It appears we’ve arrived on the other side of this mathematically significant New Year’s Eve with very few Y2K glitches, personally and globally. The program I use to upload these files to the host informed me that yesterday was “1000102,” but that was fixed merely by choosing a four-digit date display. I went to the on-line version of the newspaper in the Pennsylvania town where I do a lot of my historical research and discovered that I was reading The Reading Eagle for “January 3, 100.” And that was it -- no power outages, no planes falling into the front yard, no hostile neighbors demanding $150 for a cupful of their stockpiled coffee. (Believe me, if I needed it, I’d pay it.)

I busied myself in the last days of the old year preparing documents to support an application for a “Mature Woman’s Grant.” This is an award of $1000 given in even-numbered years by the National League of American Pen Women, one each to a writer, a visual artist, and a composer over the age of 35.

The project I have in mind would advance the writing of a historical novel which I’ve been telling people for ten years that I’m working on. Actually, what I had was an idea, some research, and a single line of fiction crafted in 1996. This application demanded a “sample chapter and an outline of the work as a whole.” I guess there’s nothing like a deadline to help you go from 10 words to 10 pages in three days.

Notification comes by March 15. We’ll see.

In yesterday’s piece I made sarcastic comments about “obnoxiously cheery” Christmas letters. This is a genre one either loves or hates -- few are neutral. I received about a half dozen this year, only one of them obnoxiously cheery. (Actually, it was from the person whose letter I was reading in 1995. She sends virtually the same letter every year, just changes the date and the children’s ages and grade level.)

Well, I’ve now joined the ranks of those who send holiday letters, of any style or variety. I composed it today but dated it on The Feast of Stephen. It was always my intention to send a post-holiday year end letter, but I expected to have it in the mail last week. What a lovely (ha!) surprise it will be for people who thought all their holiday cheer was behind them.

There is no reason why those of you with whom I do not communicate by snail mail should not have this reading opportunity. (I've cut a paragraph promoting The Silken Tent and giving the URL. If you're reading this, you evidently don't need that!) So:

December 26, 1999
The Feast of Stephen

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow; 
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere . . .
     — Richard Wilbur
          “Year’s End”

Dear Friends,

I think I was about 10 when I first had the idea to calculate how old I would be when the year 2000 arrived. I had recently learned how to determine a span of years thus — you subtracted the smaller number from the larger one, in a process my grandmother called “mental arithmetic. “I’ll be 53,” I told my sister. “You’ll be 50.” I didn’t know then that precision in expressing ages is a bit trickier, nor that it would be important to me when the time came to note that I have ten weeks yet to be 52, (and more important still to my sister to note that she has three complete seasons before her milestone arrives in October). At the time the year 2000 seemed very far away, and being in one’s fifties impossible to imagine.

And now here we are, at the dying of another year and the threshold of a new one, a quadruple turning of numbers that no one ever likely to read this will ever see again. It’s almost certain that we here on Bradley Drive in central Pennsylvania won’t have Wilbur’s “settlement of snow,”  but come New Year’s Eve our vista will surely be softened by the gathered light of the joy we have collected through our experiences this year.

We all continue in good health. Although Ron and I can both be described as “retired,” we are far from idle. Ron is the naturalist here, spending a good deal of time maintaining indoor and outdoor environments for both fish and fowl. He continues to sing with his church choir and with the Harrisburg Choral Society. That group’s Christmas concert was its first at the city’s new Whitaker Center for the Performing Arts, and Ron very much enjoyed performing at a venue which can present the music in a way that delights both artist and audience. 

Some of Ron’s time this year was devoted to settling the estate of his aunt, Ezenne Petrucci, who died just before Christmas in 1998. Her house was a treasure trove of family memorabilia of interest to the historian in both of us, in particular the “letters home” from the South Pacific sent by her brother, as well as his Army uniform, his dog tags, and a little notebook in which he kept accounts. Ron donated the uniform to the Derry Township Historical Society. Assembling and annotating the letters into a usable, shareable form for both family and the community is a project both of us will work on in the coming months.

Lynn turned 14 in September. She is in the eighth grade at  Susquehanna Township Middle School, where she continues to enjoy academic success. She won her school’s spelling bee and participated in the regional spelldown in Harrisburg. This was a particular delight for me, because at about the same age back in 1961 I represented Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School in the same event.

Early in the summer Lynn began to talk about going out for field hockey. This was her first indication of any interest in formal organized sports. Despite having to compete with girls who were two- or three-year veterans of the field, Lynn won a place on the team. The experience gave her everything that involvement with sports is supposed to provide: she learned teamwork and leadership, developed strategies for managing her time and her energy, and improved her physical fitness. An unexpected byproduct of her participation was not only the pleasure Ron and I took in attending her games together, but also the friendships we made among the other hockey parents.

Lynn continues to enjoy music activities. In the spring she went on her first overnight school trip when the STMS Concert Choir went to Washington, D.C. to participate in America Sings! an outdoor massed choir festival which raises money for worthy causes. She also decided to commit herself to the flute, undertaking private lessons in addition to her school band instruction. For Christmas she asked for a new flute, an indication of her seriousness in this regard.

1999 began in the middle of my first academic year out of the formal classroom setting. I have continued to refine what it means to describe myself as “an independent teacher and writing consultant.” I conducted several sessions of my “Time It Was. . . “ memoir writing class and worked with a few private clients on various personal history preservation projects. 

Sometime in the late fall I began to experience a call to greater commitment to the writing life. Although the entrepreneurial life has its rewards, it still has too many aspects of what American lyricist John Fogerty (of Creedence Clearwater Revival) called “workin’ for the Man every night and day.” Thus I’ve decided to change my description of myself to just “writer.” To that end I’ve embarked on the “Year of Writing Seriously.” I’ll let you know next year what comes of it!

Some of you reading this were guests at my holiday open house. I thank you for the gift of your presence there. If you also gifted us with a one-pound box of nuts from Matango’s or the large Pandoro Traditional Italian cake, you will not be receiving (eventually) an appropriately specific and personal thank you note because those items (which were delicious!) got separated from any tags they might have carried, and thus you remain anonymous.

Some of you reading this are among those we have been out of personal touch with for far too long. I thank you for the gift of your presence in my history, and look forward to perhaps a more personal exchange of communication in this new year.

The second half of my life will be ice breaking up on the river, rain soaking the fields, a hand held out. . . writes poet Joyce Sutphen. As I move deeper into the second half of my life, I hold out my hand to you, and wish you a happy and prosperous new year.

Best wishes to my on-line friends as well.