To anyone interested in such things, below you’ll find my musings on life as I know it heading into 2025.

The snow was coming down in gentle, fluffy flakes as we loaded up the Honda after spending a few days in the mountains over New Years with our friends. The day before, I’d killed enough time sipping black coffee at the single-deck table at the Number Ten Saloon to nearly double my money, and unlike Wild Bill Hickock I got out the place without the assistance of pallbearers so I was feeling alright about how 2025 had started out. I completed the game of Tetris that is fitting luggage for four into an undersized Japanese vehicle, then got the kids loaded up as well and said goodbye to our friends and the mountains. We stopped in Sturgis and I let the Titus and Zooey pick a five-dollar tee shirt each from last year’s motorcycle rally and a box of tic-tacs to help with their chronic car sickness, then we set out for Valentine to meet my folks at the Coachlight for lunch. Sonja, whose stomach also struggles with windy roads, got behind the wheel and I pulled out my laptop to jot down a few notes.

I guess the year is off to a pretty good start, all things considered. On the first, a friend and I who met coaching cross country set out to get ten miles in on the mountain roads surrounding the cabin we’d rented with three couples and a gaggle of small children. Between the loose-packed snow, the altitude, and more than eleven-hundred feet of elevation gain, the ten miles took nearly two hours and left me feeling as if I’d just set a new personal best in the marathon. Too tired to get in the hot tub, a showered off and took a nap.

It’s that time of year, that annual recurrence, when I set lofty goals for reading and writing, for diet and exercise, and for making a difference in the world. Those goals will never be abandoned, but they tend to evolve and momentum tends to slow as time goes by. Then, too, there are the things I never articulate, perhaps because despite my voracious appetite for the written word and a lifetime spent in compositions, I somehow still cannot.

The year holds…promise, if you’re up for such a pathetic platitude, or perhaps it bears the burdensome weight of expectations leveled against a lifetime of variables and uncertainty, if you’d appreciate a touch more nuance. I plan to run a few dozen races this year, the first behind me in the form of a virtual run with the New York Road Runners, the next in a few weeks at the Houston Marathon. Then again, I planned to run twenty races in 2020, but managed only one before the world was set ablaze, so I make no predictions. What feels like not all that long ago, I filled out my size large shirts, benching 315 pounds and squatting small Italian cars. Now I find that I sometimes drift about loosely inside my “smedium” shirts, struggling to lift my wife’s suitcase into the back of her car and, hell, if we’re being honest, groaning aloud whenever I so much as stand up. This realization led me to want to lift weights again. I drink my beet root supplements and my colon broom, measure my heart rate and my blood pressure religiously, and go in to get my bloodwork done every three months like a good boy–a good boy trying not to succumb to the inevitable any earlier than I must. Again, I make no predictions. 

So, too, there are goals about writing—none of which will be accomplished if I spend too much time on blog posts such as this. I am enjoying my work in Oakville, a quiet, historic town in the Napa Valley where I’ve spent a fair bit of time lately, and I am eager to see that book finished. By my count, I have twenty-eight essays left to write, about half of which already exist in various stages, the other half of which I’ve yet to begin. Routledge—a rare publisher that has yet to disappoint me—is reviewing another manuscript of mine, this one on teaching about genocide, for publication, while yet another publisher has asked me to pitch a third book. I am considering it, though it would surely cut into the time I have to write poetry, and I must write poetry or I’m liable to implode. My most recent book was released last month, a collection of essays I wrote as emails to student teachers and adapted into book form. It’s called Don’t Forget Your Cape: Inspirational Words for Aspirational Teachers, and it is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, though I’d prefer you contact your local small bookstore or, if you ping me, I’d be happy to address a copy to any teacher you’d like.

Teaching. I get to teach undergraduates again this spring, my second year with The Holocaust Through Literature and Film, and I’ll be taking students from that class to Amsterdam again this spring which excites me even more. Still, I miss my high schoolers desperately, and have lately taken to reading memoirs like Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man and sullenly contemplating a return, well aware of all the barriers I face. 

vinNEBRASKA has me excited, as 2025 marks the start of our three-year partnership with Completely KIDS, an organization that I adore. We have an amazing cast of winemakers coming in this year, and the Women of Wine Symposium will again be hosted at College of Saint Mary that week as well. Also in the world of wine, the 2022 vintage of Gudgel Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon was released last month, and people have been very supportive. It’s available all across the state and I hope you’ll seek it out–there’s a list and a map to help you find it on the web page, gudgelranch.com. This summer I’ll look to blend the 2023 with my friend, Jean. I’m kicking around the idea of wooden boxes, and fantasizing about a tasting room in Valentine, where of course I’m from.

Speaking of my hometown, I’m also hosting the first annual Valentine Marathon there, come August. We’ve got a distance for everybody, from one mile to more than the full marathon and everything in between. It starts and ends at Bolo Brewing, and it benefits the Valentine Community Schools Foundation. I hope you’ll consider running, walking, jogging, or even volunteering at the event. It will give you a good reason to visit the Sandhills, and you can get an amazing steak, shop in one of the finest small bookstores in the Midwest, and go down the Niobrara River while you’re there.

Other goals this year include getting rid of a thousand possessions for the second straight year, getting an accurate inventory of my wine cellar, reading more books, getting more sleep and, most importantly, being a good husband and a good dad. That last one is the trickiest by far. I tell my doctoral candidates all the time that good goals are quantifiable, yet somehow I find it hard to set meaningful, measurable goals when it comes to family. Take more trips? We take enough. Eat out more? We like to cook. Yell less? Working on it.

It’s snowing tonight in Omaha, those fluffy, floating flakes that rarely threaten to accumulate, the same type of snow that waved us off as we left the mountains not so long ago. I learned this morning of the passing of yet another friend, this one someone I saw only two weeks ago and who I had hoped in vain might make a full recovery. I’ve lost what feels like an awful lot of people lately, and it never seems to get any easier. I’ve also gained a few, and I rarely fail to appreciate how special friendship can be. 2025 is here, and how I feel about that—how any of us might feel about that—really doesn’t matter. Let’s make the most of it. Wishing you all the best possible start to the year.

Cheers to what we can all hope will be a very fine year,

Mark