2021 – THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Theresa asked a few days ago if I had made any progress on this year’s annual newsletter, and I struggled with telling her I had yet to write a single word.  It has been a strange year and not an easy one to sum up.  Whereas 2020 passed like the first bead from an old tube of caulk lost for years and then rediscovered in the dry corner of the garage, 2021 came rushing out in an uncontrollable mudslide of white ooze behind the pressure of a much too worked piston freed from that first dry line clearing the tip.  Quick!  Get me an old wet towel and a putty knife!  On balance there was more mess than accomplishment which reminds me…I need to caulk the hole from when I loosed an arrow into the back of the house.

I think I’ve told this story before that for years my daughter, Keagan, has commented that my annual newsletters clash with the traditional form of a holiday newsletter style.  I think the claim is that they are too much my story than any great respecter of equal time for each member of the family.  They are more my personal reflection than bulleted news meant to impress.  Before the kids left for college to build their own lives, I was not a helicopter parent or at least that is my image of myself and I think the writing reflects that.  In fact, I might have been so polar opposite of a helicopter parent that I was on my way back again.  It’s neither a brag nor a confession.  It’s just the way it was.  I got lucky that my parenting methods worked out as well as they did assuming I could take any credit.  Both of my kids are great human beings before any mention of accomplishment or acquisition.  I am very pleased with them as people that they concern themselves with being useful to others.  I think the sloppy ignorance of love coupled with an almost accidental stability from living one day at a time did more than any forced curriculum could, not to mention Theresa’s enormous contributions as a model of humanity.  If Theresa is your first exposure to someone from a Buddhist upbringing as she was mine, you might come away thinking, “Wow!  Those Buddhists turn out a pretty damn good product.”  She might be genetically superior to me too.

-So!…the kids have been gone now for awhile, off doing their own thing.  I know little more about the details of their lives than I do my nephews, my judo partners at the dojo, or some of you reading this.  They tell me what they want me to know, and it seems they are doing very well, -happy, healthy, and thriving.  If the parenting job in the animal kingdom is to model the job of being a productive adult of the species, then for or despite me, they’re there.  -Not much else to report.

Keagan made all the predictable college break trips home, took my Honda, at first with permission and then as if it were her own, and we soon came to understand her presence at the house was something only slightly more frequent, durable, and predictable than the Amazon delivery driver.  One more semester at Lewis and Clark College and she plans to return to Colorado in the spring thoroughly sated with the fog and drizzle of the Pacific northwest.  -Then a gap year and maybe grad school, -something ideally where we are not her roommates I think.  What I am trying to say is while I love my daughter very much, I have a very active dating life.  Yes, it’s my wife I am dating, but a dating life all the same, and springing for hotel rooms to properly conclude the evening when you are twenty years into a mortgage, well…that’s just silly.

Emerson is busy making career hay as an engineer and seems to always be traveling throughout the western United States.  He’s not one to lead off with all the cool stuff he is up to I suppose because he is so legitimately busy with the details of making real stuff happen that he doesn’t put a lot of thought into how it would play in a story to Mom and Dad.  There is no need for embellishment.  Instead it comes out in drips and drabs usually when he is over for one of his Sunday night visits.  A commercial during a Broncos or Avs game is often the trigger, “We just did their warehouse RF design…blah blah blah,” and then there is a bunch of techno-babble I am ashamed to admit is over my head because I probably sell every doodad and part inside everything used to build the monstrosity he is designing.  -Which just goes to show I don’t need to understand the thing to perform the economic task of pricing the thing.  Still it’s a case of one techy dude talking over the head of a presumptive another.  It’s usually then when I ask him to fix the tv sound bar, so I can play 80s music on my next date night.

It was a year on the mat.  Judo made a comeback in the life and times of Gilmartin, actually beginning in the latter part of 2020, but 2021 was a full year of it…depending on who you ask.  I’d like to make more practices next year than I did this one, but I did manage to get in two tournaments.  I have in mind four for next year for both shiai and kata which probably means little to the non-judo people reading this.  I’ve met some great people having gotten back into judo. -Too many to list here, but I suspect they know who they are.  The additions to my FB friend group are interesting, -a lot of black belts.  I am pretty sure my FB friend group can beat up your FB friend group. 

I especially like the older folks who still find a way to keep judo in their life because returning to the mat in one’s fifties is as much an accomplishment of the mind as the body, and, let’s face it, the body does get a workover sometimes.  I learn a lot from the older folks, -the whole mindset.  Anytime the ego gets involved, you’re looking at some hardcore personal growth.  Checking it at the door is not as easy as it sounds.  It has been an exercise in confronting fear and keeping expectations manageable.  I am in great shape for my age, but I am still my age.  Quite often I am working out with someone 20-30 years younger than I am, and I gotta find my wins in a whole new way.

I dropped some weight, 40-50 pounds depending on what you consider the starting point.  Some of that is attributable to judo, but a lot of it was stress.  Now that the weight is off, judo is probably the main incentive for keeping it off though EVERYTHING is easier when there is less of you to carry around.  I feel really good in the 73kg (160#) weight class and very good when I am at that weight in my age bracket.  I am very much looking forward to Senior Nationals where I hope to get some re-matches.  I am gunning for a couple of guys. 

Cycling miles are off this year because I converted time in the saddle to time on the mat, but I should still wrap up the year with 4100 miles, very respectable considering the big picture.  I’ve added some running as well, a couple of miles here and there sometimes before or after a ride just to change up the muscle groups getting used and maybe train my brain to not freak out if one day I enter a running event.  If I do say so myself, I have excellent cardio for a man on the cusp of getting senior discounts at the movie theater.  This year’s 500+ mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles was just this side of effortless, and the clothes!  Theresa finally said, “You can’t wear that anymore!  You look stupid.”  I was slow to replace the wardrobe, but it is a nice problem to have being down two shirt sizes and back in the same size jeans I wore when I graduated high school.  Yeah, I like the new size, and I resist the temptation to add any bulk.

Theresa swore me to secrecy, but let’s just say in the not very far off future I may have to bow or curtsy in her presence.  Some are probably reading this and thinking I should be doing this already anyway, but for now it is a fun subject to kid her majesty about.  Yes, that was coded and not many of you, if any, know what I am talking about (mission accomplished), so maybe this is as good a place for a segues as any.  2021 became the throwback to the halcyon days of dating.  I did not marry to have kids, buy a house, or even to check off a box with God.  I could have cared less about the institution, and even at the age of 25 I was then acutely aware marriages were made inside churches, but undone inside a court room.  Which institution really got the say as to what it really is?  Insecurity more than anything else drove me to the altar. 

I married this chick for the purely selfish reason of wanting to monopolize her free time which I did with all the gluttonous fervor one can imagine until adult life began to hit me in the face.  In any case, we found our way back to the simplicity of those days this year.  If you had told me at 28, “Let it drift, Matt, it’ll be back,” I am not sure I could picture it or imagine that it would be better than it was before when it picked up again.  -But…it is!  Bow…bow chika bow bow!  For me, I don’t think date nights need to be a big production. I think we seldom plan much beyond the first hour of the evening, but it is something to think about all week, -something to get to when all the working and working out is over. The other week, Theresa called me down to show me a pair of leather pants she was trying on and asked, “What do you think?” I think, you’re thinking about date night, and I KNOW I am thinking about it now, and the next thing you know I can’t grunt in caveman, “Matt…so…so happy now,” without drooling. So, with that this is where I have to cut the story off because c’mon.  You don’t want to hear about the dates I have been on.

-No hunting tags for 2021, so another year of leaving the camo at home.  The Jeep spent much of the year parked in the driveway with the cover on.  I really need to get busy in 2022 investing some time and money into restoring that.  I need to find a welder to patch a hole in the floorboard.  Know anybody?  Aye yai yai, just knowing that hole is there eats at me.  Have a great 2022 everyone!

Pax vobiscum,