get up'. But the 'knock down' this year was painful, perplexing, confusing.....

Happy New Year any way.....