Another Year Over

I’m posting these a little earlier than usual this year. For anyone who didn’t see my post from last year, I like to come up with names for each month, sort of like chapter titles in a book. I always start with July and end with June. I usually name each month as it happens. Sometimes I know during the first week what that month’s “title” is going to be. Sometimes it takes me until the beginning of the next month. But I always know in advance what June is going to be, since for June I like to come up with an all-encompassing title that sort of sums up the entire year. I usually wait until June to write them down or post them here or share them with others or whatever I’m going to do. But like I said, I’m posting them a little early this year.

This year, for the first time, my titles tell a story. I’ve already told parts of this story. There are parts I cannot tell. I’ve written a lot about this being a hard year, the year I didn’t win. I wish, now, that I could have seen how good it really was and savored every moment of that goodness. There will never be another year like this one.

Some years I know what June’s title will be months in advance, but this year, I only recently decided. Like a lot of this year’s titles, it came from a song, the last line of which tells the story much better than I ever could: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

The Book of the Year 2010-2011

July: Bowling With Ben Franklin

August: The Times, They Are A-Changin’

September: Rise and Fall

October: Getting Horizontal

November: Tom Sawyer’s Guide to a More Complicated Life

December: The Walls Came Down At Christmas

January: Forward Through the Ages

February: Riding to Rutter Rehearsal in the Ridgeline

March: Runnin’ On

April: Faking It and Making It

May: The End of the World As We Know It

June: My Soul, My Life, My All