I woke up this morning at my usual time, 6:30 am, sans headache. I showered, shaved, and brushed my teeth. I exercised, dressed, ate breakfast, and fired up the computer and checked. Nothing significant had changed. Today is Thursday, just as Thursday always follows Wednesday. So what if it's New Year's Day, 2015? An excuse to party, to drink, to dance. Is that all there is to the beginning of a New Year?

How sad. The only song I find sadder is John Lennon's Imagine. To be bereft of principle. To think that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are America's most admired people of 2014 according to a Gallup Poll. Police are being assassinated as thugs are being celebrated. The Republicans who were elected to put a stop to the growth of big government are already coddling up to a President who promises to promote even more federal intrusion into our lives. That Americans feel more politically and ideologically divided today than ever before, even during the Civil War. How can I read that and then wish you a happy new year?

Is it true?

Is that all there is?

No. There's more...

Father forgive me for I have sinned.

How long has it been since your last confession.

A pause.

A shrug.

How have you sinned, my son?

I've murdered men.

Men?

Yes, many.

How many?

Another pause.

Another shrug.

And?

I've tortured many more.

Why?

They displeased me.

How?

They disagreed.

Do you wish to confess another?

I've sent others to murder and torture on my behalf.

Who?

Ernesto.

Ernesto?

Che.

Ummm. He must confess his own sins.

He didn't.

No?

A laugh.

It's funny?

Yes. Che never believed that he'd sinned.

No?

That's why I killed him.

You murdered Che?

Quirky characters and well-written scripts dominate Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries available on Netflix streaming. My wife and I absolutely adore it.

Essie Davis romps through the title role as a bon vivant who returns from England to Melbourne, Australia and becomes a sleuth. Everyone loves Ms Davis. The makeup artists. The costume designers. The dialog writers. The lighting director. The camera operators. Everyone loves Ms Fisher. Her household staff including her maid who fears the telephone (the earth, she is told by a friend, will explode if people keep transmitting electricity through wires), her butler (a WWI veteran intelligence officer and commando), and a pair of roustabouts who do the heavy lifting, especially when thugs are involved in the plot. The chief police inspector is constantly annoyed by Ms Fisher's intrusions into his investigations, but we suspect that he secretly loves her too. There's no doubt that his hapless constable loves her maid.

Sometimes I fear that I may have failed those who follow this blog. When I began sometime in May, 2011, I posted just four times. However, I quickly warmed to the task and was posting two or more times each week. By the time the year was out, I began posting almost daily. As the frequency of my posts increased, so did my audience. It seems they were visiting more frequently just to keep up.

I'll never forget the first time the blog was visited by more than one thousand readers in just one day, then two thousand. They didn't just stop at one thing. They went on to read two, three, four, or more, some as many as eight to ten postings in one day.

Then I burnt out.

It would be nice to be remembered for writing a beloved Christmas story. Such tales have kept alive the memory of many authors who might have been otherwise forgotten. 

Ghosts of Christmas Past is one of two sketches that I've written that could be expanded into full length short stories. Please let me know what you think of it.

Most are resentful of my affected cheerfulness. They greet me with suspicion and some never surrender it. They are almost all depressed, their chronic diseases and injuries afflicting the soul as well as the body, serving as constant reminders of battlefields best forgotten. However, they will never forget which is why we must never forget them. They are patients at the nation's Veterans Administration Hospitals.

I used to visit them at Tripler Army Medical Center when I was stationed there as the Special Services officer after my tour of duty in Vietnam. Their wounds were fresher then and hadn't yet eaten away at their psyches. Most were still cheerful in a morbid way, still marveling at being alive, their wounds perceived as a winning lottery ticket. The prize, a discharge from the horrors of combat. It was to be a short assignment. Unfortunately, I carried my own wounds. A dose of malaria, a nagging sense of survivor's guilt, and a bad attitude that my colonel couldn't see past. I still carry vestiges of all three. Thus my tour of duty at Tripler was brief, and I was sent on to trouble another, happily a commanding officer who was more tolerant and found a way to channel my energies more productively.

There's a political proverb that “Only Nixon would go to China”, meaning that “only a politician or leader with an impeccable reputation of upholding particular political values could do an action in seeming defiance of them without jeopardizing his support or credibility”. (Wikipedia)

President Nixon was a hardliner when it came to dealing with the communists. No one would suspect him of coddling them by visiting China and opening formal relations, but he did. Even those who did not suspect that Nixon's intent was to leverage the Chinese against the Soviets never questioned his motives. They trusted him to be tough with communism regardless of appearances.

Yes, you know where I'm going with this, don't you? Do we trust President Obama's motives in opening formal relations with Cuba? Can we say with equal confidence that “Only Obama could go to Cuba?”

As I write this, responses to that question are arriving every minute from the Vietnam Veterans Only group on Facebook. It seems my question has hit a nerve. Take a look at a random sampling of the responses...

Can you imagine my surprise?

I was fortunate that when I completed my tour of duty in Vietnam, I was assigned to a post in Hawaii where there was little hostility between the military and civilian communities. Thus, I was spared the abuses that many Vietnam Veterans experienced on their return to CONUS (the Continental United States). I am appalled to learn that my comrades could not find sanctuary even among other veterans. It seems that “The Greatest Generation” wasn't as great as I once believed.

As I read Dr. Ben Carson's book, Gifted Hands, I discovered that he shared a problem with me in school. No one bothered to teach either of us how to study. Although Dr. Carson relates that he excelled in grade school in spite of the handicap, his lack of study skills almost caused him to flunk his first semester at Yale. Fortunately, as he believes, God extended a helping hand and got him over the hurdle. Afterward, he perfected his study skills and went on to great accomplishments.

Sadly, God never gave me a hand. However, inspired by Dr. Carson's example and believing that late is better than never, I set out to learn how to study. I turned, of course, to Google to show me the way. 

I may be guilty of overthinking this, but I read a book that got me to thinking about verb tense in storytelling. That's tense as in past, present, or future. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but it seems to me that most stories are told in the past tense. Consider this example from Charles Dickens: “Marley was dead: to begin with.”

That's the first sentence of Stave 1 in A Christmas Carol. What? Is he no longer dead? Was he not dead at the time of the story? Or should Dickens have written: “Marley is dead: to begin with”?

As I said: I'm overthinking this, or am I?

It's my son's fault. He gave me a book to read, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, in which the author played with the present tense. I say played because he wasn't consistent in its use. I wish he had been. It's the reason I read the book.