Hope … springs … and all that jazz

“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering ‘it will be happier’…”
–Alfred Tennyson

 

Happy 2014. Seriously, I hope it is happy for anyone reading this and within that reader’s definition of happiness.

Wikipedia has a whole big shebang about happiness. How much of it is true, I couldn’t tell you. If you start to read the article you will find a big “smiley face” that could make you happy or scare you shitless or put your mind into some frame within those states or outside of them.

I have wandered this planet now for more than a half-century, and many of those years I sought happiness. Or so I thought that was what I sought. It turned out I was seeking something that had the opportunity to make me happy or just totally f**k up my life. Even if you do not know me I am sure an easy guess would reveal what it was I was seeking.

Was it love or was it money? It might have been. For unlike that song from the 1980s fad which caused me to no longer wear Western attire — think cowboy culture — about looking for love in all the wrong places, I felt like I was looking in all the right places. Only it is hard to delineate how many times I was actually looking for love.

Never have I made much money in my life. Unless it falls out of the sky, I hit the lottery or if the book I have been trying to write for some four years now is published and a phenomenal best seller, I will never be rich.

Love? Yeah, what of it? I have known love of many distinctions. Unless you have a solid idea as to just what is this idea known as romantic love, however, specifying when and where it was I fell across that state line makes for a difficult definition. The song by one of the weirdest duos ever — my hero Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias? — “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” comes to mind in such a realm.

  “To all the girls I’ve loved before
Who traveled in and out my door
I’m glad they came along
I dedicate this song … “

Now I know that sounds like a lot. It sounds a bit caddish. Let’s just say it is a metaphor for a part of my past. That part about not making much money, definitely more solid.

Hope springs eternal. Maybe. Spring is the word there. Spring springs hope. It has long been said, as well, that in the spring a young man’s fancy to turns to love. I think that is true, yet I am no longer a young man. But that does not preclude my hope for a happy new year. Whatever happy means.