I am putting this post together to post on Wednesday. January 23, 2025. There is snow in our yard and it is cold. I am missing my main work for money all week so far because my current work involves driving a great deal. I will not get paid days off because of weather closure because I am a self-employed contract worker. But I am still in pretty good spirits and grateful we are getting through this winter storm as well as we can.
I am feeling blessed to have the home and marriage and health that I have. But I also have begun to feel the pinch of exposure to the cold and the warmth as I go in and out. I have run out of firewood after several days of much enjoyed fires in our hearth. Like America as a whole this moment of my life is fraught with possibilities and laden with realities both wanted and unwanted.
This is a historic moment in American culture, life and politics. The new Trump administration has already been marked by the inaugural speech in which President Trump marked the transition. He began with some fairly normal remarks, that nonetheless probably offer some insights into the new era.
Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you very, very much. Vice President Vance, Speaker Johnson, Senator Thune, Chief Justice Roberts, justices of the United States Supreme Court, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and my fellow citizens.
There is a difference between the start of this speech and that of the speech at his 2017 inaugural:
Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans, and people of the world: thank you.
Here the first words are to thank everyone and he also include salutations to party leadership in the US Congress. This Trump won the popular vote and has remade the Republican Party. We can expect a President Trump who will be aware of himself as a politician. That does not mean that he is not also the other things he has always been.
In 2017 Trump said,
We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people.
Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come.
The opening of the second inaugural address is a little different but not vastly different. In this speech Trump said:
The Golden Age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply put, put America first.
I sent President Trump a Christmas card care of the White House. I also served as an Election Commissioner at a precinct when he was elected in the general election. Today, I am interested to see how AMerica will chart its future course. However, I am a little old, tired, run-down and frayed to play much of a role in a new and burgeoning American experiment. However, I have invested a great deal of myself in the pursuit of a better future for America. Therefore, I will watch with interest to see what eventuates.
The pardon of the January 6 demonstrators, the deployment of troops to the border, the declaration of a National Energy Emergency, the plan to raise revenue with tariffs and the declarations about policy toward Greenland, the Panama Canal and the Gulf south of the Gulf Coast of the United States — these all proclaim a real change in America. For me it is hard to explain how much less I am emotionally involved in these changes. If I cannot find a way to retire soon my life will be painful and short. I just want to get what I think I deserve from a few different systems and adapt to a simple life with just enough to get by. I hope the Trump administration will be a period where that will happen.
I am living now and I am also trying to understand how to relate to the life I have lived up to this time. The future for me is about making the best from the end of my last vigorous strength to whatever follows death for me.
Not many posts ago I was writing a kind of memoir. I have written more than one. I am not sure why but I could speculate about what I am trying to say and why I feel compelled to say it in a number of unpublished autobiographical narratives. I am someone who has felt compelled to assert my faith in myself and willingness to try many things which had little chance of success. Those were things that seemed important and still seem important to me. It is just that now I am past the point in my life where I can hope to do something meaningful with the risks and work that I was involved with all through my life. Today, early in President Trump’s second term, I am aware that the world could change. I however am just seeking to pass the time in some peace and comfort than I am in most of those changes.
I am sixty years old. It is evident to me that many people in their sixties are aging but also harvesting the fruits of their decades of planning, labor, innovation and gamesmanship. For many the years between the birthday when they turn 60 and the birthday when they turn 70 is a time of prosperity and power. For me this part of my life is not without its joys and comforts. However, I know that for many people the period I live in can be a very challenging part of the life cycle. In my case a great deal is up in the air. I will see in the next year, whether I am completely going down in flames or whether I will see a period of some security with very limited possibilities for the reaping of some of the rewards that I have earned from a lifetime of toil, risk-taking and planning. The consequences of all this for me are clearly significant but what the consequences of my future will be for my family, community, personal legacy and the world is another thing altogether. l
One thing that is going on in my life right now is that I may be publishing a short story named Ports of Call that has some significance for me. The publisher and I are currently running into some technical issues with producing the final print manuscript or galley. I no longer have the energy or optimism to be confident there will be a publication. However, I am not giving up on the publication because we also have been able to overcome the glitches so far. But I have to hope that what is important to me will find its way into the real world of publication. The piece matters to me because it is my written work about things that matter. It is also a tiny sliver of the vast literary canon of work I have produced which has never been published and which is part of my lifelong struggle to bring certain things to the realm of possibility and the discussion of the people who can make the future happen — I am not among the echelons of those who can really see much of what they planned happen. On that nexus, on that scale I am pretty far down. The things that I have struggled most far require vastly more resources that are involved in operating a small store. Operating a small store requires a vast amount more resources and where-with-all than I have at my disposal.
For me, the chasm between my personal status and the place I would need to be to break even in the bigger picture has always been more like the Grand Canyon than a moat. For me there is not much chance that I will ever feel that I am both secure and doing what I ought to be doing… at least in terms of my work. I am at the last stages of a journey that has included studies of many kinds and many kinds of work. There are however stages of building to something that one hopes to achieve, and I have not built much if anything. The Sacred scriptures state in Psalm127 verse one: “If the Lord does not build the House, then in vain do the builders labor.” While many do not believe in the Lord, most people know that in fact some people do not build much that endures and others find almost all that they build endures. For me there is just the end of a personal journey. I am grateful to have married a very good woman that I really love. Her support has written some new text into my life’s story. However, I am not in very good shape these days and without a few big wins in the struggles that I currently am engaged with, (and which could turn out badly) it is hard to say what chance I have of being able to hold up a reasonable part of this marriage’s responsibility.
The loss of almost all the hopes and dreams of a lifetime has been most of the theme and structure of my life’s narrative. I hope that I can find a tiny fraction of the potential for happiness and a good life that Clara and I had just a few years ago for the remainder of my life. What I don’t think is possible is that I will find a period mature fulfillment of a life’s dreams. I am perhaps lucky to be alive.
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