2007 Superlatives

It's time for best of/worst of reminiscences. Usually being more concerned with the gestalts of things I like rather than neat point by point comparisons, I've never really been keen on keeping lists of top fives or tens. I can think of, say, a book I liked especially well, maybe more than anything else I read in a given year, but then I have a hard time ranking all the less satisfying ones--I liked or disliked them for different reasons, and my preference for one over the other could shift according to my mood, whatever I've read in the meantime, or whatever is happening in my life at a given point. I may decide that one of my "second best" titles was in fact the best--then change my mind. Honestly, I've given more effort into this self-analysis than I've ever put into making a list of favorites.

In place of a set of lists, I'll offer some randomly selected highlights of 2007.

Best Book Read: Tie--Choke, Chuck Palahniuk; Black Swan Green, David Mitchell.

Best Film Seen: The Lives of Others

Best Meal: Pasta with the season's first batch of Putanesca sauce whipped up from tomatoes from our garden--actually, this may be tied with the season's first batch of gazpacho whipped up....

Best Wine: a 2004 Grande Domaine Venuer Cote du Rhone du Villages we enjoyed at Easter.

Best Beer: A Belgian trippel imperiale from Brasserie des Rocs.

Best Fish: a 15" brown caught in a narrow, brushy, gin-clear section of the Manistee. I've caught bigger, but maneuvering this spirited brown around and away from ubiquitous logs and clots of branches with a 6X tippet, while myself hopping over and around said obstacles, and actually seeing the fish during the entire fight, pumped more adrenaline into me than any battle I've had with a fish in a long time.

Best Fishing Trip: My hex trip.

Best Hunting Trip: My second daytrip to mid-Michigan. Bagged my sole bird of the year, and got shots at 4 or 5.

Best Hike: Up and down Mt. LeConte, North Carolina.

Best Professional Moment: At the end of this fall semester, when some of the students working on term papers for my "River Class" (ENLG 1140, "Writing the Watershed," which in involves studying, writing about, and publicly presenting on local environmental issues and history) started to make their work their own, when the need to fulfill a requirement transformed into a desire to learn, and they began to see a connection between their hopes and desires in life and the condition and possibilities of their local waters and landscapes. I loved it when they rushed up to the podium before class to dish about the great sources they'd found and what discoveries these had brought, or when they effused about how their research was gathering a momentum they couldn't have imagined. That happens in other classes too, but never as commonly as in that one.

I had to scour my memory hard to assemble that list. Most experiences of this year have fused into an amorphous conglomeration of images, moods and words. I can make out tarnished fractals, radiant sherds, but few portraits, stories, or songs.

Which suggests a new year's resolution--in 2008, I need to witness my life more deliberately. And I guess that means, among other things, more blogging.