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A healthy prosperous 2008 to Yukoners everywhere!May your flight into the new year be C A V U (ceiling and visibility unlimited)!May you meet…
Rambling

A healthy prosperous 2008 to Yukoners everywhere!

May your flight into the new year be C A V U (ceiling and visibility unlimited)!

May you meet friends, new and old, wherever your journeys take you. May you meet more smiles than frowns, more appreciation than complaints, and may learning, laughter and love fill your time with others, and leave worry behind.

Friend Big Ray told me: “Worry is like a rockin’ chair. It’s something to do but it don’t get you nowhere!” He had a lot of rumblegumption, that fellow!

Rumblegumption is an old Scots word I stumbled on recently, and it’s become an old friend too. Before falling out of favour it described an essential, though endangered characteristic — common sense.

And farewell to 2007 …

Memories of the old year are being tossed about by our pundits like voodoo witch doctors tossing chicken bones into the dust of the year expecting answers to rise from their dust. All we get is more clicking of the bones, more chatter, and little or no answers to the problems, and the blessings the year brought to our Canadian world.

The rest of us gather, feast, tell tales, raise our glasses in appreciation of the generous legacy we share together — a legacy as old as our land, and as new as yesterday’s snow — memories of family friends, neighbours and community.

Together they are our national memory! Individually, day by day, night by night the peoples of the place past and present helped bring us to this time, and the bounty we share. A bounty we share not just because of what we have done, but what those who have gone before us have done and given, and left in our care.

May our generosity in sharing equal theirs, and may we remain as steadfast as they in ensuring the foundations, traditions and stability they toiled, fought and died for to make Canada what it is, are passed on in total to future generations intact.

It is their due, and our duty, eh?

Do not corner something you know is meaner than you (a cowboy tip for ‘08).

What’s next, eh?

A search perhaps? A search for leaders with rumblegumption and a few more desirable characteristics: honesty, truth, just plain goodness, like old Santa’s image for starters.

Considering today’s crop, writer David Brin, in the Bangladesh Daily Star, is likely closer to the mark when he gave us a new take on some old advice. “It is said that power corrupts,” he wrote, “but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible.”

Reminding us how small our global village is, and how intertwined we all are, he also left us another way to measure our choices if our federal leaders ever get with it and call an election. Let’s get it done and get on with the rest of our lives.

Having said that, cowboy Ray pulled my reins pretty hard with his proclamation: “The biggest troublemaker you’ll probably ever have to deal with watches you from the mirror every mornin’.”

My friends bettered him with a birthday card announcing to me that: “On the day you were born, a thunderous, glorious voice sounded from Heaven above and proclaimed to the entire Earth below . . . . . . . ‘Oops!’”

A tip of the hat to 2008, and Happy New Year everyone, especially those who sent the birthday card. It’s a keeper alright, and so are you!

I hope everyone’s 2008, year end proclamation will not echo my “Oops,” but be an enthusiastic, “What a wonderful year!”