Holiday Greetings from Jim and Jan De Young

 

Volume L                                                                                      December, 2023

                                                   Christmas 2023

 Would you believe that this will be the fiftieth consecutive year for this letter? The first one was on a ditto (only old people will know what that was) dated 1973. Our family had just returned from a year in our favorite city in all the world—London, England.  

Where are we now? The pair, who will soon celebrate their 64^th wedding anniversary, are beginning their third year of residency at Grand Living. We don’t travel much anymore; covid put a real stopper on that. We still drive for medical appointments and to our daughter’s first grade classroom where we spend an hour once a week reading stories and tutoring. Jan’s special project has been working with a little girl who just arrived from Mexico with zero English. She is finding her college Spanish is a bit rusty. The rest of our activity is pretty much focused inside our home community. Jim is on the resident council and chairs the Activities and Sales sub-committees. We both work on tending the building’s two libraries and we lead a book and creative writing group.

 Daughter Amy and her husband Todd live ten minutes from our apartment. She still teaches first grade at Hiawatha School in Cedar Rapids. Her life is a whirl of activity mostly devoted to her students, and her fellow teachers (all of whom are facing educational challenges that have not receded even though Covid has diminished.) She has inherited some of my appreciation of clever humor and recently sent me this one. “Have you seen the ad from a company that makes yardsticks promising that they won’t make them any longer?” Todd is officially retired and is now waiting for a surgical implant that we hope will alleviate his back pain. He is doing a lot of the cooking and is so good at it that he can even make brussels sprouts taste good. His skills also extend to marksmanship. He bagged a wild turkey and a deer with his crossbow last month. The year’s jerky supply is ensured.

Grandson Mikel will be graduating from Upper Iowa University in May. His next steps are not clear at the moment, but he likes the outdoors and it looks like he will land somewhere in the area of conservation or the environment. He now has his own apartment and is working part time while he finishes his senior year.

Big brother Taylor, a paramedic and firefighter in Texas, is also embarking on something new. He has announced his engagement to be married in March. His bride-to-be is employed by the

police department and both of them are familiar with the hours that must be kept by the people who work to heal and protect us. A commitment to helping others runs deep in our family and we wish them well.

Our son David and his family live in Finland. He works in IT (Information Technology) and reports that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is all the buzz. His wife, Lotta, still finds time for her Gestalt Therapy clients and their two girls (Frida and Selma) are up to their winter caps in school and activities. This brings us to the event of the year. BRUNO, David and Lotta’s 3^rd child, arrived in January. We didn’t meet him in person until this fall when everyone visited us in the USA. The young charmer took his first unassisted steps while here and with his twinkling eyes and wide smile endeared himself to everybody-- especially his uncle Mikel who seemed to develop a special bond with him and was a godsend as a caregiver during the visit.

 

Perhaps, in this season of giving, you will also give a thought to a bit of wisdom from Andrew McCall Smith: “Gracious acceptance is an art most of us never bother to cultivate. The very best gifts have no conditions attached to them and you must realize that accepting another person’s gift is allowing them to express their feelings for you.” With that in mind, we send you this gift of love which is enduring and carries no strings. May your season be merry and your new year bright.

 

Yours, Jim and Jan De Young.

dramajim@gmail.com janetwdeyoung@gmail.com  http://stirringthepudding.blogspot.com

Book Review of William Kent Krueger's THE RIVER WE REMEMBER

 

Krueger, William Kent The River We Remember

 

William Kent Krueger is a “sneaky” writer. He begins The River We Remember as a standalone, straightforward detective story. A man, Brody Dern, with a dark WWII past, is now a county sheriff and is called out, on what was celebrated as Decoration Day in 1958, to the site of a vicious death along the banks of the Alabaster River. The victim is Jimmy Quinn, a local man of considerable means, who has accumulated more than enough enemies over the years. The traditional questions of a murder mystery are broached. Was it suicide, was it murder, or was it a tragic accident? Then, quietly, we begin to meet some of the suspects and other people in the town. Things rapidly get  more complicated. The Alabaster River harbors dark secrets that go back through the history of the town and we begin to see how the hopes, the fears, the adolescent longings, the interlocking love affairs, the racial hatreds, and the violence of wars have impacted the lives of those who live in the ironically named farming community of Jewel, Iowa.    

Krueger writes with profound sensitivity about the scarred lives of the folks who live Jewel. His characters appear normal on the surface, but many are lost in their past secrets and sins. The narrative flows on and is continually deepened by references to both modern and ancient literature. We have lost adolescents who seem drawn out of Holden Caufield; we have lives compromised by alcohol and drugs; and we have the maimed veterans of modern wars whose lives could have easily been pulled from the pages of Homeric legend.  All of these folks now live near the quiet banks of the keynote river. The book moves you most specifically by dealing with the deep seeds of hatred toward the American Indian and the Japanese that have been planted in our history and continue to grow today in the rich soils of the USA. Each of the lives depicted leads inexorably to a violent resolution that takes you through more twists than a pretzel in distress.  

I must admit that this book caught me up. I read most of the last third in one sitting. The plot is solid and convincing, the characters seem spot on, and the overpowering inclusion of the sad history of our land puts a rich and satisfying sauce on an already well-made meal. Through it all, the Alabaster River runs with a current that sweeps all contents “from our beginning to our end.” As Kreuger says in the epilogue, there are many stories to be told and in all of them there is some truth and a “good deal of innocent misremembering.”  Separating it all out remains the ultimate challenge of living.

Jim De Young 12/11/23