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December 2012 ~ WE; ARE FAMILY
I got a wee bit behind with my goal of
two blogs a month in November. Trying
not to make that mistake again this month, even though I am still extremely
busy with my work and not finding much time to sit and write. Interesting that MS Word spell-checker likes
‘wee’.
I want to talk about the other one,
though. The ‘we’ one. The Cold War has long since passed, yet a
novel written before it, back in 1921, has ‘We’ as its title; Yevgeny Zamyatin
writes about a frightening society. At
the other end of the social scale is ‘We the people…’ more commonly known to be
the beginning of the American Constitution.
Not to be confused with the Floridian pop-punk group called ‘We the
Kings’ that have actually written a song for the upcoming Hunger Games sequel,
‘Catching Fire’. They even performed, as
recent as this year, with another band called ‘We Are the In Crowd’ in
Brazil. Wow; a whole paragraph in which
I completely digress!
We.
For me, ‘we’ is family. Be that
the “family of man” or whatever. Simply
put; we’re here to procreate so that our children can grow up in to adults,
leave their family of origin and start their own ‘we’. The nice thing about ‘we’ is the journey of
getting there; to actually being ‘we’.
To live a life of ‘I’ would be a terribly lonely thing for this writer; though
I understand, of course, that there are probably a lot of very happy ‘I’ people
out there. For me, I like the ‘we’ and
all that it brings; love, frustration, joy, etc. I like the building part; the building of a
new relationship and the children it can bring and the growing up of the kids
and the growing old of my soul-mate and myself.
But most of all it has to be the building of the memories. How nice it is to sit here and tinkle on
these keys like a concert pianist and recall memory after memory after memory;
and every one of them has a ‘we’ in it.
As I write this, all of my ladies are
out Christmas shopping; my lovely bride, Jane and my two adult daughters, Zoe
and Alex. I have got one of my favourite
movies on, White Christmas. Tonight we
are all over at my sister’s place for a Christmas party. The Christmas trees are up. All we need is some snow because it’s
beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!
If ever there was a time of year when
‘we’ becomes the most important thing in my world it has to be at
Christmas. We won’t all be together as a
complete ‘we’ this Christmas because our son, Martin, will still be at his base
all the way out on the west coast of Canada in British Columbia. But this is exactly what is supposed to
happen; your kids grow up and move on.
Martin will be working over Christmas in the Royal Canadian Air Force,
but his girlfriend, Cara, will be with him over Christmas; and so it seems that
the ‘we’ process is starting to repeat itself as it naturally does. Also this will be a Christmas without Rosie,
our lovely Irish Setter that we lost back in October. So this is my first Christmas without our
full complement of ‘we’. All the more
reason to never take your ‘we’ for granted; love every bit of it, warts and
all!
‘We’; are family!
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