By the way . . .
Water polo.

Gone
Christmas and Thanksgiving come with such family obligations that New Year's has become the time to really celebrate the holidays, at least for me. The other holidays are just ordeals to survive.
And this year I'm going to Savannah.

That Wasn't So Bad
But thanks God I'm back home. My home. Not where I grew up.
My brother never volunteered any information about his situation, and we never had a moment alone where I could ask him. But we did have this odd conversation where my brother started talking about the cathedral at Chartres, how it was all based on mathematics based on the philosophy of Plato. And I told him, they didn't know about Plato in the Middle Ages, his works were lost to Western Europe, and they weren't regained there from the Arabs until the Renaissance. He disagreed with me. Then he started talking about the academy of Pythagoras, and he said that was a model for the monastic schools in the Middle Ages. My brother switched to Thomas Aquinas. He said Aquinas had separated spirit from soul, and focused on spirit, and that was when Plato was lost to western Europe until the Renaissance. I said no, Plato wasn't lost in the thirteenth century, he was lost in the mid-first millenium. And then my brother made some connection between something in Aquinas and modern prayer. I didn't understand what he was talking about.
My brother has always had a bad habit of seeing connections between things simply because he's read about them recently, but was a bit extreme, even for him.