The Wheel
It is Friday the Thirteenth in January of 2023, and we are in that holiday hangover time of year. That weird uncertain place between the Solstice and another new moon, trying to get our shit together for another spin on the Wheel of the Year.
There are, and always will be, remarkably fewer familiar faces to look forward to seeing. Friendships, relations and collaborations irreparably shattered and leaving mostly memories and, hopefully, some tokens of their immortality. Whether through thought or deed or nature’s cruelty, we will always need some new collaborators in laughs and love and that peace of mind, so hard to nail down and even harder to start over.
We lost an old college newspaper friend of mine, last Spring. It was staggering news, followed by a memorial that his siblings organized at a golf club in the small river town where he and his career ended up, but they never expected the turnout. His is a big Irish family that scattered over time across the country, allowing themselves to loosen contacts with each other. He was a quiet kid, so they expected him not to have left behind such a huge collection of broken hearts represented by the standing-room-only crowd of mourners stuffed into the bar area of the club. The program that the family had planned and printed for the guests collapsed into a simple ritual of taking turns passing the mic and telling the stories.