New Beginnings

There is something intoxicating about new beginnings. The yellowed and dim page filled with eraser marks and interlineations ripped aside to reveal a bright clean sheet. Of course, as one gets older, the page beneath the one you just tore aside carries the impressions from the prior page -- dim reminders of hasty notes written in a powerful hand. And, of course, there are some notes that you want or need to carry forward with you. That list gets longer, and longer, until a 'fresh start' is rarely the blank page of earlier years.

I find myself now with a fresh start in some sense. Tomorrow I begin a new job, and really a new profession, although the new job is based upon knowledge gained from my old profession. The indentations of the law have dug deeply into the next page for both weal and woe. The indelible ink of my three sons seeps deeply through the pad of paper that is my life, never to be forgotten no matter how often I tear at the pages. Once I thought the same was true of my wife, but now time will only tell if this is so, or if my marriage is another set of deeply inscribed indentations from the page before -- making it difficult to write fluidly on the new sheet of paper but otherwise the ghost of a hope that died unfulfilled.

New beginnings are intoxicating, but they are a young man's heady drink. The older we grow, the less we taste the wine of new beginnings and the more we taste the dregs of what might have been.