As I write this, I am sitting on the floor in the room of my childhood home. You are laying on a mattress intently reading a Scooby-Doo book as you wind down for bed. I close my eyes and think about when we first met you eight years ago. How you fit in our arms. How your face was round and squished up. Today you seem impossibly big and impossibly old, but I think that is how all parents feel on their kid’s birthday.

We were walking in a park the other day with your grandparents and you did something that you have done on our many other walks in this pandemic year. You slipped your hand into mine and held it as we walked along. Your animated voice bouncing from one idea to another as your other hand waved and gesticulated in all directions.

I’m thankful each time it happens because I know moments like that probably aren’t long for this world. I hope and know that others will take its place; other gestures and moments that connect us as you grow up. But those times when you put your hand in mine grounds me. It calms me in a world that has been anything but calm. It’s a reminder that when everything is changing that you will always be my son, I will always be your dad, and there is a love that holds us together. Those reminders are a gift.

It’s NCAA Tournament time again. And that means that it is time for me to go down my annual rabbit hole in which I fill out a bracket based on the question, “Which team’s mascot would win in a one-on-one fight?” After doing an Ultimate Bracket last year when there was no NCAA Tournament, I decided this year to film myself going through this year’s entries as I explain which mascot I believe should be crowned champion of Mascot Madness 2021.

The de facto joke (if you can call it that) as we enter into Lent is that no one wants to give anything up because we have already given up so much in the last year. We’ve been in Lent since mid-March. We had to give up time with friends, going to restaurants or the movies, seeing our favorite teams play, and so much more. Lent came for us, elevated its game, and then stuck around for well past forty days.

One of the refrains of Ash Wednesday—this first day of Lent—is “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.” I usually think about that in very narrow terms. The minister says it to me as she or he imposes the ashes on my forehead. Yet this last year has been a reminder that all of this is dust. The world as you and I know it can vanish with a gust of wind: a pandemic, a diagnosis, a fractured relationship, anything. Our world is dust.

What do you do when you and all around you is dust? I guess that you could sit in the ashes and mourn its fleeting nature. Or you could just throw caution to the wind and roll around in as much dirt as you can while the getting is good. You could grow numb to the seeming meaninglessness of this whole random venture. Sometimes we feel like doing all three of these things in one Tuesday.

I'm still up because both my boys woke up in the middle of the night, so I'm sitting with them as they fall back asleep. I'm going to treat this like it's still Wednesday because in the chaos of this day I forgot that it was Epiphany, which is when we remember the Magi bringing gifts to the Christ Child.

I was explaining to my boys the other day that we don't know how old Jesus was when these visitors arrived. We only know they came from the East and, in Asia, the East covers a lot of territory. We don't know how many there were.

What we do know is these individuals of high honor lavished this young family with immensely valuable gifts. That they knelt before a child and simply being in his presence brought them great joy. We know that they did not tell a tyrant king desperate to hold on to power where that child was.

Today was supposed to be rainy and dreary. But it wasn’t. The rain came through more quickly and thoroughly washed away the last vestiges of 2020. And this morning the sun broke through the clouds. The air felt like spring. It was a new day in a new year.

Of course, this does not mean anything in the grand scheme of the world. A beautiful January 1 in one town does not mean that the tide has turned any more than the flipping of the calendar magically changes our circumstances. The things that made last year so difficult stubbornly still exist: the pandemic and the maddening number of people who don’t take it seriously, the leaders tilting at razor-bladed windmills for political gain, the sickness, the dying, the heartbreak.

The lingering of the past year made me stop in my tracks this morning. It literally stopped me. I took advantage of the beautiful morning and went on a new year’s run. The route I usually run takes me near 2nd Avenue where a suicide bomber set off a massive explosion on Christmas Day. Several streets downtown are still closed which meant that I had to stop and figure out a different way to find my way home. Despite the cleansing rain and the bright new day, the echoes of a harsh year still resonated.

In an effort to get out of my typical music patterns, I set out in 2020 to listen to as many different albums as possible. Many of these are albums that were new to me interspersed with some old favorites. The project got derailed in the last quarter of the year, but I still got to listen to a lot of great music. I listened to 67 unique albums this year and I’m hoping to hit a hundred in 2021 and hopefully hit 100 unique albums. Anyway, here in alphabetical order are albums that I listened to this past year:

In the whirling dervish that is Christmas season, music is one of the main things that ground me. I spend a lot of time in late November making different Christmas mixtapes (technically they are playlists but “mixtapes” sounds cooler) for different moods.

My Advent playlist is a little different from the others. It still features carols but it also dips outside to non-Christmas music songs that capture the longing, the tension, and the hope for light in the darkness that marks this time of waiting. Since we are in the midst of that season, I figured that I would share the songs from this mixtape with you.