As it nears the end of January, countless well-meaning folks throughout the Chippewa Valley are busy scrubbing … their social media accounts of any references to their new year’s resolutions.

Read a book a week for one year. One month down, and the only book you even opened was Ten Easy Recipes for the Cold and Flu Season. 

Go to the gym at least three days every week. It’s been cold outside. And you have to make another vat of chicken noodle soup.  

Be a more patient person. But, really? A simple decaf, soy latte, with an extra shot and cream takes TEN MINUTES?! 

”

On New Year’s Day 2006, I wrote about a very good friend, Rudy Polenz, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer 11 years before. At first, he’d been given two years to live, then a few more. “I was scared for a couple years,” he told me. “But then two years went by, then four years, and I didn’t die. I almost forgot about it.”

I do want to recognize that resolutions aren’t really new. They’re confirmations of past pledges made and kept. “Ten years sober today.” Or 30 years. Or eight months. Or eight days. Good. Good for you. 

I wondered if I’d ever made a public resolution myself, so I revisited many of the newspaper columns I’d written during holiday seasons in the past 30 years or so. In the rereading, I noticed a bit of a pattern. They tended to be backward looking, more retrospective, rather than leaning into the future. 

And the Christmas and New Year’s pieces were different. The Christmas columns were sentimental, cast in a softer light. I wrote of an electric train set I’d received as a boy. My mother eventually tucked the train away in a cardboard box and, decades later, returned it to me so my wife and I could set it beneath our Christmas tree. We put it together beneath the tree and turned it on, only to have the train announce it had reached the end of its line with a puff of smoke, some wee sparks, and the smell of something burning.

And I once wrote a passionate plea to my wife to shrug off recent holiday neglect to again decorate a Christmas tree, reliving some trees of the past and the meaning they carried. From the pitiful wreck of a rejected tree rescued from a closed parking lot on Christmas Eve to camping in a magnificent redwood forest, I conjured Christmas memories of a tender nature.

My New Year’s columns were more nostalgic, often sprinkled with bits of melancholy, as if in considering the coming tide of a new year I literally asked myself, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?”

On New Year’s Day 2006, I wrote about a very good friend, Rudy Polenz, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer 11 years before. At first, he’d been given two years to live, then a few more. “I was scared for a couple years,” he told me. “But then two years went by, then four years, and I didn’t die. I almost forgot about it.”

But then a more dire prognosis returned. I asked Rudy what it was like to be given a number of opportunities to – as I wrote at the time – view “New Year’s Day as the beginning of a final act in a play that may not have a full-year run.”

Rudy took me through various resolutions he’d made over those years. Some were more personally meaningful, like the long letters he wrote to each of his children. “I tried to explain why I worked so many hours when they were young,” he said. They all turned out good anyway, he added, and he gave his wife the credit.

Other resolutions were more practical, but they too had a purpose. “I know it sounds stupid, but I wanted to leave the lawn in the best shape it’s ever been,” Rudy said. “I painted the front stoop. And I painted a lot of the inside, and I hate to paint. I just didn’t want anybody having to come in here and find things I hadn’t done.”

I asked Rudy for his resolutions for 2006. He first suggested one for other people: “Be good to people.” He said it was the best resolution he’d ever made. 

As for his own resolutions, he jokingly said his was to “try to make it to summer again.” He would keep that resolution, but only just. Rudy passed away June 3, 2006. 

“And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”