And the bagpiper on the condo roof.

Peace to the newsman, chasing stories for cartoons.

Peace to the lady who jammed in Tunisia.

And peace to the one who makes really sexy ladies’ underthings.

The year is ending. Another revolution around the sun. Another slow arc of the top that never seems to unwind. Another winter night of wine and friends and winter morning of headaches and shame about how tubby Christmas made you.

It’s a time to say goodbye to the people and places of the past three-six-five. For me that means a fare thee well to those I wrote about here in  these …

These, what?

These pages? Don’t make me laugh. A short at a server somewhere in the world and these lines never happened. No library for one to stumble across a dusty old book they come to love. No song that gets caught in their ear or crumbling monument they sit upon on a picnic day.

My Chicago, vanished. My legacy the momentary darkening of some pixels on your screen and the lightening of others.

So I say goodbye to the people I met, the places I wandered, the things I saw. The drum circle at 63rd. The dancers on a South Shore roof. A woman handing out dreams on the #66 bus.

I say peace and farewell to the makers of one final canoe, to the hobbled pigeons, trainee barbers and shot girls dancing in inappropriate places.

Peace to the scientists in rooms of insects. Peace to the cackling homeless man on the bridge, the screaming one on the train and to the peaceful, loving one I don’t see in my neighborhood anymore, which is starting to make me worried.

Peace to family, friends and unicycle salesmen.

I wish peace to the seasons, to the homeless man pushed through an ugly spring rain.

To the smoke and sweat of a summer-clogged night.

To the little girl laughing as the bubbles float to the street in an endless warm fall.

And peace to the communists holding court in the snow.

Peace to you, 2013. To the men and women and inanimate objects I fell in love with just enough to write about on a site one power surge from oblivion.

Peace and goodbye.

And to you, 2014, and to all the people, places, objects and hilarious shitheads I will meet in the next three-six-five, I say hello.

Peace and hello.

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“Every day,” he said as his fingers gently flitted along a recorder’s surface as the drumbeat slowed in the background.

That’s recorder not as in fancy machinery, but plastic flute as from a grade school music room.

With it on nights like Sunday, when the weather’s good and the beach is full of swimmers, laughing kids and young lovers, families barbecuing and teens sneaking off to flirt with each other and practice their flow, the man with the dusty cap has come to the shadow of the city’s oldest beach house to place that recorder between the natty mustache and patch and twirl, whirl, twitter on a bird-flow song to accompany the now old men as they beat on the congas, bongos, djembes and anything else that can be slapped, shaken or shimmied to make music.

Every day when the weather’s good since 1966, he’s come.

The men just accumulate, mostly old, but a few young acolytes drawn by the sound. One by one, they show up with the implements of a hundred musical traditions.

A man all in white, from his Kangol cap to the shoes on his feet, was part of the early group. He yelled bits to other in the group, gave a brief speech to the small crowd gathering, old-timers knowing to pull out chairs, newbies straddling their bikes as they stopped for a moment in surprise. The drums never stopped as he talked.

An old man with a dashiki and a stately white afro (the same old man who glared at me earlier when he thought I was going to poach a parking spot he was staking out) walked up to a round of handshakes and hugs to join the circle.

A Hispanic man with an American flag button-up shirt danced in the middle. The other Hispanic man in the circle was a young guy with a military-grade buzz cut and wicking performance fabric gear.

A wizened looking man in full Afrocentric garb and a hat half between coolie and kufi wandered around, looking for a spot to join. He had small drums and a large polished stick that came to a circle at the top.

Some wore slacks and long shirts. Some wore African clothes of pride. Some wore leather biker vests and dusty Obama/Biden baseball caps.

A man trilled his bongo so fast his hands were a blur, just brief flashes of fingers and wrists at the perfect angle for sound.

“We came from the Point,” the man with the dusty cap said during a bit of a break.

He waved the hand that wasn’t holding the recorder north.

“On 55th,” he said.

He flicked those same fingers south.

“Then we moved to Rainbow Beach,” he said. “But that didn’t have the spirit we have here, so we came back.”

The drums started again, ending our conversation.

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