Letter from the Vineyard

The cold that has held the Midwest throttled for the last two days is heading east and will be with us tomorrow.

It is time to pull out the long underwear and the heavy sweaters and to be concerned that pipes don’t freeze.

This will be a short letter as I have spent the day in languid pursuits, a long leisurely lunch with my friend Larry Divney at his favorite place, Ca’Mea, the best northern Italian north of New York.

We met so I could return to him the various containers in which he had brought wine to Christmas celebrations, part of the best Christmases I have ever had. He and Alicia, his wife, are very special people and fill a special place in my life. We celebrated both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together and it will remain with me as two of the best Holidays of my life.

The market is volatile. The world is volatile. The New Year did not bring some magical changing of the tenure of the times. The troubles of the old year have blended into the New Year and we continue on.

The Republicans have taken control of both the Congress and the Senate and so I suspect we will have a very rocky couple of years while they do their best to demonstrate they can govern as opposed to being the party of “No!”

I grew up Republican, one of those good cloth coated Republicans that Nixon described in his famous “Checkers” speech, back when we actually believed in Nixon. My parents did. They were one of the few people in our neighborhood who supported Nixon when he ran against John Kennedy in that long ago, much studied election.

But I haven’t been able to recognize the Republicans in the last couple of decades. They seem so far away from the party I grew up. Now they have the entire Congress and it will be interesting to see if they can govern and govern with some sense of responsibility, which I haven’t felt they’ve had for quite some time.

Boehner is once again the majority leader in the Congress but not without some pushback within his own party.

The Republicans seem fractured. They are trying to hold it together but I’m not sure they can. It will be interesting to watch. I would like to see them manage but I’m not sure they can.

So, on this first day of the new Congress, I hold my breath and wait to see what occurs.

In the meantime, I must head for bed as I go back to the city for the first time in three weeks to begin facing the challenges of the year.

This entry was posted on January 7, 2015 at 2:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.