A Quiet New Year's Eve

I spent much of New Year's Eve mindlessly watching TV "bowl" games between mediocre teams that I don't care much about. Granddaughter Ann-DuPree was visiting and she's very interested in all the bowl games (all 34 of 'em) because she has entered a football pool being run by someone out of her old neighborhood and has visions of somehow winning the big prize, which is several hundred dollars. Alas, her record so far is not much better than mine so unless she has an incredible rally, she doesn't stand much of a chance. (I'm not in the pool, just have made my picks so that she and I can compare notes.) At some point, we flipped back and forth between an out-of-hand bowl game (our team was winning handily) and "Akeelah and the Bee," a movie she had asked me to record. It's a heartwarming tale of a good kid being rewarded for hard work and for making the right choices at the right time. "Akeelah" is fiction, but it's so closely tied to the real national spelling bee that you kinda wonder if it's not real. Alas, there was no real "Akeelah" though her struggle no doubt mirrors the struggle that many bright kids face, living in an anti-intellectual culture. And, she doubtless is a composite of many kids who do work hard, miss out on the social aspects of that stage of adolescence, and achieve their goals. So, it's not a "true" story on the purely factual level, but it certainly ought to be, and I'm sure on another level, is "true." After Ann-DuPree went home, I settled in to some New Year's Eve concerts on the tube and Pat and I toasted the New Year as we watched the ball drop in Times Square, New York. Then it was off to bed and a good night's sleep.