Well, that was fast. And a little strange. Mostly lovely. With some parts that were definitely not.
I’m talking about 2024. (Mine, anyway.) Some of the best moments, as usual, were the ones I wasn’t expecting — didn’t know they’d happen, didn’t know they’d teach me that, didn’t know they’d leave me feeling like that, didn’t know they’d remind me of that.
Here are 24 things from the past year, in no particular order, that I’m taking with me into 2025. Thank you for your part in so many of them.
1. When a group of middle school kids saw an opening — to heal a wound, to brighten a day, to stack some joy next to sorrow — and threw a surprise 47th birthday party for their teacher Kathie Howe, after learning she never had one as a kid.
2. The last line of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Don’t Hesitate,” which it took me until 2024 to discover: “Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
3. John Schu’s book, “Louder Than Hunger.”
4. Meg Kissinger’s book, “While You Were Out.”
5. Jessica Calarco’s book, “Holding It Together.”
6. Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs performing “Fast Car” together at the Grammys.
7. Chris Martin serenading Dick Van Dyke in Coldplay’s “All My Love” video.
8. The night I watched two Chicago Public School baseball teams compete at Wrigley Field. A bunch of baseball-loving high school kids running on and off that ivy-ringed gem, in their uniforms, surrounded by their teammates, cheered on by their peers and their parents, under the lights? Talk about a field of dreams.
9. Every sunrise. I made a point to witness as many as possible in 2024. I think I topped 300.
10. When my son and his friends shaved their heads on the last day of freshman year of high school.
11. When my daughter’s high school principal ended her graduation speech with this advice: “Love like your life depends on it.” (It does, in fact.)
12. When Gus Walz stood up and cheered “That’s my dad” on the third night of the Democratic National Convention — reminding us who we can be and who we already are.
13. Turning 50.
14. Moving my daughter into college.
15. Hearing Mike Melendrez give voice to the pain and pride and process of saying goodbye to your childhood home.
Pete was 41 when he was standing next to his orange tent near Interstate Highway 90 on Dec. 22, 2022, in Chicago’s Irving Park Neighborhood. He died in early January 2024.
16. A community rallying around their neighbor Pete, a gentle soul who lived in an orange tent near the Kennedy Expressway. He made it a point to inject a little kindness and beauty into the world where he could and he touched a lot of lives while he was able and he died younger than he should have.
17. Listening to Sarah McLachlan in concert, under the stars at Northerly Island, surrounded by middle-aged friends who thought we had life figured out and realizing it’s so much better not to.
18. Craig Mindrum, searching for meaning in the wake of his son’s death and determining that we, in fact, are the creators. “We are fashioning meaning as if we were working in clay,” he told me. Brilliant.
19. Watching help pour in after Brad Zibung asked for support for a family of new arrivals from Venezuela. He met them on the bus — they were on their way to a shelter; he was on his way to a play (about immigrants arriving in the United States).
20. Glimpsing the Pink Moon in the April sky with Anne Lamott in the front seat of my car after I interviewed her for her “Somehow: Thoughts on Love” book tour and she needed a ride back to her hotel.
21. The first time my kitchen filled back up with my daughter’s friends’ voices after they’d been away at college for a million years (eight weeks).
22. Watching a young musician set up a microphone near Chicago’s 12th Street Beach one October morning and sing, in Spanish, to the runners out for a sunrise jog, many of whom were in town for the Chicago Marathon that weekend.
23. Watching as a campaign to write holiday cards to people in the LGBTQ+ community took on an extraordinary life of its own, thanks to readers of this column. In mid-December, organizer Carolyn Pinta had more than 800 writers contact her to send cards out to folks whose families have shunned them — across the United States, plus Canada, England, India and counting.
24. All the people and gestures and questions and wisdom and mistakes and triumphs and joy and brokenness and healing and searching that remind me how beautiful and fragile this all is and how unbelievably lucky we are to be part of it, for as long as we get to.
Happy, healthy new year to you.
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