Tybee Island, GA, 2024

HAPPY SOLSTICE!

I wish you a great holiday season, and a fabulous New Year!

A friend, Spencer Lawton, died recently. At a regular “guys’ coffee” session on the morning of the day before he passed we were talking about many random things, and one of those was a book series I had been reading, and how brutal and cruel the legal “punishments” had been in early human history. I am glad to remember one of the last things Spencer said to me, “As a people, we are getting better.”

Losing a friend abruptly, in what felt like an extended and ongoing conversation, is a reminder of how temporary everything is.

Getting old may not automatically convey any special wisdom, but it does give one perspective, simply because you have more lived experience, if nothing else. And with that reference point to history you have witnessed personally, it’s a little easier to see progress on many social issues.

I grew up with Jim Crow; public schools in Savannah were not integrated until I was in high school. Conversations about transgender participation in women’s sports, or who uses what bathroom are difficult and necessary, but we didn’t have to have those conversations when I was going through adolescence because leaving the closet was rare, socially risky, and sometimes dangerous.

For much of my life I saw that glass as half empty, but these days I am constantly reminded of things to be grateful for, and I aim to take that attitude with me into this next trip around the sun.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ended a 1963 speech with, “I say goodnight to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, ‘We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we want to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.'” Amen.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index