A little more than kin and less than kind...From Hamlet, of course.

I used to make a pun about kin. My Icelandic heritage, you know, compels me to prize family and leads me to genealogical relationships. Cousins are duly recognized and their affiliations carefully documented. Icelanders, Western Icelanders included (the latter term given by Iceland to all who have Icelandic roots, however far back), count cousins and figure out where they perch on the family tree. I have a cousin in Iceland, for example. We call each other cousins having once figured out that Hebba's grandmother was my grandfather's first cousin. Maybe. Anyway, Hebba and I are cousins, so there. Here in Canada, my first cousin married a woman who is the daughter of her mother's sister (or brother?) who had a daughter who is her first cousin - and so, mine too. I call her cousin Gail and I feel a real kinship with her, so much so that I say (here's the pun) that we are kith'n'kin (kissing cousins)..

In one of his books (I'll check which one) Kurt Vonnegut presents a character who wins an election on the slogan "Lonesome No More". It beats "Make America Great Again" because it doesn't eliminate anyone. As I remember it, when the candidate wins, he sets up a giant, computer-operated system linking people by flower names (fauna, too I guess, because a huge number of people was involved). Thus, all the Daffodils are related, no matter where they are or were born. When people thus categorised, came together, they found they had a lot in common with whomever their floral relatives were. ("We jonquils are much alike.")

We all are. I like to believe that. No matter what our early influences are or the circumstances (good or ill) of our provenance, we are, I hope, still human. Somewhere, deep in there, we are all kin.

As Auden said, "We must love one another or die."

[Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! is a science fiction novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut. Written in 1976, it depicts Vonnegut's views of loneliness, both on an individual and social scale.]

Finally: my Generic Blog Christmas Letter....must write it today so that I can send hard copy to my computer-illiterate friends

I've been struggling with it in my head. It was a difficult year for me but not significant in the way that life is for other people who achieve so much both in themselves and through their children. My kids, i.e. my grown children, are just fine, thank you, into the solid, consolidating years, past the wild surmise of youth, but realistic in their idealism. My grandchildren are amazing, not only creative but nice people. i can't help but quote Kahlil Gibran here:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

How I love my living arrows! I cannot even begin to strive to be liked my grandchildren. (Obviously I will have to trim this blog into a snail letter, but I can indulge myself here.)

Now, about me, for those who do not read my blog or read my letters: I finished a hard, hard seven-month course in screenwriting that took me to the middle of July, with a deadline every 24 hours, often hard to keep up with because I took a theatre tour to London in January with the Stratford Festival; a cruise to Alaska in May; attended the Writers' Union annual meeting in Vancouver in June; bounded in and out of Stratford going to the season's plays; then, a visit with Matt to the summer h one in Maine of daughter Kate and husband Jonathan; a one-day trip to New York in September for the table read of a play of mine I've been trying to show for ages; a drive with a friend to Boston in October for another visit to Kate; and then a week in New York for the longed for, hoped-for public staged reading of that play - to complete disaster and disappointment .

Hopes dashed. But hope strings eternal and i am beginning to recover. It ain't over till it's over. This year isn't over either, not yet. Too soon to say Happy New Year. I hope you have a good holiday season, not merry exactly, but thoughtful and considerate.

We go on we go on.