After two days and nineteen hours driving the interstate
After two Mexican restaurant dinners and a free breakfast
We are resting in a hotel room in Jacksonville
And you still have the energy to play on New Year’s Eve.
Like young children we are free now to amuse ourselves
Discovering whatever fun and interesting things to do
Traveling south to a warm place to spend the winter
Where we will be active exploring nature preserves.
On this night we talk about the arbitrary caprice of the
calendar
As compared to Tet or Rosh Hashanah or any other demarcation
Remembering a very good year for us doing and being together
Looking forward to revisiting favorite places and
experiencing new.
I am reading about the historical process of change in
language
How the English irregular verbs are getting modernized
The past tense formed with the regular verb –ed suffix
Not the vowel change that was the ancient verb structure.
The last to go are the most common verbs, lingering
expressions
As we speak of ringing in the New Year, I picture large old bells
That were rung by pulling on ropes to sound the celebration
While today it is the telephone that rings to make
connections.
The incoming call sound made by a cellphone isn’t really a
ring
Unless you select that option for a retro jangling noise
But it is still called a ring tone, using throwback
nomenclature
That phone sometime in the future will be said to have
ringed.
