Cold Comfort

It’s getting to be winter here in New York. And, although the weather has been bouncing from the early-morning 20’s to the mid-50’s in some afternoons, it is swiftly moving through what has become a miserable few months.

So, I am taking cold comfort - pardon the  pun - from the hope that a bright new year is breaking, a year when change will shift some things from the bad column to the good column, and that the normally pleasant order of life will return.

Which, of course, gives a whole batch of new meanings to that phrase. You know, “cold comfort.” Actually, a lot of meanings.

It is, truly, seasonal. On some emotional level, I think, human beings take comfort in the change of seasons. For those of us who live in weather zones where leaves fall off trees, whole religions have sprung up telling us why the weather changes and days grow shorter. Turn, Turn, Turn.

In other places, the change in seasons was marked by changes in the moon, or the stars, or the times that rivers flood. Egypt and Greece celebrated those changes long before western civilizations even got into the act.

(fear not, this will eventually devolve into a political screed of sorts. But, for a while, let’s have some fun.)

This is the time of the year for another kind of cold comfort, which works equally well in the north and the south, the east and the west. Yes, it’s the time for hot stove talk about baseball, when teams make trades, and all the teams who were out of the playoffs long before the end of the season make trades - ok, most of them - to get better. Soon the players will start reporting to Spring training, and everyone will be healthy. Pitchers and catchers will make mistakes, and it will be chalked off to being rusty. Optimism will rule. 

Teams who pile up a winning record will have fans who are smiling. Teams which end up with a losing record will get a lot of cold comfort by saying that every team starts 0-0 when the season begins, or that no one remembers Spring training once the real season starts, or that this was only a chance to see what the farm team kids can do, or to evaluate draft choices.

See, cold comfort everywhere.

Old romances will die over the winter. New ones will be born. We will see new records for storms or snowfall, cities in the South where snow was a one-inch, once-a-year rarity will start debating buying snow plows. More cold comfort of a different kind. Some time in February or March, I will say to my wife “The weather has been miserable, but at least we never lost power.”

She will look at me with a sweet, sad expression around her eyes and reply “Shut up. You are going to jinx it.”

Cold comfort, again.

I am looking forward to the new year for a lot of reasons. The big one is January 3, when the 116th Congress will begin its term. Naturally, there will be fights between the Democrats and the Republicans, and there will be fights between Democrats and Democrats, and then between Republicans and Republicans. Which means we will be entertained and most of our nation’s problems will not be addressed. Cold comfort.

Then I heard on the news that our President has ordered all of our troops in Syria, about 2,000 of them, to be withdrawn, because they have defeated ISIS there and it is no longer a threat. So we will leave, and ISIS will go back. Then we can go to war again, or just bomb Syrian women and children as collateral damage. Cold comfort.

There is speculation that President Trump may have already been indicted, and that the indictment has been sealed. Cold comfort.

The Trump Foundation has been ordered to be disbanded by a judge, and a couple of million dollars - if that much is actually left - will be distributed to other charities. Now accountants are looking into what it spent and how much of its money was spent for inflated bills and services charged by other companies owned by our President. Cold comfort.

Well, you get the idea. We are heading for a couple of years of chaos. a Constitutional show-down of sorts and the likely collapse of many of our small farms, a lot of them owned by people who voted for Trump. Cold comfort.

That only touches on all the likely things that will happen next year, and gives just a small sample of how many kinds of cold comfort we will likely be getting.

Which is, in itself, cold comfort.