De Young Christmas Letter 2024.

 Volume LI                                                                                                                       December 25, 2024                                                                

 Christmas Tidings

I’m sure some of you are getting tired of these letters. I mean fifty in a row. Give me a break! Or are you willing to take a chance on fifty-one, which starts with a declaration that I once believed in Santa Claus, then I didn’t believe in Santa Claus, then I could play Santa Claus, and now I look like Santa Claus.   

    We are now in our fourth year at Grand Living and more than ever convinced that we made the right choice. We still read stories to our daughter’s 1^st grade class every week and we share the keeping up of the Grand Living Library. I guess that goes to prove that when the chips are down books still power our lives.

 Have you noticed that the easiest way to find something lost is to buy a replacement?

OK, vote now. Is that better than Santa Claus? Worse!  Or keep trying!  

 I also keep busy as Secretary for the Grand Living Resident Council and trying to finish writing our family history. Our son David is helping with the formatting. On the medical side, I had a nosebleed go out of control in October and spent a night in the hospital. I’m now off blood thinners for the time being. Otherwise, I’m holding my own. Jan is still the champion reader and crossword puzzle solver. She schedules our community book club and helps with the creative writing group. She beats me regularly at Wordle and Mini Crossword. For Christmas, she has been knitting caps and mittens for a local mission. On the health front, she has had good luck with cortisone shots for arthritis in her hip and hand and continues to resist surgery.

Our daughter lives about ten minutes away and still teaches first grade in the Cedar Rapids Public Schools. She won a teaching award earlier in the year and recorded a demonstration lesson just last week that will be shown to teachers across the district. On the minus side, she took a spill in her classroom a while back and has had to wear a boot while it heals. Speaking of healing, husband Todd has had a new electronic implant device put into his back. It is supposed to give him more control over pain and it seems to work most of the time. When it stops, it means another trip to have it re-adjusted. Luckily, it hasn’t interfered with his slam-bang cooking. Thanksgiving dinner was a gorgeous feast. 

OK stop and take a breath and turn your mind to more important things. I opened my closet this morning and a lion was staring out at me. I said to him, "What are you doing in my closet?" He said "It's Narnia of your business."  How's that one?

All right, on to more important things. Grandson Mikel graduated from Upper Iowa University last May. He has started work on a Master’s degree there while working 30 hours a week on an Iowa DNR and University project to use goats rather than pesticides to control invasive plant species. Grandson TJ has had to restart his life after a short marriage and divorce.  He now has a new house and continues to work in Texas as a firefighter and paramedic. He fills his spare time with hunting and jobbing out work on home repairs. 

And finally, there is travel and one more joke. “If I ordered an axe from Finland and had it mailed to me in Cedar Rapids, would I now have a foreign axe sent? To check that out we traveled In June, to Finland to visit our son, his wife, and their family, who live in a suburb of Helsinki. Our daughter was our companion and caregiver. we could not have made the trip without her help. Here we all are after a great meal down by the harbor. Lotta took the photo so she and David get a close-up. David continues to work in IT for the Kone Elevator Company and Lotta has recently taken a new job in counseling.  Frida is already a young woman as you can see from the group photo. Selma is an all-around spitfire from an inventive artist to a goalie on her soccer team. And two-year-old Bruno is the happiest clam around with a smile that will melt even the coldest Finnish winter.  

So ends number fifty-one. We’d be liars if we didn’t mention our disappointment with the election results. We have great fears about what the country will look like in the future now that every fact is negotiable, every truth is relative, and his truth is the only one that matters. All is not lost, however. Many gifts have been bestowed on us; we will feel no guilt about that. While waiting for better times, we will continue to spread as much love, generosity, and humor into the world as possible. May you also bring some light to those you touch this holiday season. It is the least we can do.

 Yours, 

Jim and Jan De Young http://dramajim@gmail.com        janetwdeyoung@gmail.com

                       

THE GREY WOLF by Louise Penny

 

The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny

Penny’s 19^th Gamache novel starts slowly with strange phone calls and proceeds into a complex dissection of fateful moral choices. Do you save your family and run or make an effort to save the planet?  What we are saving the planet from is a large-scale terrorist conspiracy that reaches into the heart of a corrupt government. More specifically the issue in The Grey Wolf involves a plot to insert a deadly poison into the water supply which will kill thousands and create a panic in the population. The panic will drive citizens to support a new strong leader who will then use his power to subjugate the populace and enrich himself and his cronies. Does this sound just a bit familiar to you?

The book starts in Three Pines and does journey back on occasion, but by and large, we see little of the fascinating group of residents that add just the right warmth and humor to Penny’s writing. The wolves  dominate here. Several of Gamache’s old cases keep popping back up and I can see her point to deepen the psyche of her main character, but it may disconcert new readers. The re-appearance of the grisly slaughter and the nasty frozen monastery on the lake may not be as significant for them as for me. Forgive me if I find that Penny seems to be targeting re-current readers at the expense of new ones. Perhaps she feels that, given the size of her following, there is no need to curry favor with newcomers to her work.

Through it all Armand Gamache does survive, though once again battered and torn. For the moment the Grey and Black wolves are kept at bay. Some friends turn out to be enemies and some foes to be friends.  The foes want to stop Gamache because he cannot be corrupted. His friends know that he will choose the survival of the society at large even though his own family may be sacrificed. John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of Utilitarianism comes to mind. The moral direction should be to maximize utility and produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of citizens with the least pain.

It's still a fine hook and I will be on the list to get the next adventure that her ending of this one is pointing to. Gosh, shouldn't be ending a sentence with a preposition!

REVIEW OF THE GREAT HIPPOPOTAMUS HOTEL by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Andrew McCall Smith is up to his old tricks again in this the umpteenth entry in the long-running No. 1 Ladies‘ Detective Agency series. We are treated to two story threads in the current book.  Mma Rmotswe takes charge of a Speedy Motors customer who is undergoing a mid-life crisis by purchasing a bright colored sportscar from Mr. JLB Matekoni without telling his wife. After the car is totaled in its first test drive, Mma comes to the rescue with her usual wily compromise.

The second story puts Mma Makutsi in the investigative lead and features the tracking down of the perpetrator or perpetrators of a series of actions designed to destroy the reputation of the Great Hippopotamus Hotel. We get several twists and turns in this thread as there are multiple suspects. With the help of her shoes, Mma Makutsi does a fine job locating the villain.  

I don’t rate this as the best of the series, but it is the kind of uplifting Christmas read we all need this time of year. All of the familiar characters are there, the gentle humor rings true, and the life-supporting philosophy of forgiveness brings everything to a satisfactory close. McCall Smith's prose just seems to float like a summer cloud above the violence, cruelty and tension of the present day.  Almost like clockwork, every twenty-five pages or so you can underline a droll piece of comedy, a heartwarming observation, or a philosophical gem.   

To wit: "Men drink beer and eat sausages—they are all a bit like that –after a while their stomachs say ‘no more room for all this beer and sausages—and then they spread in the only direction possible—which is to the front.’”

or 

“It is helpful if a people’s leaders build things, rather than knock them down.”

or 

“If only we could go back and cancel the misunderstandings and acts of selfishness that are like millstones in our lives, but we cannot, and so perhaps it is best for us to forget those things we cannot change.”

I love his books. I give this one a 4.8 out of 5. 

Robert Harris PRECIPICE

 

Robert Harris Precipice

Having just finished Robert Harris’s CONCLAVE and liking it, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a copy of his September release of PRECIPICE at the Marion Library. It is set in London and the English countryside, which enchants an Anglophile like me. The time was the beginning of WWI, which is always a fruitful period for generating juicy plots. In this semi-fictional novel the British Prime Minister Asquith is battling his own cabinet and the European powers as the war breaks out.  There is the scheming Lloyd George and the raging bluster of a young Churchill to contend with and then there is Asquith himself, who is having an affair with a young moneyed British woman named Venetia Stanley. He is sending her lovey-dovey letters topped off with classified information and actual state documents that he and his lover have been tossing out of moving car windows. His love letters to Venetia have actually survived, but Venetia’s responses have not. Harris solves the problem by re-creating them. This ends up making an interesting spy procedural that shows the British government at the beginning of WWI engaging in attempts to ferret out German intelligence agents long embedded in the country.  Harris also creates a young Scotland Yard detective as a lower-class representative, who is assigned to go undercover to smoke out where the leaks are in both the civilian and political population. Needless to say, when the evidence begins to point to the Prime Minister himself, the situation heats up.  

It's not a great book, but a pleasant throwaway read all the same.  I give it 3.5 out of 5.