As millions of people count down the minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, I will observe my passage of time — 37,317,600 minutes to be exact — that brought me to the year 2026. And I will replay the glory of my youth in South Baltimore as if it were yesterday.
I will relive days when my elementary school friends and I walked the railroad tracks from Ostend Street to Swann Park to play baseball. I broke my left arm one summer diving for a fly ball and never regretted it.
I will savor the taste of a chili hot dog with mustard from George’s, a place I frequented on Light Street during lunch breaks from Oliver H. Perry, P.S. #92 School. I always sat at the same counter spot and always played Beatles songs on the jukebox.
I will smile when I think about walking Debbie home from Francis Scott Key Middle School, thinking she might be my first girlfriend. I have no idea why that never happened, or why I ever thought it could.
And I will hear the sound of my teenage rock band playing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio.” My voice was slow to change in puberty so I sang the song in Neil Young’s falsetto, adapting his enigmatic personality in the process.
The poet T.S. Eliot wrote: “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse.”
I choose not to reverse a thing. The upcoming year’s first minute is fast approaching. So are more wonders of life to celebrate.
— Mel Tansill, Catonsville
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