The Pecan Park Eagle

Happy New Year, Everybody!

Late last night, I added the following three paragraphs as an addendum to yesterday’s brief, apparently singular topic column, “All I Want for New Years is a Cougar Win”:

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Thanks, Houston Cougars, for making my New Years wish come true. Your 38-24 win over a good Florida State Seminoles team earlier this afternoon not only sweetened New Years, it also turned out to be the happiest New Years Eve birthday gift I’ve ever received.

After the game, my family treated me to a terrific steak dinner at Taste of Texas, one that came complete with a complimentary birthday dessert and sparkler-lighted natal day photo salute to me making it through another year. These birthdays days always hum with hope and rejuvenation for me, anyway, but this one really came upon me with an extra special wallop charge.

Thanks, dear family! ~ And thanks again, you growling, rolling Cougars of Coach Tom Herman, thanks  for putting the special buzz on bliss for everybody in Cougar Nation this time around the birthday horn.

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The lesson of UH’s win over Florida State, however, was much larger than a monumental game in the history of Cougar football and its hopefully now sooner return to national respect as big time player. It was an event that enhances the City of Houston brand as a place where people not only dream big, it is a culture where people also put their hopes into action with character, hard work, and a determination for success that actually gets the job done.

The Tom Herman story alone is the dynamo that stirs this energy drink. – How many schools anywhere have had Don Quixote come in as a football coach and take a previously lackluster group of young men in one season to 13 wins and victory over a major foe in their first year at the helm? Stop right there. You already have the list. And his name is Tom Herman. Whether he stays with us three years, five years, or a most welcome forever, by what we’ve seen, so far, Tom Herman already has placed UH on a track to restored national respect, an eventual Top Five conference home, and made UH an immediately much stronger recruitment attraction for the nation’s top high school players.

Tom Herman was no psychotic Don Quixote who only idly led any who followed him into tilting their swords at windmills they could not hope to topple with dreams alone. This UH Don Quixote came prepared to lead the Cougars into knocking down the windmills of resistance that have stood in the way of long-term success since the Yeoman years. Herman even got to the UH Board of Regents on the oblique. UH finally saw that they had to start paying their coaches at a level that would give the university a chance of retaining winners. The elevation of Herman’s salary wasn’t all that will be needed, but it was a significant step up from the “stepping stone” salary level that previously cost them Art Briles to Baylor and Kevin Sumlin to Texas A&M.

The first general point we hope to make this morning is that UH made the City of Houston look good yesterday – and anything that makes our city more respected in a legitimate way benefits us all. UH football success is not going to hurt UT, A&M, or any other Texas university. It will only help us all. It may make recruiting a little tougher, but tougher competition makes every school, including UH, stronger. – Without competition, many young student athletes will simply make the dead-head decision to just sign up with “THE” school to go to – and then lapse into the sort of entitlement culture that makes some four and five-star recruits show up at their chosen special school expecting stardom to just kick in as soon as they turn on the game cameras in the fall.

Note: UH beat talent-loaded FSU yesterday without any big five stars. Fortunately, UH was not short of players who had been taught by Tom Herman to learn and take passionate personal responsibility for playing the game to the best of their abilities for the team goal of winning.

The second point today makes sense too, but only if you see and agree that anything legitimate that makes any part of Houston look better to the world also makes the whole of Houston look better too. It is important to the issue of how we finally settle the future of the Astrodome question, hopefully, in 2016.

They may be distant and silent for now, but the whole world really is watching what we are about to do with a structure that is revered by others as an architectural icon. Will the larger reward from re-purposing the Dome’s utilization destiny for the sake of history help Houston build a new reputation as a city with the character to care about historical preservation?

Yes! You bet it will!

Will the demolition of the Astrodome only serve to reinforce the impression of many others that Houston is strictly a marketplace that cares nothing about history – and a city where some developers would pave over cemeteries for additional parking space, if they could get away with it?

Yes! You bet it will!

Refresh the Happy New Year! button on that note, friends.

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Auld Lang Syne for unforgettable friends and acquaintances, plus a certain reverie for personal experience, all take on a richer, sometimes sad or now settled “what might have been” quality with age, but that’s not our original discovery. It lived in recognition among the ancient Greeks.

As humans, we have the capacity to grieve over anything. From what is now done and gone forever, we may grieve. But we may also grieve for all those things we once valued that were either never done – or left alone and unfulfilled.

These are the stuff, including the people involved, that are the producers of Auld Lang Syne. What we did, and didn’t do; whom we engaged as mates and partners in any life mission; and those we separated from, for reason or whim – all of these  are the fodder for our personal Auld Lang Syne.

And so our personal Auld Lang Syne rests within each of us as either the seed of wisdom that blooms over time – or sadly, if it is not absorbed, it becomes a major missed golden opportunity for those who never do get it. The absence of wisdom gained from personal experience is the major tax on those who live by the “Ignorance is Bliss” adage.

In fact, the tax on our rejection of the lessons from painful experience is to live in a state of redundancy, going through the same painful experience repeatedly over time for as long as we refuse the lesson –  or until we either get the lesson and make changes – or grow broke, mad, or die from the experience of avoidance.

We don’t like to think about this sort of thing, especially  on New Years Eve, but it is what it is. It’s with us as the driving wheel in our repetition of any pattern of similar disappointing consequence which fails us  as a teacher of the lesson it carries.

Behind every resolution we make at the new year is the energy we have used in the past to avoid the thing we now say we want to change.

The other day, St. Thomas friend and author Rob Sangster sent me “The Meeting,” a lesser known poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This work by an iconic 19th century American poet implicitly personifies how aging too may inspire and enrich our appreciation for both the things our minds tell us that we did and did not do with our lives.

Our memories of “experiences fulfilled” and “experiences missed” work together to shape our abilities for greeting the new year on some level of peace with ourselves – or not.

In the end, as Longfellow describes it, it’s hard for us to distinguish the ghosts from the guests among our reverie ~ “and a mist and shadow of sadness steals over our merriest jests.”

The Meeting

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

After so long an absence
At last we meet again:
Does the meeting give us pleasure,
Or does it give us pain?

The tree of life has been shaken,
And but few of us linger now,
Like the Prophet’s two or three berries
In the top of the uttermost bough.

We cordially greet each other
In the old, familiar tone;
And we think, though we do not say it,
How old and gray he is grown!

We speak of a Merry Christmas
And many a Happy New Year
But each in his heart is thinking
Of those that are not here.

We speak of friends and their fortunes,
And of what they did and said,
Till the dead alone seem living,
And the living alone seem dead.

And at last we hardly distinguish
Between the ghosts and the guests;

And a mist and shadow of sadness
Steals over our merriest jests.

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Happy New Year, Everybody!