Dec 31, 2021 4 min read

“You still have some of it left,” my daughter said, making an air circle around my head and torso with her hand. “Better get moving.”

A compliment was buried in there somewhere, but I took her warning with the bluntness with which she offered it: You, Mommy, are not getting any younger. Go find some male companionship.

I thought of a bicycle tire with a slow leak, the strong usefulness draining out with every mile. Or a jar of honey with a loose or missing lid, with all the sweet goodness crusting over. This is the gloomy self-talk I harbor as I shove 2021 off the cliff, dust my hands and turn around sheepishly to peek at the horizon.

2022 has to be better, doesn’t it?

Of course, that’s what we were saying last New Year’s Eve, and look how that turned out. If you and I were sitting around whining, I would listen to your list of the Top 10 ways 2021 sucked wind, feeling bad about all of it. However, being alone with my keyboard, I will do the whining. And keeping in mind Tolstoy’s offer that all happy families are the same, let’s agree that the pandemic has taught us all to be grateful for the good stuff, of which there is plenty. But as with unhappy families, the misery of my past year is more interesting.

So here goes.

March was a doozy: jacked my knee, that was fun, and then found out a squatter was trashing a rental property I owned.

Also, the farmer departed.

Summer brought groundhogs, at least two of them, which wandered around the yard like they owned the place, scoffing at my traps and ruining every effort to grow pretty things. My luck, the two are a male and a female and I now probably have a bigger groundhog problem.

Fall brought the coyote. Also, the bike-trail spider bit the already-jacked leg, causing a massive infection and expensive ER visit.

In a different year – say, 2018 – I’d be countering each of those events with something positive to provide balance, and for the sake of optimism I’ll just say the leg and knee are better, and that spider didn’t keep me from clocking a thousand lovely miles on the trail.

But I’ve felt lonely in a way I never have. Even with visits with my kids and family and friends, I go hours without talking to anyone but the dog, and I don’t like it.

I must have mentioned that to my daughter.

“Go on a date,” she said.

She was suggesting dating websites, and I’m not necessarily opposed to that. One of my best friends met her very nice husband that way and she didn’t even have to lasso around a herd of jerks to find him. Another friend suggested it might be fun to date “the way Mary Richards did on the Mary Tyler Moore show”, meaning dinner with a different blandly handsome man twice a week with no kissing or anything.

I told her I don’t have the wardrobe for that.

And yet another woman, long divorced, said she probably won’t date at her age because she doesn’t want to be “Grandpa’s lady friend.”

She may have a point there.

Getting back to my daughter and her assessment that I may still possess something attractive, I think I understand what she was going for, and it was hope.

Hope that the months ahead will be better for me than the ones I’m leaving behind. Hope that come spring, this exhausting pandemic will end and, like my groundhogs, we’ll emerge from our hibernation to rejoin the world.

And hope that the new year will be a little less terrible than this one was. For all of us.