Hello and Happy Holidays,

   Hope you enjoyed the holiday season. Even if it was Valentine's day. OK, I know this is a little later than usual, but this has been a busy January. I just haven't had the time to get this letter started. I'll tell you about that later. But for now, let's get started with January of 2001.

JANUARY

   I started the year on a tennis court. We joined this fancy smancy health club a month or so earlier and I soon realized that the most exercise I was getting out of it was when I pulled out my Visa card each month to pay for it. Jane signed me up for a clinic as a Christmas gift and I was ready for action. I got out my wooden racquet and headed to the courts! It was still in good shape, even after 18 years in the closet. Ha Ha! How silly! Just kidding! I knew better than that! I borrowed a racquet for the first few weeks and am now the proud owner of a brand new space-age titanium magnesium kryptonite composite mid-size maximum flex glow in the dark tennis instrument that cost more than my first car. I started this letter with tennis and will update you throughout on my progress. Emily had her 13th birthday this month. This is one of those special birthdays. I heard about this birthday from others, but I really didn't think that my daughter would do such a thing to me! An official teenager. She knows exactly how long before she gets her driver's license and tells me daily what kind of car she wants me to buy her on her 16th birthday. She's living in her own little fantasy world. Doesn't she realize I just bought a tennis racquet?

FEBRUARY

   It's cold outside. Emily is playing indoor soccer and I am playing tennis and bowling. Also indoor. Sarabeth and I went to the Brownie Father / Daughter Valentines Dance again this year. I don't really have much to say about it but thought you might like to see the picture. Pretty cool huh? The big tennis update is that my feet really hurt.

MARCH

   This was a good month. Emily spent a weekend in class and got her soccer ref license. Hopefully this will prove to be a nice source of income this spring for our new teenager. The girls began 3 weeks of spring vacation from school. We started with Sarabeth's 8th birthday party. We took 10 little girls ice skating for the afternoon. Jane refused to put on the skates, and Emily, being 13, was always on the other side of the ice rink from me. So, it was up to me alone to pull the 3 or 4 non-skaters around in a circle all day, stopping every 15 feet to pick one or two up off the ice. It was fun, but at the end of the day my arms were about six inches longer. The rest of the vacation was spent around home, with a few little mini adventures in between the soccer and tennis. Speaking of tennis, I'm getting better, but my knees ache a little. Not enough space left on this page to start on April, but I really don't want to waste the paper either, so how about a joke! I don’t have a lot of room and I hope I don't run out in the middle of it. That would be terribly embarrassing. Well, here goes. "This dyslexic walks into a bra…"

APRIL

  Not a lot to say about this month this year. We finished off the girls’ vacation with a little mini-trip to French Lick, Indiana. Toured the restored hotel / resort area, which was pretty cool. Ran into Larry Bird's uncle, who was a tour guide or security guard or something just as exciting. That was a pretty exciting day for French Lick. Later on in the month we went to Cincinnati to see a play with a bunch of family. One of my goals in life is to write the sequel to "Fiddler on the Roof"; a good play that just kinda leaves you hanging at the end. I just want to know what happens to everybody! Is that too much to ask? Since I didn't get a photo of Larry's uncle and you weren't supposed to take pictures during the play, you get a picture of Sara and Rocky. Oh, I think I pulled something in my back playing tennis.

MAY

   Made the trip to Columbus, Ohio for the convention. Pretty much the same as last year, except I got to spend some time with my old friend Don, who lives there now. That was cool. Got home and spent a day at the track in one of the new F1 suites. I am becoming extremely spoiled. The day after Emily was inducted into the National Honor Society she became a cheerleader. (I had to turn off the MS Word auto correct feature to type that last sentence.) I'm still playing tennis, and my elbow hurts a little. Thought you might like to see this picture of the girls sleeping in the laundry they were supposed to be folding. It doesn't have anything to do with anything I've written, but it was taken in May.

JUNE

   A lot happened this month. I started the month on a business trip to Atlanta. A supplier was trying to sell about 100 other printers and me a 1/2-million-dollar press. We spent Friday listening to the sales pitch and occasionally nodding our heads, pretending we cared. The next day we were given the choice of playing golf or spending the day at racing school. As in fast cars. I love golf but get real! Every little boy wants to be a racecar driver! We did mini-road courses, the skid pad and the slalom in brand new Audi A4s. The instructor told me that if the car wasn't making noise and smoking, you weren't trying. I was trying. I spent the entire day squealing tires, hitting the gas, then the brake, then back to the gas and sometimes both at the same time. Don't ever buy a used Audi in Atlanta. The day ended with me driving the car you see in the picture, traveling around the 2 1/2-mile road course at Road Atlanta at 187 mph. Well maybe 153 mph. OK, there was a pace car in front of us and we weren't allowed to pass, and we had to play follow the leader, but we really did get up to about 120! It was great! For the next 2 weeks, I was dripping testosterone. A big chunk of the month was taken up with soccer stuff. Emily is probably done with soccer. Her team exploded. Soccer moms and soccer dads and soccer politics and soccer egos sent soccer kids in all directions. The only things left from her team are a bunch of great memories and the decal on the back window of my truck. She joined one of the "premier" programs but quickly decided that it wasn't for her. She said something about it not being fun, as if fun has anything to do with children's soccer today. Do I sound bitter? Sarabeth ended the month by trying out and making the U9 girls travel soccer team. Here we go again. Let me end this month with a word of warning to my fellow husband / fathers out there. "No" is a very special word. Use it wisely. Don't waste a good "No" on something that doesn't really matter. On Thursday evening the 28th, at about 8 PM, Jane called me on my cell phone as I was leaving tennis practice. "Could  you meet me at the pet store?" I agreed and practiced my “NO" all the way there. NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! I found her at the  rear of the store holding a puppy. Granted, it was a cute puppy, but it was still a puppy. Jane looked at me with her big brown eyes, and the puppy looked at me with his big brown eyes and I looked back at them with whatever color my big eyes are and said, "NNNNNNNN………OK. Guys, I had run out of "No"s! Because I had wasted so many in the past, when I really truly needed one, I was all out. That's how we ended up with Kirby, the guy in the photo on top. The next day, my girls went back to the pet store and bought Scout, who is one of Kirby's brothers. That’s him over there on the bottom. I didn't even try to say "No". We are now a 3-dog family. You can only guess how pleased Rocky is about all this. And to top it all off, my elbow is still sore from playing tennis.

JULY

The girls are out of school this month for summer vacation. That's great because they are going to use this time to train the puppies. It really didn't take me very long to figure out how to get them to go to the bathroom outside. All I had to do was carpet the front yard. My tennis has now gotten serious. I am on a team that travels around the city and plays teams from other clubs. So now we practice as a team once a week and then play a match every week too. It feels great to actually play against people you don't know and to really try hard to beat them so badly they go home crying. I think the competitive juices are really starting to flow now. The team is winning and it's fun. The only bad thing is that the doctor told me that I officially have "tennis elbow". That means that even if I do beat someone in a really nasty way, I go home crying too! The picture doesn't have anything to do with anything I've written, but the other choices were my elbow or the dogs in the front yard.  Besides, Jane looks really pretty in this photo.

AUGUST

   This was an interesting month. The girls started back to school. This is a photo from the first day. The dogs stayed at home. Sara started soccer and Emily didn't. Emily did start cheerleading practices though, so we still had our fill of running around and dropping off and picking up kids nearly every evening. The first big fun thing is that Jane and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. We spent the weekend without the kids in a nice hotel here in Indy. We had long quiet dinner and did a lot of talking about our first 25 together. Most of you that are reading this letter were mentioned sometime during the weekend as we rambled through 25 years of memories, 99% of which were good. Thanks for the wine, Pete. The next exciting event was "The Antiques Roadshow". You know, that PBS show where normal people bring in old junk for appraisal and routinely find out that it is worth millions? We got tickets and spent most of the day standing in line with thousands of other would-be millionaires. The line standing was the fun part, since we got to meet a bunch of people, and everyone was showing off their stuff. We also got to laugh at the ones that thought their collection of glassware was going to send their kid to college. Even a thousand years from now, I don't think that a set of glasses that originally came free, packed in a box of laundry soap in 1967 is going to be worth much. Once we got inside with the appraisers, it got interesting. One appraisal started with the phrase, "So, what is this?" After I explained that it was an antique cigar lighter, he said it was worth $250. I have little faith in his assessment. Another spent 10 minutes defending the masculinity of men who weave, nearly breaking down in tears. We wandered around getting disappointed in the fact that we were not going to be on TV and were not going to be millionaires. I don't care, it was fun. I twisted my knee in a tennis match and now have a brace to match the one on my arm. Our team won our division and got to play at the next level. We got beat, but I did get a cool T-shirt.

SEPTEMBER

   We all know what happened this month. There are other things on the calendar that I could write about, but it just doesn't feel appropriate. Our lives were changed this month. Let's all just pray that some good comes from this change. I will let you know that the brace on my knee is starting to squeak and it bugs me when I play tennis. At least I think it's the brace.

OCTOBER

   What a very fun month! We started things off in Bloomington for Homecoming Weekend. The Smith Hall gang was reunited once again after about 25 years. Jill, Jane, Jenny, Barb, and Randye. Alan and I joined them for part of the weekend, but we really couldn't keep up. They spent the entire time laughing and telling old stories. It was really neat how they all clicked together again, as if no time had passed since they were last together. I think it was decided that they wouldn't wait so long next time. Sarabeth was finishing the outdoor soccer season with a couple of tournaments. They won the first one, which made for a fun weekend and a happy little girl. They came back down to earth the next weekend, when they didn't come close. The girls started their month-long fall break near the end of the month. We headed for the cabin in Brown County. My sister Teresa was in from California and got to join us for a couple of days. She needed a good fix of red and orange leaves. We were down there over Halloween, which worked out fine. Emily wasn't too worried about missing Trick-or-Treating, and I bribed Sara with a trip down the candy aisle at the local grocery store. We decided that we needed to celebrate at least a little, so we carved a pumpkin and then we all bobbed for apples in the kitchen sink. Come on, tell the truth, don't you wish you were a part of this exciting family? We do this kind of stuff all the time! Livin life on the edge! Tennis is great. I feel good, I'm playing well and I'm getting in shape.

NOVEMBER

   I started the month by attending my first cheerleading competition. I now know how a Swede must feel while watching a game of baseball for the first time. For those of you that have never been to a cheerleading competition, I will try to paint a picture for you. Close your eyes and envision a million girls of assorted ages, all made up like Jon Bennett Ramsey, except add a lot of glitter. A lot of glitter! All of these girls were wearing the same outfit of short skirts and short tops. I saw enough little girl bellybuttons that day to last a lifetime. The competition itself had all the excitement of very loud synchronized swimming. The crowd consisted of a whole lot of very loud ex-cheerleader moms, and me. Emily of course, did an excellent job. I respect her athletic ability, rhythm and grace. She also had the cutest bellybutton. Sometime during this month, my shoulder started hurting. Big time. After 3 doctors and a dozen x-rays, it was decided I have a bone spur on my shoulder and some sort of inflammation of my rotator cuff. No more tennis until after Christmas. We went to Louisville for Thanksgiving and had a good time with the family. The next evening, I met with a group of friends from high school. These are people that were a big part of my life many years ago. Just like the ladies from Smith Hall, it had been 25 years since I had seen most of them. We had a great time as we laughed and giggled about all the stupid things we did as teenagers, and about a lot of the stupid things we have done since as "grown ups". These people will all be reading this letter, assuming I ever get it finished. "Hey Jackie, let’s do it again next Thanksgiving!"

DECEMBER

   I guess I need to start with a little sad news. Rocky left for heaven the weekend before Christmas. He was a good old dog, but it was time. We're going to miss him, but you don't have to miss him. Look for Rocky to show up in Christmas pictures for years to come. Christmas was a flurry of activities. In the course of one week we had a big Willis Christmas in Louisville, a small basic just us Willis Christmas here in Indianapolis, and then all of Jane's family at our house at the end of the week. It was a lot of Christmas and a lot of family and a lot of fun. In case you were wondering, the picture on the middle right would be; Wayne, Garry, Jake, pretend Mike is there, pretend Erin is a Willis cause we certainly did, Bob, Jean, Erik, Jane, Nancy, Teresa, Marky, Lauren, Dad, Mom, Megan, Emily, Sarabeth, Dawn and Kyle. The Finley family on the lower right is Mathew, Jon, Nathan, Michelle, Randy, Marybeth, Wayne, Carrie, Sarabeth, Ben, Jane, Betsy, Ian and Emily. Pretend Jane's parents were there sitting in the middle of all of us. They were there but had to leave a little earlier. If you add them all together it comes out to about 30 people. I guess that kinda gives you a good idea of why I like the Christmas season so much. And why I enjoy writing this silly letter / short story every year. As I stuff these letters into the envelopes each year, I think about all you people and all the fun things we did together once upon a time. Thanks for the memories! I hope your holiday season, and all of 2001 was cool.

Happy President's Day,

Wayne, Jane, Emily, and Sarabeth

JANUARY 2002

   I enjoy writing these letters too much to start next year's with this news. My father died January 30th. It was sad, but I guess it was time. I assume God knew what He was doing. Dad had a very good life and I know where he's at right now, and that's all that matters. Thanks for your prayers.

W