I Can’t Wait for This Year to End

Musings of an Aging Mind

By Jack Bagley

I won’t presume to speak for anyone other than myself, but I will be exquisitely happy to see 2025 in the rear-view mirror of life. Of my years on this planet, it has to rank as one of the worst.
During the course of my 67 years, I’ve had some bad years. I’ve also had some very, very good ones:
There’s 1958, for instance, the year I was born. That has to rate as a good year, at least from my perspective.
I would say 1968 was a good year – that was the year I got to visit the WGN-TV studios in Chicago and attend the Bozo’s Circus show with my school class. Later that year I had the opportunity to meet my boyhood idol, television weatherman Harry Volkman.  Mr. Volkman came to speak at our school (at my invitation) and I got my picture in the local neighborhood newspaper with him, on the front page no less.
Of course, 1975 was a great year – I graduated from high school. It had its bad moments, when my attempt at a career in the Air Force fell flat on its face, but apart from that it was a good year.
The following year, 1976, was good as well, because I started my career in broadcasting. I must’ve been doing something right, because almost 50 years later I’m still in broadcasting. Radio and television have been very good to me over the years.
I have to say that 1985 was a good year because that was the year I got married. Two years later, 1987, my daughter was born, and that was an even better year.
Academically, my good years were 1989 (Bachelor’s degree), 1996 (Master’s degree), 2001 (Education Specialist degree), and 2016 (doctorate in education). I started teaching in 1989 and that was a good, good year – the start of 27 good years, to be honest.
After I retired from teaching in 2016, I have to add the beginning of my newspaper career that year to the list of good things that have happened.
Some of the years I’ve been ambivalent about.  For instance, 1970 – the year my family moved from Chicago to LaGrange. I’ve shared in this space some of the fish-out-of-water stuff I went through those first couple of years away from the big city, so there’s no need to go into it again.
For personal reasons I won’t go into here, 2010 was a pretty meh year. That was the year my marriage fell apart, though my ex-wife and I have built a friendship since then – which is why it’s an ambivalent year rather than a bad one.
And of course, 2020 – the year of Covid – was a pretty downbeat one.
But nothing in my life compares to the seemingly endless onslaught of bad juju that hit me in 2025.
I know I’ve gone over it before in this space, but if you will bear with me I’d like to recap it one more time. You know, a way to get it out of my system, so to speak.
In April, at the Georgia Renaissance Festival, I learned the hard way that gravity is not my friend when I fell and broke my left arm at the wrist and elbow. For the first time since 1967 (an otherwise decent year), I was in a cast and sling for over two weeks.
If you haven’t ever worn one, you have no idea how infuriating it is to have an itch inside the cast that you can’t get to in order to scratch.
Then in July, I had a pretty serious heart attack, and waited four days to get treatment for it. Yes, I know, that last part was pretty stupid of me, but hey – I thought it was a bad case of acid reflux. Shows what I know.  The word “doctor” before my name has nothing to do with medicine, remember.
After spending a week in two hospitals with that particular malfunction, I came down with a bad cough which turned into a raging case of pneumonia. Then fate and the odd gods of the galaxy added in a dollop of congestive heart failure, putting me back into the hospital, this time for a total of 24 days.
Since my release from the hospital on November 1, I’ve been getting better and stronger with each passing day. You can bet next month’s mortgage payment that I start each day thankful to still be here, and knock wood that whatever bad things that can still happen don’t.
So I hope you understand why I will, for the first time in many years, be staying up until midnight next Wednesday night.  I will have a party horn handy and may even have a glass of champagne (or suitable substitute) nearby, when the countdown takes this awful year and puts it into the rubbish bin of history.
Good riddance to 2025.
I hope 2026 is better for everyone – myself included.