By Ken Anderson — Columnist
As 2025 begins, I look back on 2024 as a year full of ups and downs.
For me, it was a very long year, which goes against one of my fundamental rules: As you get older, time goes by faster. The reason is that your denominator gets larger the older you get, so the passage of a year is a smaller percentage of the age of an older person. [Note: my rules are not formalized in any kind of text, like Isaac Newton’s, for example.]
Of course, it was a leap year.
Several close friends, relatives, and acquaintances passed away in 2024. While the void their deaths have left is palpable, I rejoice in the memory of our friendship and the things we shared. And I smile at the goals met and the new things in my life.
On diamond, gridiron, and links
Cynthia Bingaman lived next door to my high school girlfriend. Her husband followed my football career. I babysat for them. She never forgot to remind me that I drove a yuppie car.
I met Charlie Blair in elementary school on a baseball field at Emerson Playground. Our paths crossed frequently: sports, girls, parties. Charlie was on the School Committee, which he convinced that “bringing football back to the middle school” was a worthwhile thing to do. It was, and it passed. I served as treasurer to Dick Monaghan’s presidency of Friends of Football for several years as we raised money and provided ideas in support of all the public school football teams.
I should add that Charlie did something as rare as anything anyone has ever done. He had two eagles in the same round, both from more than 100 yards away from the pin. The holes, a par 5 and a par 4, were at Red Tail in Devens, and Charlie made eagle each time with his 7-iron.
Christine Conners was a respected teacher at Thoreau School. She was a dear friend from my younger days and married Bernie Kelley, a boyhood friend from the neighborhood.
Bill Coover was co-founder of The Memphis Rockabilly Band, which we saw for the first time in 1982 at Club Casino in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. The band opened for Jerry Lee Lewis. Bill was the lead guitar and duck-walked à la Chuck Berry. It became my go-to band. They always opened with “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the opening bars of which always jump-started any party at which they played.
Erick Eaton was the older son of Lynda’s maid of honor at our wedding. After a horrific three-year experience with cancer, he passed away on his own terms in Maine.
A somber meet-up
It was three years ago last September when I had lunch with a college friend, Dana Gallup, and Emmanuel Aronie at our local haunt: Twin Seafood in West Concord. Dana announced that he had ALS and two years to live; Emmanuel announced that he was moving to Ukraine. Dana passed away in May because of ALS. (Emmanuel returns, as we shall discover below.)
Sandy Healy was my oldest cousin, who came to live with our family and attended CCHS for her senior year. I missed that time with her as I had gone to college by then. She later married Jim Healy, an engineer who invented a system for the recapture of vapors when gas is pumped. She and Jim passed away on the same day.
We met Kathy O’Brien walking in our neighborhood with our young children in the late 1970s and kept track as our children grew up.
On the Anderson/Wheeler side of the family, the Wheeler homestead on Fitchburg Turnpike was sold after countless generations in the family. Though it is now in the hands of a local contractor, I still hold dear the feel, the smell, and the sight of the farm where my grandmother Esther took us under her wing and taught us about farming. And I remember the sounds of Red Sox games on the AM radio in her kitchen.
Memorable sounds
We went to the Holiday Pops at The Umbrella Arts Center to hear the Firebird Pops Orchestra concert. The two vocal soloists, Lori L’Italien and Mara Bonde, and the violin solo by Jayna Leach, concertmaster, and the orchestra were superb. As I listened to soprano Mara Bonde sing, I thought of an article I had read about Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, and Emmylou Harris, all sopranos. Rare company.
In the early days of The Concord Bridge, I shopped the idea of publishing some poems by my friend Emmanuel Aronie to Betsy Levinson. She contacted him and published a poem. That event evolved into my columns for The Bridge and was the precursor for a book of poems.
He and I have been compiling and editing his poems online between Concord and Cherkasy, Ukraine. Needless to say, this approach, while keeping us in touch with each other, has not been effective, what with working through email and across seven time zones.
Happily, Emmanuel arrived in Massachusetts the day after Christmas. We spent more than five hours going through the 23 poems, word by word, and we are done. (More than once during our work on this project did I think back on our days of studying together after school at Peter Bulkeley.)
We have not worked out the distribution process for “Poems from Ukraine — My Homeland” by Emmanuel Aronie, but sales of the book will go to support Emmanuel’s work in Ukraine. A wonderful end to 2024 — and a project for 2025.
