Tag Archives: past

Sunday traditions…

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As often as not, Sunday dinner at my grandparent’s house meant roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, and all manner of home cooked food. While I may not have a dozen or more gathered around my table at 5PM on the dot, at least once a month, my house fills with the savory smell of roasting beef as I do my best to keep with tradition. Sure, I’ve made some tweaks to the recipes – I use more garlic than my grandmother would have ever dreamed of, for instance – but the underlying idea is still the same. Sunday dinner is important, if for no other reason than it’s a touchstone with the past.

While we’re on the topic of touching the past, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that this week’s posts from the archive are now available for your reading pleasure. Pulled into the present from the last half of June and July 2008, today’s posts are a bit more pithy than they’ve been in the last few weeks. They feature a few more explanations of some of the more colorful words and phrases that show up in my vocabulary from time to time. Get your dose of the archives soon, because from the look of things, in two months this particular Sunday tradition will be drawing to an end.

A short December…

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Yeah in and year out, December regularly has the lowest readership of any month of the year. Everyone is busy and that’s to be expected while they’re attempting to fill the world with their personal version of holiday cheer. I mean, I can’t really expect everyone to drop their Christmas planning just because a new post or two show up on the internet. The logical result is that December became something of a dumping ground around here. Since the numbers weren’t on my side, posts got less frequent, shorter, and weren’t exactly “A” level material in a lot of cases. I like to think more recent Decembers have seen that trend reverse a bit as I try to keep the focus on delivering quality pith every day of the year.

December 2007 was seriously short on posts. It looks like I was only managing to get my act together every three or four days back then… and what did show up was often super short and lacked the snark that I think helps define jeffreytharp.com.

What does that mean to you? Well, instead of dribbling them out over two weeks, I’ve taken the unprecedented step of posting the entire month’s worth of material in one go. With these 10 posts, we can bring 2007 to an end. Next sunday, I hope you’ll join me as we launch headlong into 2008. With only ten months and 14,000 words of archive material left to post, this little project is closer to its end than its beginning. I still think it’s been a worthwhile effort if only to remind me about how ridiculous our own pasts can sound when we have the benefit of hindsight.

Photograph…

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In one part of our building there’s a long hall with several dozen historic pictures that appear to be taken sometime between or shortly following the World Wars. I know they’re supposed to instill a sense of pride and speak to an enduring legacy, but that’s not what struck me about them today. Walking past those pictures this morning it suddenly hit me that they all have one thing in common – Those people staring back at us from the other side of archival quality print are all dead, deceased, gone to meet their maker, and singing with the choir invisible.

I’m sure that every one of them did great and wonderful things or were very important in some way, but I’d be willing to stake real money that not one person in a thousand could tell me who they were or what they did. Maybe that’s morbid, but it’s a pretty stark reminder, just when I needed it, that some future hardworking and dedicated employee isn’t going to have a clue who we were or why our picture is hanging on some wall looking back at them. Sure, everything we’re doing every day seems awfully important, but in 100 years, you’ll be a luck one if someone is even using your picture as an office decoration. I’m not so far gone down the path of fatalism that I’m willing to concede that nothing we do day-to-day really matters, but sometimes it’s healthy to let nameless faces from the past remind us not to take it all so damned seriously. Chalk that up to stupid lessons I wish I’d have learned years ago.