Those Were The Days, in Words and Music My Friend

 Lena Horne, Words and Music, 1948

Our Internet went down as I was typing my 2023 New Year's resolutions this morning - probably from too many people doing the same online.

My cursor blinked idiotically at mid-list reminding me obliquely of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and more directly of my life's futility. So goes my anti-mantra

Is this 2023 anyway? It will be 4720 when the Year of the Rabbit starts in a few weeks. The old Hebrew Calendar says it's already 5782. It would be 7530 if the Byzantine Empire had made it. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few million and we humans have been scratching our fuzzy heads, maybe 300K of those

 

 I divide my own life story roughly into epochs. The theme of each: Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end... sang Mary Hopkins in her 1968 Russian song reprise, Дорогой длинно! 

 

 Indeed, my yesteryears of personal, family and work flew by - youth, schools, marriages, children, wins, loves, losses, suntans and snows... 

 

 Mary Hopkins, 1968

We'd sing and dance forever and a day...."We'd fight and never lose, for we were young,

 and sure to have our way

 

Now it's gratitude for whatever works - whatever age allows

Mary Hopkins' lyrics echo in my empty bucket of New Year's resolutions: I'm going to do better. I will finish projects. I will sharpen my pencils and revise what needs fixing. I will ignore distractions. I will write something new for a change ... Like many of my creative colleagues, I resolve to get over my chronic imposter syndrome.  

I went to the kitchen for my coffee and meditated at the fridge over snack possibilities for a few moments. 

 Satchel Paige, c. 1948

There, I found myself humming, "Where or When." For you youngsters, it's a lyrical ballad about love and deja vu by Richard Rogers & Lorenz Hart from the 1937 musical "Babes in Arms". 

That was the year of my birth, on the brink of World War 2. I think about my ridiculously-young, nervously optimistic mother and father then. Their lives were headed down rocky paths that they may have silently feared but like most of us, did not let themselves expect as they popped their cheap New Year's Eve bubbly corks. Whatever the future held, they would prevail and realize their dreams, they remembered saying to each other.

Glassy eyed over my resolution, it dawns on me that my most promising course of action would not be to change -- that is do something new, but find and cultivate what is old. After all, the best writers have told us the same stories over and over and ingenious guises sometimes, but still it's the same old song, but with a different feeling as The Four Tops 1960s Motown hit goes...

 The Four Tops, 1968

Something new? How about something old? I realize that I should resolve to find the essence of what my creative self keeps trying to write and write it -- over the over in recurrent, but hopefully, renewed forms. 

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you," the baseball great Satchel Paige advised. But it comes time to do so to see forward when you're down life's road.

So that's my writer's resolution for 2023 - to examine what I've been trying to say and renew it, with what wit and clarity I can muster, I hope. Satchel Paige

I poured my coffee, grabbed a last Christmas cookie and set forth to reconnect our wi-fi and 'Net connections. Soon normality returned in the form on 21st-century global connection. I deleted my resolutions. 

No need for them now that I had a flight plan - at least for the time being. 

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Umberto Tosi is author of the classic holiday satire, Milagro on 34th Street, Santa vs. ICE! The story is based on the author's personal experiences as a department store Santa. What's a Kringle to do when a pair of children ask Santa to get their immigrant mama back? A department store Santa's mettle is tested in this touching, powerful and relevant re-telling of the classic holiday tale! (Author will donate royalties from the sale of this book during the holiday season-- December 1 through January 1-- to the American Civil Liberties Union, fighting for immigrant rights.)

Umberto Tosi's other novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead. plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus books Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His nonfiction essays and articles have been published widely in print and online. He began his career at the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and an editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West. He went on to become  editor of San Francisco Magazine. and managing editor of Francis Coppola's City of San Francisco. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult daughters. He resides in Chicago.

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Enjoy Umberto Tosi's Hollywood noir detective thrillers: The Phantom Eye  and Oddly Dead, out in August, 2022.

 

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen and managing editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.