By Edward A. Forbes
The Bulletin
The new year is approaching like a locomotive with a full head of steam. Only a catastrophic incident will halt its inevitable arrival.
We should age only on the anniversary of our birth date, not with the year’s changing. But as we get older, time, a speeding locomotive moving fast, is fixated with the year. Happy New Year, and you are immediately a year older. You can protest that you’re only three months older, but it will be to no avail.
I meet with friends I haven’t seen in years, and I’m stunned by how much they’ve aged!
I don’t have many mirrors in my home, but I shave often enough to know I have a turkey neck that is the envy of every gobbler in the area.
Crepe skin anyone? Mine is the envy of every piece of chicken on the meat counter. No full-length mirrors are allowed in my domicile. I fear the image might destroy my retinas.
As our bodies start betraying us, we can at least say “but we still we have our wits about us,” or do we?
We spend a lot of time trying to understand our grandchildren’s tattoos, body piercings, music and vocabulary. And with my (and I mean our) parents, the vocabulary alone would have had me eating soap twice a day.
I was thrilled to discover that google could translate foreign languages into English, and now I’m equally thrilled to have the urban dictionary explain the now-commonplace shorthand of the young, lol, smh.
The symbol for the lunar year 2024 was the Dragon, and for 2025 it is the year of the Wood Snake.
In Chinese lore, the snake is mysterious, charismatic, calm and resourceful.
In South Texas, snakes, wood or otherwise, are best considered dead and then identified as poisonous or nonpoisonous. We take few chances.
So HNY to all my friends, real or virtual.
(Email Edward Forbes at eforbes1946@gmail.com or send comments to The Bulletin, P.O. Box 2426, Angleton, TX. 77516.)