I was watching television one recent evening when a top aide to President Barack Obama disclosed that one of the president’s prime resolutions for the new year that begins today would be to spend more time away from Washington mixing with just plain folks, presumably to see which way the wind blows in grass-roots America in advance of the 2012 presidential election.
The aide did not say how the man who seems to be constantly on the road could possibly spend more time away from the Oval Office than he has since becoming president. Nor did her interrogator think to ask.
My guess is that Mr. President will be hard-pressed to out-travel his first two years on the job, and the resolution therefore will stand about as much chance of holding up as would a New Year’s resolve by the incoming Weeper of the House, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, to lose his sobbing act in 2011.
What’s up with this prime-time crying stuff, I haven’t a clue. But I’m thinking that chances of a tearless performance by Boehner when new-majority Republican lawmakers make a show of reading the Constitution aloud, in its entirety, in the House chamber on Thursday, range from nil to none. Should there be cringe-prone young innocents in your company as you watch the televised proceedings, parental discretion is advised.
Mark Twain’s take on the New Year’s observance was that it is a “harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.” New Year’s Day, he suggested, “is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them, as usual.”
The old boy had something there, I think, as did 18th century author Samuel Johnson who wrote of the business of making New Year’s resolutions: “Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.”
Convinced through frequency of experiment that a New Year’s resolution is generally something that goes in one year and out the other — as an old saying has it — I long ago opted out of the practice. But that is not to say I do not appreciate people who can make resolutions, New Year’s or otherwise, and have the perseverance to see them through, come hell or high water.
If, in the process, perseverance should fetch solidly up against procrastination, the result can be memorable. While reading some of the correspondence accumulated in my files during a lifetime in the newspaper business, I came across a case in point.
When former Bangor Daily News stablemate and accomplished photographer Leo Chabot was chief of this newspaper’s Rockland bureau, he wrote a photo-illustrated feature story about an aspiring novelist who had written a book centered on North Haven island in Penobscot Bay.
The author died before his work could be published. In the mid-1970s his widow contacted Chabot, then working for the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, seeking photos he had taken that were to be included in the book. Chabot resolved to look for them, and did so, although unsuccessfully. Busy with the daily business of cranking out news copy and photographs for the midcoast edition of the BDN, he subsequently forgot about the deal.
Some 20 years later, the Kennebunk native — who now was employed at the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune, where he ended his long career in journalism — was back in Maine to attend his father’s funeral.
When he went through his dad’s belongings, he found the negatives of the North Haven shoot packed away in a storage box. Remembering his resolution of long ago, he sent them to the North Haven woman with a note reading, “I told you I’d keep looking …”
In thanking Chabot for his resoluteness, the lady applied the needle gently. It had been more than generous of him, she said, to devote 20 years of his life to conducting the search.
Happy New Year, loyal readers. And may that paving-hell-with-your-good-resolutions thing work out for you about as well as Mark Twain implied that it might.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.