"Maybe the best we c'n do is to hope to end up with the best regrets." Arthur Miller



Coming down to the wire…

Whether you like it or not, the year is coming to a close...
Well, as they use'ta say in those long-ago newsreels, "Time Marches On!"...some of them scientific folk figured it all out a long time ago, way before I ever came on the scene anyhow. 
Twelve months, 'n that's it. Then, if you're lucky, you get t'do another one…  
As years go, for a lot of people, this was either a very good year or a very bad one, depending on your p'ticklar point of view...
Either way, good, bad or indifferent, the die is cast, the deed, as they say, is done... 

What got durn near ever'bodies attention wuz the non-stop election campaign…the differences between the two major parties have never been more pronounced in the whole entirety of my life.  I got so confused, I thought I wuz maybe in one of those Marx Brothers movies...
The whole campaign wuz one of those 'first you say you do but then you don't' things that ended up splitting the country down the middle...if the costuming 'ud been different, we might'a been back in 1860 'stead of 2012...(if you listened to Bill O'Reilly peddling his book, you might'a bought a ticket to see Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater)...
In the end, of course, if you read hist'ry at all, you'll know that one election won't make or break a country 'n the US of A has been around almost two hundred 'n fifty years 'n it has always been a country in flux 'n if we've learned anything, it's that things change...when I wuz a boy in Kentucky, folks use'ta say if you don't like the weather, wait fifteen minutes.....
Americans of a certain age like to think of our country as something special but, in truth, we all know that as every snowflake is deemed to be different, so too are people.  Every one different 'n every one pretty much indistinguishable from all the others…well, as soon as they hit the ground 'n begin melting….

"Now this is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, p'haps, the end of the beginning."  Winston Churchill