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I doubt that there is a time or season that brings more nostalgia and reflection than the Christmas-to-New Year holiday period. There is no other time when most of us are more likely to be with our extended families, no other time when we are more likely to recall more vividly our childhood, and the wonder and anticipation that we have experienced in our lives.

Just as we are prone to look backward, many of us are also inclined to look ahead, and consider what the year to come may bring. Some of us may pledge ourselves to changing some part of our lives, by the device that has come to be known as the New Year's resolution. There is not much hard evidence that the majority of resolutions are kept, at least for the long term. But the world is a little better for people trying, and at least a few lives are improved for those who are successful.

This Christmas, my daughter gave her grandparents - her mother's mom and dad - a photo album she compiled from the contents of a large tin box, which had been a fixture at their lake cabin for as long as I have known them. In it were photos of every kind and quality, which had been accumulated over a period of more than fifty years. A few were black and white; some were Polaroid "instant" prints, the chemistry of which was beginning to fail. Some were well composed, sharp and rich in color; others less artful, unsharp, and fading.

But, regardless of their technical nature or quality, they spoke across the years. They showed stringers of pike and panfish, a vintage outboard motor screwed to the transom of an old fiberglass fishing boat, smiling young children in braces and bathing suits, and a seven year old cradling a three pound walleye in his arms like a sacrificial offering. And lots more.

The notes beside each photograph neatly identify the subject or the event, and the date it was taken. A photo image by itself can be ambiguous as to era or age, but a date and data penned providently on the back is uncontestable proof of the march of time.

A small, square, black & white on one of the pages shows a tall, muscular, vital man who looks then to have been in his thirties. He is smiling the smile of a confident man and a successful fisherman. Two decades from this dated photo he would become my father in law. Some three decades later, this past autumn - his strength waning - a bone-fracturing fall would lead to weeks and months of recovery, and independence very much in doubt, as those young children who he watched over and protected would now be caring for him.

During this holiday, time, too, my wife and I gather with several couples for an annual dinner. Most in this group are graduates of the same high school, in the same year, which chance or fate linked together in marriages, and in friendships. One of these is a special friend with whom I have hunted and fished for decades.

Some dinner preparation need led me down to his basement, and I wandered into his shop and "man cave," where I spotted a red baseball style cap that I had given him at Christmas many years before. As an inside joke, on the crest of the cap I had embroidered the words Club Carpe Diem, as you might find the name of a country club, or resort.

Carpe diem is probably the most familiar of all Latin phrases, meaning "seize the day," or in English slightly more plain, "find a way to control your life, or make time for the things important to you." Perhaps selfishly, the two of us talked often about doing more of the things that we enjoyed doing together, which was difficult, as we each raised two children and tried to make a living.

Yet, despite very busy lives, we still put on a lot of miles busting through thickets and walking forest roads looking for ruffed grouse, and waiting on chill October or November mornings for ducks to be lured to our decoys.

We still hunt ducks together as avidly as ever. But time's roll-of-the-dice has brought him multiple sclerosis - MS - a disease that now makes walking even a few blocks an exhausting event. He is one of those exceptional people who will talk of his condition as a professor might lecture to medical students; matter-of-factly, without the tone of complaint or regret, committed to doing all he can, for as long as he can.

Our approaches to life are shaped by many events, both momentous and remembered, and casual and seemingly unimportant. But there do seem to be checkpoints that lend themselves to both looking backward, as well as into the unwritten chapters of the future. This is always such a time for me. A time to appreciate what has been, and to resolve to do what I can to shape the future as I hope it will be.[[In-content Ad]]

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