The friends in the room

I've been reminded of some past comrades folks I know. They've been haunting my life over the past few weeks. Like they were around me, behind me and making me think of them.

Unbidden they've managed to insert themselves back into my life.

Not for any specific reason that I know of.

Except for one. My dad.

It was two years ago this last month that he passed.

At the time it was not exactly a surprise, but it was a surprise in the end. Even when you see it coming, it always is a surprise when it finally occurs.

I started calling my dad the Energizer Bunny because every time he went in to the hospital, very sick, he always came out.

Always.

He always beat the odds and the prognostications of the doctors.

Until he didn't.

Finally, even the Energizer Bunny ran down.

I still miss him. I still talk to him. I still relive memories of past times together, so that he's not really gone. When I remember these times, I laugh again, I feel joy again, I relive them with him again like he was still here.

And for those moments, he still is. He and I are still living, laughing, and loving.

So, the anniversary of his passing causes me to miss him, logical.

Fred, not so much. Fred Bozek passed this past summer, something that we saw coming. Fred is another old time SF guy. One of the senior guys when I joined 10th SF, who'd been around awhile. He'd seen things. He'd done things. Done combat things. The sorts of things that a young, impressionable troop with brand new shiny jump wings and a desire to be one of the action figures found fascinating.

And so not one of those. So such a new, wet behind the ears kid wannabe. But Fred was cool, gracious, and nice guy. He was equally at home with his buds that he had served in Viet Nam with and with us new "VolAr" kids.

Volunteer Army (VolAr). It started in 1977 when the military started only accepting folks that volunteered to enlist into the military. It was to be the end of a decent, effective, US military fighting machine. Well, that was the common take and prevailing wisdom of those in the know at the time. Actually, not so much.

But I digress.

Fred popped into my head for some reason. Turns out that he had been living around Palatka, FL, a town that I had driven through many times and watched Fourth of July fireworks several times with my aunt and uncle that lived near there. Had I known that Fred was there, I very much would have linked up with him, but twas not to be.

I'm saddened for the missed opportunities. I knew him for over 10 years while in 10th, during which time I became SF qualified, got experienced, and became a peer.

His treatment of me never varied. Not a bit.

I last saw him while he was working at Range Control at Fort Devens, having left group to get away from a spate of chicken shit mis-focused leaders that we went through for a time. Folks concerned with pole vaulting over mouse turds vice some operational issues that deserved attention.

That's the worms eye view.

I saw him during a HALO night jump when I landed off the DZ in a junk yard. The guy that owned the junk yard was used to this and graciously ran me over to range control in his pickup truck. Where I ran into Fred, who had more jumps then than I did by the time I retired years later. Gracious, of course, as ever that night. 

And David. My best friend for most of my life. He passed a couple of months after my Dad. Stood up at his desk and fell over dead of a heart attack.

We had known each other from the crucible of elementary school where we were the odd kids out, receiving the ire of the teacher and the scorn of our classmates.

David was distinct. He was avant-garde before folks were.

In the '50s he would have been a beatnik.

In third grade he was just weird. And I was his sidekick. Or visa versa.

He grew into himself as time went on, but he was always avant-garde.

I first heard Kansas, "Carry on" over at his house sitting around in his room. 10cc, Mott the Hoople, Queen, and many others I first heard because of David.

He had tickets to see Queen, ninth row center at the Santa Monica Civic Center in 1975. When he bought the ticket, no one on this side of the Pond had heard of them. Two weeks before the concert "Bohemian Rhapsody" hit big and the tickets were impossible to come by. I cannot remember how many folks tried to buy my ticket from me on my way in to the concert.

Yeah, my ticket. David got grounded (a common occurrence) and sold his ticket to me, after convincing me to go. I'm really glad he did. It was a great concert. Freddy Mercury and Queen were in great form, that night they presented an inspiring performance that made me a fan for life.

I cannot hear Dust in the Wind or Carry On without thinking of David. Never. We were friends through elementary school, attending school together first at one school, then another. His dad became more successful and they moved to a more toney neighborhood about Jr High School time.

Yet we remained close friends. I would ride my bike the three and a half miles to his place, or he to mine. Though it was mostly me to his, David spent a lot of time grounded even before he could drive. Once I could drive I would drive to his place to visit and/or pick him up and we'd drive around or visit other friends. Even when grounded, his folks allowed me to visit. I was a good influence? I guess so.

He went to Israel for awhile in the 70s while I went in the Army. He came back after a few years, I made a career in the Army and never really came back. But we reconnected via email and chatted online and on Facebook. He popped up while I was on a business trip to Germany and we had a good chat. That was the last time we "spoke" before his death.

Frequently, while sitting "alone" I'll start laughing as I remember something from my time with one of them. And I'll toss out a comment to which ever one of them I'm reliving a moment with. Just like before, with my friends in the room like nothing had ever changed. They'll be with me for the rest of my life, and I with them.

Time and tide wait for no man

A year.

A year ago today he was still posting. We were still reading, discussing, chatting.

Life was normal, my morning online routine started with him. I checked back again over the course of the day, as usual.

It was during the thread of "Streamer", during our chattering, that the first harbingers of something amiss came to light. Niggling chunks of news that were unconfirmed while we mused over their meaning.

Calculated the odds. Figured how many of this and that were there, who was flying, what it could mean. As the bits trickled in it became increasingly clear that it looked bad.

Increasingly the picture emerged that it would involve him.

Lex.

Our host. Who had walked away from something that he loved, that was a part of him. The Dream lived and put aside as Life moved on.

He got his chance again though. After doing the contractor thing, the cubeville thing, the Powerpoint Ranger thing, opportunity knocked.

"They" wanted him to fly fast movers again. That life among the skies was asking him back, to return to the pulse pounding life of flying for a living. Flying in high performance aircraft again, paid to roam the skies and tangle with others similarly attired. To live the Dream again.

How many of us get to go back and do it again, to live the dream and the life that others only dream of, that we walked away from, glad to have had the chance at all.

And not only get to do it again, called back.

He had to work to get back, sweating, panting, exercising for high G turns. Going back to school to learn a new air frame, older, slower than he used to fly, but still high performance fun.

There were niggling things that kept popping up. Tower folks who should have known how to guide in this craft but kept missing marks. Little things that a more manual, older bird demands that are nothing like what he spent a lifetime of flying doing.

Streamer was just that, a discussion of something gone wrong with the bird. Nothing bad, but it was one of series of things that seemed to haunt the bird. It turned out that it was a practice run for what finally happened to him. He ran out of options, air speed, gas, pretty much everything.

And in the end, he died as he lived. Doing what he enjoyed.

And we grieved and we moved on.

Unfortunately, life continues. His family still lives and deals with life suddenly without him. We do the same. We've had surgeries, graduated, changed jobs, and otherwise had to keep dealing with the current of life coming at us.

But.

We remember.

We bear witness.

We blog, we live, we chatter, we remember. For he was of us, and we of him.

And now a year later, most of us that started blogging to keep his memory alive are still doing so. Still bearing witness. Still adding our voices to the blogosphere.

That I think is the greatest tribute. Inspired by a man most of us never met, we muddle through life, adding our viewpoint in an inviting manner. Hosting sites of discussion and tolerance for opinions that diverge from our own.

I still have issues with the airfields that handle mishandle these birds on a regular basis.

I miss him and hold him in my heart. Though he is gone too soon we deal with the aftermath, for the tides and time wait for no man.

No matter how much we miss him.

Partly cloudy to Cloudy

I'm a geek, it had to come to this.

A geek post.

One of my coworkers has drunk the "Cloud" Kool Aid. Everything has to "be in the Cloud". Otherwise you're a "box hugger".

So, what the hell am I talking about?

Have you wondered what the "Cloud" is?

"The Cloud" is any service that you can reach from the Internet.  Traditionally, if you wanted to use something, you had to go to a computer. Frequently, you had to go to your computer. For example, if you wanted to access the latest sales figures, you had to log in to your computer at work and open the file stored on your hard drive with the spreadsheet program installed on your computer. If you copied that file onto a floppy (or more recently, a USB drive) and took it home, you could not access that data unless you had a compatible version of the spreadsheet program installed on your computer at home. Meaning, you had to have a copy of your own installed on the computer you have at home. If you were not near a computer with that program installed on it then you were unable to access the data in that file.

Things got better, you had file servers at work so that you could log in to any company computer with your company credentials and access any data that you are allowed to access. So, files that you have stored on your shared hard drive space are accessible by you from anywhere on the company network - L.A. or New York.

Even Berlin.

If you could not get access to your company network, then that data was unavailable to you.

The same with any music that you might have digitized. If you didn't have your mp3 player with you and you weren't at home, then you did without your music (we'll skip over CD players in your car or PC).

With the Intenet, we began to be able to log in to the work network via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that acted like a private extension of the work network. Only to your home. Or at your local purveyor of high-end coffee.

You get the idea.

But, things tended to still be locked up or behind walls. If you could not run your VPN software, then you could not access the data that you needed to access. So, if you ran a Mac that did not have VPN software of the type that your company uses, you were unable to access your company network. Likewise if your smart phone didn't have a compliant VPN application, the corporate network and data was unavailable to you.

Similarly, all of the music on your hard drive was unavailable to you. So if your mp3 player wasn't large enough to hold all of your music, you had to choose in advance what music you thought you might want to listen to. Or your movies.

The next evolution was for folks to provide an answer to that. They created software-as-a-service (SaaS). It started with things like contact management software (actually, it started as email like Hotmail), the first of which was SalesForce.com which hosted enterprise-level customer relationship management (CRM) software for sales people to manage their customers.

This software only required that the customer be able to access the Internet.

And have a browser.

With internet access and a browser, you could access the site, log in with your credentials and immediately access your contact management data. Now your sales force had access to customer data while they were out on the road. Whether that road led to Muncie or Munich.

Google Docs added a basic software suite of word processor, spreadsheet, and shared calendars (okay, and email) for a company's people to use.

From anywhere.

With the ability to delegate actions (important for management) and share data documents.

Now, a company's workers can access and share company data with anyone in the company regardless of where they are.

Now, in g33k (aka, geek) circles, the interior networks are shown as diagrams of nets, subnets, routers, and so on. And the external world, the Internet, is shown as a nebulous thing, a cloud. Literally, a figure of a cloud is used to indicate the Internet. And this representation has been used for many years now. Well before "The Cloud" became the defacto phrase for anything that is an Internet-based service.

So, any service that only requires an Internet connection to use is referred to as being "in the Cloud".

Still here? Still awake? Good, we're almost finished.

So the issue came up about a service that we were planning on offering and that it should be hosted "in the cloud". Because, if we did, we wouldn't have to worry about servers, networking, licenses, or anything. It would "just scale" through the magic of "Cloud".

It would just know.

Like magic.

And we could stop hugging servers and insisting on having hardware. In fact, anybody teaching folks on servers and how to use them or how to build infrastructure was wasting time and effort in teaching folks how to build buggy whips.

Except, those "clouds" don't form from pixi dust or unicorn sweat. People have to open boxes, remove servers and rack them, stack them, and configure them.

Now, you can use kickstart files to automate a lot of that, but you have to know how this "magic" works in order to write kickstart files (files which automatically install and configure the servers as required).

Somebody has to teach how this stuff works. Not as a certificate course, but using theory to explain how they work, how to design them, what the various designs are and their strengths and weaknesses are, and why certain configurations are preferred over others for various requirements. In short, a degreed program that turns out folks who will design the coming generations of technological infrastructure(s) that will support whatever the future holds for us. In short, while one day the concept of having your own server farms may no longer be necessary for many of us, someone somewhere will be creating the infrastructure to handle it for you. We should keep teaching that.

But we're not there yet. Probably not going to be there within ten years either.

Flickr and tumblr are examples of Cloud services. Hotmail and Gmail are as well. iCloud and MeGo as well as Dropbox are yet more examples of Cloud service offerings. Most of these are free, and sometimes that is their real value to you. See here for an example of the service providing apropos to its cost to the end user.

This stuff is all fine and good. If you're in civilization.

You know, limitless wifi, true high speed Internet connections.

Not like many regions of New England. Or the Midwest. Or most of the U.S. at this point in time.

Without this ubiquitous high speed Internet access. Always and everywhere, you'll need to have local assets and copies of things that you want if you want to access them whenever you want.

For the foreseeable future, we'll have to hug something technical.

Me? I'm a coffee guy.

I'm not a Kool Aid guy. Especially when someone is handing it out to the masses.

My kilt story

Over at Bou's she had a post about her Da and a night out with a Scottish gathering for all things Scottish. It reminded me of an incident with some lads under similar circumstances. So I liberally quote my response here with some embellishments:

I've the fuzzy man-legs for a kilt, but no excuse for it.

A German and Irish heritage (with a fair amount of British as well, though much further back) is not a real legacy for kilts.

We were having a celebration upon a day, as it were. It was a SpecOps thing and we had some of Scotlands finest in attendance, Paras I believe. Perhaps Royal Marines or Commandos. Regardless, they were arrayed in their finest and had brought their pipes (huzzah!) as they were true Scots and more the welcome for their pipes. Strapping lads one and all.

My wife, wonderful lass that she is, had not much real experience with Scots, though she had heard things.

So, while mingling and imbibing (early on though, she'd no need of liquid courage for this) inquired if what she had heard of Scots and kilts was true. She felt emboldened I imagine since she could see that we all knew one another and were comfortable around each other.

So, I invited one of the lads over for her to speak with.

I told her, "Go ahead and ask him if you'd wish dear".

Ah, we were still young enough that she was want to avoid a bad reaction on my part lest these things be true, my blessing to her inquiry allowing as to my being comfortable with this line of inquiry.

So, she asked if it were true about what a Scot wore beneath his kilt.

He glanced at me and cocked an eyebrow, awaiting my reaction.

Understanding that although I was never the owner of the chiseled physique of Rambo, I was still 6'4", 185, in Special Forces and not as an accountant.

I assured him it was fine with me if he was willing to accede to the lady's inquiry.

So he showed her that a true Scot only wears what the good Lord gave him beneath his kilt.

Turns out that he was a natural red head.

Turns out that my wife was able to do a very passable imitation of red her self.

And the night went on in fine fashion, all of us having a thoroughly good time.

Though my dear bride still remembers and refers to that incident when the subject of kilts comes up.

And what is not beneath them.

And that is my kilt story. :)

Penguin Plunge

The Penguin Plunge, more commonly called a "Polar Bear Club" event in other locales, will take place this Saturday in Burlington, VT. The Penguin Plunge in this case is an event of Special Olympics Vermont held as a fund raiser for the Special Olympians of the state.

It's held every year about the first weekend of February at the City of Burlington boat ramp in conjunction with the city's Winter Carnival. A large contingent of cadets and students from Norwich University volunteer to help man the event in various capacities, along with folks from many other organizations. I attend with the NU student contingent. This year will be my third time volunteering, my second time plunging.

Those of us that help to run the event form the last plunge group. We form up as a contingent, march down to the boat ramp, do some pushups, and then rush the water to close out the event.

Follow the link, come on down if you're in the area. It's a festival in the cold and usually a good time.

I'll be the one in the black Army trunks and gray NU t-shirt trying hard to look like I'm not cold.

Things that go bump in the 'Net

Oh noes! We're under attack!

Unseen, all-out cyber war on the U.S. has begun

 I read a lot of folks, some of whom I agree with, some not, and some that I agree with sometimes and sometimes not. In this case, not so much with these folks, but with a guy named Bruce Schneier who likens articles like this to hype and hysteria (not a literal quote). While he frequently feels that discussions about a "cyber Pearl Harbor" are overdone, that the threat isn't that severe, I don't share his complete disregard. I don't disagree that there is a lot of alarm being raised by folks who have something to gain from the fear, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a big threat.

 This particular article has a lot of "may" and "could be" sprinkled throughout. It does address issues that are true, there have been some particularly severe infestations of networks that went on for years before being detected. The attacks are getting much more sophisticated. The article mentions the recent advice to turn off or disable Java in your systems. 

 For those within the cyber security industry, "Duh". We've been using separate browsers for years now, one with Java installed for those sites that we regularly have to use that require Java to be enabled. 

Like Gmail. 

And our other browser, the one we use for normal surfing the web, without Java in it. And neither browser is Internet Explorer. 

Firefox. Chrome. Opera. 

 This particular article slings phrases like "cyber violence" and "cyber 9/11" looking to spook folks. Phrases just loaded with strong imagery designed to instill fear in the readers. Yeah, there is stuff happening, there has been for years. Yeah, it's getting sneakier. Yeah, lots of folks do the equivalent of leaving their front door open, their back door open, leave their wallets on the front steps, and so on.

But . . .

This is the sort of thing that gripes me: 

 Banks coming under cyberattack 

This article is being used as an example of how pervasive this cyber threat is. They talk about how the U.S. financial system is being targeted, then using an example of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to make their point. A DDoS is where a lot of computers are directed to ask the bank's web server to send them a copy of the bank's home page. 

Think supply and demand. When too many folks mob something looking for more of it than is on hand, some do without. 

In this case, normal customers that are trying to do their banking business with the bank either may not be able to reach it or experience slow response from the bank site. In cases like this, this is considered a damaging attack because customers are being inconvenienced. More so if they actually cannot get through. 

However, a physical version would be a large crowd of people swarming the ATM that you usually use. You are denied access to it while they're swarming it, but the bank is not going down. 

In the cyber case, the bank may not be able to put up another ATM, but it hasn't failed nor been compromised. With experience, the bank will learn how to deal with this type of attack to minimize the impact to their operations and the customer experience. 

But, cyber violence it isn't. 

Neither is it a cyber 9/11.  

There is a threat. We do need to take it seriously.

But let us not equate what is really only a cyber flash mob and its effects with results like this.

 

Winters I have known

This time some more photos, but mostly of more recent vintage - like last weekend.

And before.

Snow. We gots it.

Knowing that unlike the tropics, where my in-laws live, we live in The North which is known for snow. As differentiated from Massachusetts (aka, The Tropics) where they only received about 6 inches of snow I knew that we were supposed to receive 12+ inches. So, during the multiple hour drive that was the journey home, I was mulling over my plan of attack for when we arrived. Fully anticipating having to post-hole to the front steps, start a fire, change into snow clothes, and mow the snow with the snow mower (aka, The Rampaging Snow Beast). We arrived home after our Christmas sojourn to find this awaiting us:

Be it ever so snowbound . . .

As you can see, it's a fair amount of snow.

As you can also see, I have nice good neighbors.

We parked across the street in that neighbors driveway and strolled up to our steps to begin the process.

The cats were thrilled to see us and jump into our warm, cozy laps.

For which they had good reason.

Once inside and aware of the state of things within the homestead, my bride's glance was almost as frosty as the reading on the thermo meter. For instead of the anticipated 60-something that I had thought the house would remain at, we found it a less than agreeable 43 degrees.

While not an unreasonable exterior temperature, most women I know tend to be chilly in a reasonable indoor environment.

By most standards, 43 does not qualify for that description.

We have radiant heat in two floors and a wood stove. Seven feet tall and magnificent to behold, it is a wondrous thing when in full burn. But, it is manually operated. Sooooo, when we're gone, no fire. No heat. Just the ground floor and the partial second floor doing their radiant heat thing.

In late December in northern Vermont.

Said wondrous stove can heat you right out of this domicile. Given time.

Hours.

No forced air, no oil-fired furnace with its immediate gratification of hotly desired heat (pun intended).

So, load up the stove with wood, stuffing little pieces in every nook and cranny in the burning area and break out the god of fire. Then change into my snow mowing clothes - warm pants, Sorel boots, thick socks, heavy coat, warm gloves, warm stocking hat, and head outside to where the temperature was cold, but the atmosphere a bit warmer than inside.

My bride awaited the arrival of a livable temperature while having to wear her coat inside her home.

Me? I sought out the warmth and solace of the winter afternoon in the interim. 

This is what awaited me:

16 inches of winter goodness.

There are places where it was worse, but there are places where it was less. I had just left one.

Fortunately I have a snow blowing beast of burden to ease my physical labors in situations like this.


Mostly.

Those of you that have lived in such a clime know that regardless the ability of the snowblower, there are many places where it cannot remove snow. Removing snow from these places thusly requires substantial personal physical effort despite the ownership of such wonderful mechanical contrivances.

But I digress.

Still, it can move an awful lot of the snow that it can reach. That's the charm of these beasties.

So, to it I went, stopping to document some of the level of effort required:

Actually, it was worse than it appears.

So, some of it was higher than the snowbeast, which requires additional effort and time to tame. I worked out some techniques, shoveling the snow down to fit the intake of the snowbeast being the best of these. Throw the excess snow on the ground and get it with an additional pass.

My neighbor is a smart, thoughtful guy, senior to me with the knowledge that comes with that status. He frequently avails me of said knowledge, especially when I ask.

So I asked him the best way to deal with the snow when it is piled up higher than the snowbeast.

"Don't let it get that high, hit it with the snowblower before then."

Erudite in its simplicity. Not much help when you're not around however.

I was reminded of previous times that I've removed snow.

I still remember this.

At one point in my career I found my self stationed with a Special Forces unit located at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, an hour south of München (Munich). Being stationed at the base of the Bavarian Alps, we naturally availed ourselves of said natural resource for our winter activities.

Especially those of the downhill ski training type.

So, in January of '81 we found ourselves conducting our annual ski training on the Brauneck, a local mountain with which we were familiar. With slopes suitable for training thereon as well as locales suitable for the cultural training aspect of it. For we are trained in the local languages, customs, and cultures. Said cultures, customs, and languages we are expected to maintain proficiency in.

Perforce fluency even.

Such cultural activities including, but not limited to, availing ourselves of the locals highly prized and proudly served malt and barley beverages. Said beverages to be consumed under the cloaking activity frequently referred to as "lunch". There are many places wherefore to stop by and undertake said cultural activities, and we being very familiar with the mountain had developed preferences.

So, to one such preferential locale on the mountain did we retire to.

We stopped by a place whose owners we were familiar with, and they with us. While greeting her and trying to sort out our orders, it came up that with the extraordinary snow fall of this season she had a problem. While she had managed to dig out the front of the establishment, she needed to dig out the back. She hadn't gotten to it yet. So, we offered to dig it out for her. We knew them well and she was no longer as spry as she had been as a bride.

Under all that snow was a supply shed that she accessed on a near daily basis. We dug a way from the kitchen door of the hütte to the shed for her as her husband had died in the fall and they had not yet adjusted to his absence.

Eventually the kids took over running the hütte but we gave her a hand in the interim.

Americans still receive a warm welcome there to this day, for this represents but one of many incidents of assistance with these folks.

But especially tall ones, for the vertically challenged among our group were unable to heave the snow high enough to gain "escape velocity" as it were. At 6'4" I was challenged to do so as we got towards the bottom.

So, the snow at home this week is back in perspective for me.

Oh yeah, frigid home and hearth. After a couple of hours of clearing snow from the driveway and truck it was time to park the car in the driveway.

And start the unloading.

Then burn another load in the stove.

We managed to raise the indoor temp to 60 by the time we retired for the evening. It was 67 by the next morning when we arose from our slumbers and the house was much warmer in more ways than one.

marcus erroneous

'Tis the season

Christmas, short days, long nights, cooler weather (ummm, actually cold here). I do enjoy the carols and Christmas music - but not right after Halloween. From about Thanksgiving on is good, feels right, like when I was a kid. If you haven't yet, thinking about gifts for those to whom you will give gifts. We usually keep our eyes open all year looking for the right gift for someone so that there's not really that much shopping to do by Thanksgiving.

Having said that, my bride and her mom along with others of the All Girls Spending Team (hat tip to Lex) head out for the Black Friday Follies. One of several activities that are appropos of the season.

One particular Saturday my bride and I were of the occasion to be walking along Church Street in downtown Burlington. We were specifically there to purchase a gift for some friends of ours from a shop on Church Street. Said shop being the only location we were aware of to purchase this item. We swung by the Three Tomatoes, an Italian restaurant we frequent when in the area. It's doorfront is at street level, but the restaurant is actually located downstairs. An enjoyable atmosphere that brings us back repeatedly with good, local, fresh produce served in the Italian art (as my German friends would say). Emerging on to the street once we had finished with our repast we found a typical Vermont afternoon in December - cold and snowing. As we strolled along we enjoyed the ambiance of walking hand-in-hand, enjoying the decorations and the Christmas spirit invoked when outdoor decorations are accented by falling snow.

It reminded me of the Kristkindl Markts in Germany sans the gluehwein and gemuetlichkeit that are the hallmark of the real thing. Again, with many happy memories of previous times in previous locales.

Cards. Specifically Christmas cards. Reminders of times in our lives, moments of our past encapsulated in a card with simple greetings, hand written notes, and form letters updating one and all of their family's doings for the past year. You will frequently hear folks denigrate the whole idea of once a year sending of a card to someone that you don't feel enough about to maintain more contact during the year.

That would be one way to look at it.

But as the cards come in, I look at the names on the return address and remember the folks behind the address. Seeing these names invokes memories of the people behind the names, of the memories we shared with them, of the point in our lives in which we met them. For instance, we received cards from several friends of our time in Texas. We moved there after I retired from the Army, when I started my corporate life in a place we'd not previously visited. Our daughter had already completed her freshman year of high school and had to change high schools. Our son visited the middle school and immediately deemed it a prison. When we arrived at our new home at 4:30 AM, it was in the high 80s and my bride was ready to melt down. Fortunately, the dogs and the guinea pigs were more sanguine about it.

But, it was a good time. Both kids attended and graduated from high school during this time. Learned to drive, learned to date, did that awkward high school-teenage thing while we were there. Pool parties, Boy Scouts, proms, and all the things that kids do during this time. We became empty nesters while we were there and relearned how to be a couple again. We reforged our relationships with our children as the relationships became one with adults instead of kids. Different but still satisfying in a way that defines our and their new status in life. And we had friends that we celebrated things large and small with. So, it was a special time for us and seeing these names brings it all rushing back.

Cards from Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, California, Minnesota, New York. Friends, family, former coworkers. Friends from our time in the civilian world, friends from our time in the military. Our new friends have only been our friends for about 15 years. Our old friends double that. Each card a moment in time for people we fondly remember.

No, we aren't as close as we once were. No longer seeing each other on a daily or weekly basis. But we mattered enough to reach out each year anyway. To maintain that connection, tenuous though it may now be.

And I discovered that I really enjoy seeing the cards come in and remembering these folks from our lives. The memories they bring back, good times, good friends, part of our past, and immutably part of us.

I hope that you have the same experiences this season. That the incoming cards bring the same simple joy that we are experiencing. 'Tis the season.