Our friend, Fran Becque, marks this day’s importance to two of our favorite people. Two days after Grace Coolidge celebrated her fifty-fourth birthday with her husband she came home from one of her shopping-walks along downtown Northampton to find her husband had passed quietly into eternity as he prepared to shave at midday, January 5, 1933. He had turned sixty the previous summer and that day, starting so clear and unseasonably pleasant, gave way to rain before the end of the week. They had enjoyed just under four years of reprieve and rest after a steady quarter century in public life. Finally freed of the immense pressures that had shaped most of their life together, Grace and Cal could at last find the restorative time together the burdens of office had delayed and prevented for too long. Then he was taken. Indeed the pressures of office — and most importantly, the state of the country — weighed heavy on both of them, as Cal and Grace truly did pour themselves into the obligations each faced during those trying and difficult years between 1921 and 1929. They could only watch with heavy hearts at the nation’s suffering, a palpable turmoil that seemed to only worsen under Coolidge’s successor. Today we remember the joys of a new year but also the somber reminder that eternity is also very near. How we face death is as much a part of our character as how we put our lives to use for others. Today we remember Calvin and Grace, both of whom with full hearts for people and lives led in service to so many.

The Coolidges at home with their dogs in The Beeches, Northampton.

President and Mrs. Coolidge hold New Year’s Reception at the White House, January 2, 1928.

As Coolidge expressed it in his daily column at the close of 1930, “We cannot for long reap when we have not sown. We cannot hold what we do not pay for. The law of service cannot be evaded or repealed. Nor is it yet in the power of man under any system of government he can adopt or any organization of society he can form to make this a perfect world. But the ability to make the best of things, to secure progress, to learn from adversity is not to be disparaged or ignored. The creative energy of nature is not diminished but increased by the fallow season. Mankind requires a time for taking stock, for recuperation, for gathering energy for the next advance.

“That is the significance of the new year. We take a new inventory to see what we have, we take new bearings to see where we are, we correct our conduct by new resolutions. After all due allowance for error and relapse, such a course guarantees improvement. Perhaps the best resolve is to live so that next year new resolutions will be unnecessary.”

May 2016 be a year where light overcomes darkness and the results of good work endure!

First, thanks to all my readers, we can take this look back over the previous year. You are a great group! See you in 2016!

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.