A howling wind buffets the house today.  I wakened early, still feeling the emotions which drove me to the computer to write last evening as I listened to the bittersweet farewell of our President.   But those words and those emotions live elsewhere.  Here in this venue, I come to chronicle my efforts to live without complaining.

So:  it’s come to this.  I tarry on the threshold  of a new year, another twelve months only ten days old.  I’ve spent so much of my life looking backward enmired in regret.  If I had only moved to St. Louis instead of Kansas City in 1992 when I faced a failing law firm falling of its own prodigious weight.  My son would have been raised around his cousins, aunts and uncles.  How different life would have been.

If only I had not married. . .If only I had taken that lobbyist position in Omaha. . . if only I had not bought this house . . . kept my son in Catholic schools. . .

The shelves of the basement groan under the weight of boxes full of pictures, letters, and notebooks which I hold close.  I dread sorting through them when the time comes to close out this house — whenever that might be, this year, next, or ten years from now.  I tell myself to just pitch the lot but I know that I will not do that.  The box which says, “Buddy Mementos” surely must be sorted for the souvenirs of my son’s childhood.  The albums hold pictures of people who’ve left this earth, some of whom my son never met because they died before his birth.

But I ask myself:  Will he even care?

Wedding photographs. . . pictures of mountain waterfalls. . .Polaroids, and heavy-bordered prints, and sketches.  Mildew nibbles at their edges as they gather dust in plastic bins.

When I moved to Boston in 1976, I went to a hair salon the day before my flight and had the woman chop off almost every inch of hair.  Later I locked myself in my mother’s bathroom and painted blond streaks throughout my bangs.  My friend David Sotkowitz met me at Logan Airport.  He must have been shocked at the change but he never said.  Nearly forty years later, brown curls with chunks of blond brush my shoulders. I ask myself every morning, Is this the day that I go grey?  Should I cut all this chemical-coated stuff off and let the silver claim me?

Living without complaint requires the burying of ghosts which hover around my shoulders as I push forward against the bitter wind.  I see clear blue on the distant horizon.  I put my head down, and press forward into the storm.  The wind rages.  I wrap my scarf more tightly and quicken my pace.

It’s the eleventh day of the thirty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.