Endings And Beginnings

The year has ended and the new year is here. My calendar of beautiful wooden sailboats has arrived.

- Welton Rotz

Last year’s calendar has been taken down and tossed on the pile in the corner of my office, stirring up a poof of dust. I sneeze. The pile is over five inches tall. I honestly believe that someday I will go back through the pile of calendars to enjoy the eye candy. But I never have. It is as if the images have been depleted, sucked dry of any vitality they may have once had. (Is it because I looked at the image every day for month? I think not.) In the same room I have an 1800s painting of a sailboat on a lake. Every day I look at the painting and fantasize about sailing up the lake towards the distant mountains, or down the lake to beach the boat on the grassy patch near me. If anything, the fantasies become more complex and more enjoyable. I am master of that boat.

Maybe one clue to my hesitancy to opening the old calendars is that the large, old boats stir up memories of dreams I had 55 years ago in which I was the master of a large schooner in the South Pacific. Fortunately or not, these fantasies have crumbled into the dust of time.