Merry Christmas 2023!

I've been writing these Christmas letters for about forty years, and still have yet to win a Pulitzer

Prize.  Those New York reporters have it in for me.  Merry Christmas, you friends of the Dise family, you!  You can't deny it, much as you might like to.  You know who you are.

Every year, the same story:  what do I write about this time?  The aging process is turning into a rich topic.  The good health we once took for granted has become officially recognized as a precious commodity.  This past summer, there were wild fires in Canada whose smoky badness came down as far south as our neck of the woods.  This gave Debbie a pretty rugged summer; she inherited respiratory issues from her dad's side of the family.  She consulted with a pulmonologist and has been diagnosed with something called cystic lung disease, for which there is no cure.  We still don't know how this will ultimately affect her health, but she and her pulmonologist will need to come to some sort of agreement on strategy for treatment.  As for now, she can no longer fly on planes, or live above sea level, which would over-stress her lungs, and this includes too much flute-playing.  She played her final concerts last week at the nursing homes (her own private ministry) and one of the nursing homes had all their residents sign a card thanking her for her years of playing for them. Debbie needs at least one full-time job, so now she's teaching violin lessons to some of the young'uns at church, and at least one of the not-so-young'uns.  It's probably good for her.  Violinists don't fret.

It only makes sense that health is an issue.  If you stick around long enough, you get close to the Bible's specification for longevity.  "The length of our days is seventy years — or eighty, if we have the strength." -- Psalm 90:10   Since it's something we can't change; it becomes something we laugh about.  I remember the old Homer and Jethro version of a '50s pop tune, "Don't Let the Stars Get In Your Eyeballs," crooning, "Her teeth are like the stars above, because they come out every night."  Or the old Rodney Dangerfield joke, "Last night I called the Incontinence Hotline.  They asked me to hold."  In fact, Rodney seems to own the entire catalog:

• “I wanted to marry Mrs. Right.  I just didn't know her first name was 'Always'."

• “I sat next to an old woman at the bar.  I asked her, do I come here often?"

The best advice I know how to give is this: live near a hospital, but try to stay away from it. Hospitals are dangerous.

Meanwhile, Debbie keeps her spirits up through church and friends.  She is still the music director at our little church -- I haven't had a trombone Christmas or Easter gig since she took that job almost twenty years ago -- and, well, that job is who she is.  Her flute playing is excellent, but her organizational skills are simply over the top.  (I couldn't organize a bee sting with my entire arm stuck in a nest of them.) She lets me play a trombone solo in church occasionally, and has quite bravely started scheduling me to sing solos.

My own primary occupation in retirement has been helping a friend edit a novel.  If you were to line up all my English teachers from grade school and college and inform them of this, I think they'd all get a nice laugh.  However, in my own defense, I had to do quite a bit of writing at my old programming jobs.  My pet peeve was, and is, poorly written documentation.  About twenty-three years ago, I remember a programming assignment which included updating the user documentation.  When I got around to looking at it, it looked like the verbal equivalent of a butcher shop.  Ugh.  Lots of dangling participles, so to speak.  So, I set a couple of days aside and performed the old Herculean maneuver known as "cleaning the Augean stables."  Hercules diverted a river, whereas I used a word processor, but both approaches were based on the same basic idea, flushing several loads of crap.  When I finished with it, I thought, oh no! No good deed goes unpunished, and awaited my swift trial and painful execution.  But, as it turned out, the customer personally went to my boss and thanked him for my editing.  It doesn't pay to be too cynical. Strive always for sufficiently cynical. Anyhow, my novelist friend keeps writing and re-writing and re-re-writing the various chapters, and that keeps me busy, too.  I don't even have time to visit the beer halls anymore.  And if you believe that, I have a novel to sell you, cheap.

We like to travel.  Well, okay, I like to travel.  Debbie, not so much.  I loved Omaha, but now that we're back in Virginia, we're in closer proximity to many our friends who weren't so accessible from Omaha.  Florida drivers are as bad as any we've ever seen, and it doesn't help matters that, like us, they're also old. It's after dark, we're coming along at 65 mph on a state highway, and suddenly, in front of us, in our lane, is a big-rig truck just sitting there, no lights on, and I'd better change lanes, like, now...!?  Florida is a bit like the Wild West.  They raise a lot of cattle there, did you know?   And oranges.  And reptiles.  Visiting our friends Kurt and Patty Rauscher, we know the good places to eat.  If you ever get to Cape Coral, FL, visit The Lobster Lady.  We made that trek a couple of times this year.  Debbie's oldest brother, Bill Jr., passed away, and his memorial service was held near Foley, AL, quite close to where Debbie's parents had lived for the twenty years or so before they came to live with us.  Bill Jr. loved to tease and needle Debbie, but he did save her from drowning when she was eight years old.  Thanks, Bill!  Whenever we get down that way, we like to work in visiting as many friends as possible, and it just so happens that our retired pastor, Wally Sherbon and his wife Jan always welcome us with open arms -- love visiting them in Birmingham, AL. They're native Pittsburghers, so we always have fun things to talk about -- like, what's wrong with dem Stillers?!

We celebrated our 40th anniversary this year.  April 2nd.  Our friends from church, David and Debbie Cunningham, bought us tickets to go to a show by Home Free, an acapella group with a country music emphasis.  We're big fans.

Later in the spring, we met with a couple of musician friends from my impoverished student days in Pittsburgh, Kevin and Ann Schmalz, and booked a couple of days at a nice hotel right where the Three Rivers converge.  We went to a Pittsburgh Pirates game (the Pirates lost, drat!) and attended a Pittsburgh Symphony concert, performing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (the Pittsburgh Symphony won).  Pittsburgh is still one of my favorite places in the world, and I always thought I'd like to do it all over again, this time with an income.

As for my own music, I've gone full circle in the past two or three years. I sold off the trombone herd a couple of years ago and quit performing because of shoulder pain and -- to be honest -- a loss of interest in playing, which turned out to be temporary. When I caught COVID/double pneumonia two years ago, that just seemed to ice the cake, to say bye-bye to playing trombone.  But then, I discovered I'd lost a third of my lung capacity.  Those stupid little incentive spirometers didn't seem to be helping much, so I bought a tuba and the act of playing it every day restored my lungs.  Nevertheless, I really suck at playing tuba.  Our next-door neighbors concurred with this sober judgment. So I started looking for a bass trombone and found a couple of nice ones.  I'm playing with the Tidewater Winds again, and that's really about the extent of my playing at present.  I do love playing bass trombone.  I always feel like Rocky, swinging as hard as I can at the musical challenges, hoping for the knockout blow.  If I'm still standing and the music is unconscious, I count it as a win.

It's been a hard year.  I went to five funerals within two months.  Debbie's brother Bill.  An old pal from the Air Force, Ray Crenshaw.  A classmate from high school, Denise.  Two old friends from our church, Jerry Valentine and Bud Richardson.  Jerry was a deacon in all but the title, helped with church maintenance, and was a master carpenter.  He's done work for Debbie and me, but simply refused to let us pay for it.  Bud was a Marine drill sergeant during the Vietnam War and I could hear the pain in his voice when he said, "I only had twelve weeks to teach them how to live through it."  Cheers to all you great people!

Debbie and I wish you all the very merriest of Christmases, the happiest of New Years, and may the Lord

bless you up, down, and sideways!