It’s that time again: Change. Hope. Recollections. Promises.

Been there. Done that. Hope i can do it several more times.

Sarah went out to her wonderful friend’s party. Heather de Ocampo is one of the best. i am wishing both of them a swing upwards and a healthy and happy new year.

i’m wondering how the Austin branch of family is celebrating.

We, are sitting by the fire; Maureen’s new soup is, as always delicious. Her salad, as always of the kind that made my father say if he could have those every night he could be a vegetarian, but i think he forgot about his eggs and Tennessee sausage breakfasts. The fake Christmas tree, a concession to our spending Christmases on Signal Mountain is stored in the garage attic with all of the other decorations that came down. There is little likelihood either of us will make the magic turnover. We are not concerned.

And tomorrow will be a new year. 2019. What lies ahead in the next 365? Can’t tell. One thing for sure, there will be change. Always has been. Always is. Always will be. Change can be good or bad. Disregarding calamities beyond our control, we have the choice to make it good for us or bad for us. Our choice.

Now this is a little more challenging this year: thinking about change. After all, i’ve seen seventy-five years, three-quarters of a century of years with change. And now i’m older. Feel it in my bones (and several other body parts). Not bad considering the things this body has been put through by some nut who didn’t have a lot of sense about what was good for him.

So what about this next year. i’m old enough to not be concerned. It will be. There will be change, good and bad, guaranteed. And you know what? i believe you and i will deal with as necessary to make it as good as you and me can make it for ourselves and others.

As Judy Lewis Gray posted today, this is a remarkable occurrence every year for the opportunity to rejuvenate old promises, resolutions we call them. It’s a remarkable yearly accounting of us with the opportunity for, as we said in the Navy missile world, mid-course correction.

And what do i remember?

Home. Lebanon, Tennessee: a quiet little country town with not a great deal of concern beyond the county limits. Good folks in a place with a dark underbelly we still have not eradicated. Good folks. Gospel singing on Sunday night. Sports. Work. Treating neighbors like neighbors. Friends from church, elementary school, junior high, high school, and beyond and lasting. Forever.

Vanderbilt. A place for gaining lifetime friendships. Good times, bad academic habits. Learning in a place that has evolved into trying to make it right for everyone.

Middle Tennessee State. Working and learning for a change. Dwelling in an academic world of literature i loved then and continue to love today. One of my other passions.

Navy. Ahh, the Navy. The sea. The lady i loved with abandon, with passion. She was my soul mate. Navy ships were my vehicles for communicating with her and making more friends.

Ahh, hell. i could go on and on and on. There are so many folks i would like to share this moment, this precipice of change with tonight. There are so many tales i would like to tell about change in my life. But time is limited, and we are cutting it short in the Southwest corner tonight.

My ingredients are laid out for my black-eyed peas and cornbread for fixing (Tennessee term) tomorrow. We will partake in the afternoon and salute to change and promise.

i hope you have positive change and fulfilled promises in 2019.

When one has reached the precipice of really old, like 75, there are moments of regrets about what is no longer.

Today, i felt old, like something was gone. Why? It was.

Late morning, we packed the car, said goodbye to my sister and her husband, who once again have given us a beautiful Christmas, and drove our rental car to the Nashville airport to spend the night in a nearby hotel before flying back to the Southwest corner tomorrow.

It was unusual. Well, it hasn’t happened quite like this before, but it’s been four years since it’s been like it always was, or at least like it always was from 1992 through 2014. But this time, we didn’t fly out of Chattanooga or take a shuttle to Berry Field to fly out that day. No, this time we spent the night in a hotel.

Forever and forever, since i became a wanderer, my last night anytime i was in Tennessee headed back west was with my parents in Lebanon.

Old ways are gone.

Of course, that is the way life is. It moves on. Change is inevitable. People pass on. That is neither good nor bad. It’s what we make it.

Still, driving on I-24 from Chattanooga to Lebanon over those mountains and past those hills and through those valleys on a road i’ve traveled more times than i can count, not even considering our trips on US-41 before the interstate was completed, i kept thinking how i would not turn north of US-231 or north of I-840 to head home to Lebanon, but how i would keep going because that is the way it is now.

OId is gone.

It is not such a good feeling for an old man, regardless of how he reasons life is meant to be that way.

It’s okay. Next year will be a good year. Daughters, son-in-law, grandson, other relatives will do just fine. Me too.

But i miss old.

My sister, with Maureen’s assistance, makes Christmas a gastro delight: In addition to Christmas breakfast and dinner, and a Christmas Eve supper of her taco soup and cornbread and her pre-Christmas welcome back dinner of spaghetti, she also makes brownies, boil custard, and her wonderful chocolate chip cookies for continual nibbling here and enough for Todd to distribute to many friends on Christmas Eve. This year, she thus far has used over ten pounds of sugar, over five pounds of flour, and more than five dozen eggs…and we are still eating. Then you add children church services with candlelight on Christmas Eve (the old man did not make the midnight service this year: too old to stay up that late after dealing with the three whirling dervishes and concerned that if i went twice, the walls just might tumble down) and this is Christmas morning, before the fire is started and before young’uns arrive. Merry Christmas to all. Noel.

i am a “rambling man.”

Well, i am not quite like Hank Williams as he described himself in his “Ramblin’ Man” or the Allman Brothers claimed in their song of the same name, although i guess i’ve been to enough places, gone from enough jobs to another, and had enough loves to qualify on that measure.

But i’m talking about rambling thoughts. i have enough of rambling thoughts to be called a rambling man in triplicate. i’ve had more than a few rambling thoughts on this trip back east. In fact, i’ve had so many ideas about what to post here, i haven’t had the time to do it. i am wondering if other folks have that kind of rambling and feel the need to write about them.

So right now, i’m rambling. Here are some, but not all of those thoughts. i wanted to capture them here and plan to write in depth about many of them later:

◊  Henry Harding remains my best friend. A short meeting last Tuesday confirmed our friendship, regardless of how long  we haven’t seen or talked to each other, never stops, just picks up again.

◊  Vanderbilt athletics is a gem within this state, often overlooked and never with the support it should have. Tuesday, i met David Williams, the retiring Vice Chancellor of Athletics who has forged a program dedicated to Commodore Athletes being true “Student Athletes” and giving them a college experience preparing them to live well long after athletics are behind them, preparing them to be good people.

◊ Southern women have an elegance and a gentleness hard to match. Ann Eliot is a superb example of that elegance and gentleness.

There are many other thoughts rambling around this rather empty head.

But this early evening, i went to church. No, the walls did not fall down. The Signal Crest Methodist Church held a service with children acting and narrating the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. It was fun and it was Christmas.

i felt a stirring in my soul i had not felt in a long, long time. Now, as i sit amongst family and a passel of grand nieces and nephews, it is Christmas Eve. It is a good feeling.

May all of you have a wonderful Christmas and a bountiful New Year.

Christmas must be here. Bedlam is rampant at the Duff home on Signal Mountain.

Yeh, it’s Saturday. Christmas is not until Tuesday, but a six-year old grand niece and the three-year old identical twin boys that appeared at my sister’s home this afternoon put an exclamation point on the season being in full bloom.

But later in the evening, the quiet has returned. Tommy, Abby, Olivia, Allie, Max, and Culley have gone home. Todd has gone up to the master bedroom to read. Maureen and Sarah are either reading, on the internet, or asleep.

My sister Martha and i sit in the family room with the Christmas music boxes, the new jigsaw puzzle in piles on the work table, the big tree still glowing, and now with the children gone, a fire in the fireplace. Quiet.

My thoughts went back to our getting here, far way from children at Christmas. On  our drive from Lebanon to Crossville and then to Signal Mountain, i thought of many things about home. i’m talking about Tennessee, specifically East and Middle Tennessee. That is where i was driving.

It was rainy on both the ride from home in Lebanon to Crossville and the ride from Danny and Toni’s home in Crossville to Signal Mountain. It was lovely.

Bucolic. That’s what i thought as the clouds provided a blanket on the shoulders of the hills and mountains we drove through. The rolling meadows were still green for the most part. The deciduous trees had lost their leaves, leaving them stark with the aspect of loneliness but the pines and the cedars loomed dark green in the vista. Occasionally, there would be a farmhouse with a barn nearby, working places even if the barns and other outbuildings had faded paint and a couple of boards missing. A few had “See Rock City” in white on the black roofs under the faded red barns. Bucolic.

Home, i thought. These folks on those farms are home. It is their life. It is a hard life, no doubt, but simple, and could be self-providing for all if needed. Home. Bucolic. Peace. That’s what i thought.

And i thought of all the people i know who had never seen this part of Tennessee. They would be on the interstates. Yeh, we were too for most of the drive to Crossville. But from Crossville to Pikeville to Dunlap and up the switchbacks to what we call the backside of Signal Mountain, it was all country.

Bucolic. i thought of those folks on those farms and Christmas morning and how they might have a cedar tree like we used to have when the three children would go out to Papa’s farm and chop down the tree and haul it back and pull out the old cardboard boxes from the attic and decorate the tree in the corner of the living room, and wait in anticipation. And how these folks in those farmhouses would have Santa visit even though there was a fire by the hearth, and they would laugh opening gifts and then eat a dinner from mostly things off the farm.

And how after all of the ruckus of the celebration was over, the old man would lean back in his chair by the fire and take a nap, and how the children would play around the tree with their new toys, and how all would be right with the world in this world so far removed from the network and the cars and the four, five, or more lane roads, and the glitter and the lights.

Peace. Bucolic.

i wish all of you could have taken that ride with me. i think it would be good for all of our souls.

Noel.