My least favorite of favored adjectives is “new”. Add “and improved” and watch me wince. New in American is presumed an improvement, synonymous with better. Commerce counts on new’s allure.

                  I thought this standing staring into our field, waiting for my coffee to heat. I’ve been standing here at this hour for twenty-plus years, longer than I’ve stood anywhere. It surprises me that I occupied my boyhood home only sixteen years and my children’s home only slightly longer. In those homes every day was new, different. I and my surroundings were changing, sprouting, finding our way. Tomorrow loomed large. Here change has come so slowly we scarcely noticed. Yes, we’re older now – photos tell us that – and more than a few intimates from those early years have gone – and new players come. My daughter’s older daughter will be thirteen in a few weeks – thirteen! The heights of our grandchildren ladder up the door jamb. Incredible.

                  So yes, there is much to be said for the new – new people, sensations, awareness – a new leather jacket. I am wiser now than I was – and happier. The words on this page are new. I could not have said them before, for I am not who I was.

                  But I resent, in our zeal for new, dismissal of the old in favor of supposed improvements. How unjust we are to yesterday, how ungrateful for what we’ve been given in our voracity for more. When I disclose my current reading – only if asked! – many the pal who rolls their eyes. What a fuddy-duddy, old fart, dinosaur! Nary a title, if I can help it, younger than I, unless by a friend, and then my motive is amiable, not inquisitive. I have so much to learn from my elders, more than from my contemporaries, who mostly are as confused as I. I exit Professor Shakespeare’s seminars brimming with revelations, tingling with zest. Who today affects me similarly? 

                  The new distracts with complications, gobbling precious attention. God spare me the new smart phone that makes me feel stupid! Enhanced convenience is promised when convenience comes from knowing what I’m doing. Of all execrable prose, instructions are most loathsome, more afflictive than the tax code. I never read instructions, with the predictable result.

                  “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” admonished my bro Thoreau, “and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.” Amen to that. I wear, to the extent possible, the same schlubby clothes every day, so I can focus on matters that matter. Contemplating elegance I am not weighing significance.

                  Absorption in the evanescent blinds us to the permanent. All the crucial moral lessons have been preached – tirelessly over millennia – we only need reminding. Ignorance about yesterday makes us anxious and arrogant about today. "Progress,” wrote Santayana, another stick-in-the-mud, “far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. ... Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

                  A young deer is grazing our field, now mid-summer high. Not a year old, it has been grazing there all our years here and will be here when we’re gone. That is worth knowing. Its sameness consoles. We are all same-old, same-old, lost in our moment, so relax. Imbibe the wisdom of your elders and their serenity, for they rest easy now.

                  I strive every day to make words new, with a newness that reveres the old: not new and improved – that is presumption – but new and true.