Aunts and uncles, cousins and cops, reporters and editors, photographers and firefighters, neighborhood leaders and clergy, high school teachers and in-laws, and every kook I ever met in Baltimore — starting with Phil Dypsky, in a cowboy hat atop the worst toupee in the North America — all stopped by.

It was a wonderful dream, like the final scene in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” when all his old friends push into Jimmy Stewart’s living room in Bedford Falls.

I woke up from the dream feeling like the guy who’d hit life’s big lottery.

When I moved to Maryland from Massachusetts in 1976, I had no idea that Baltimore would become my adopted hometown. But my job as a reporter, then columnist for the bygone Evening Sun — and later, the morning Sun — generated close encounters with thousands of generous, brilliant, creative, weird and eccentric people. They made me feel welcome. They taught me a lot about the city and region. I quickly started to feel at home.

Baltimore has problems that have persisted through generations. I’ve heard some people talk about the city with scorn, expressing frustration and a desire to leave for good.

But, for me, when it came to the quirkiness and general amiability of people, I felt I could not have landed in a better place. When it came to news, there’s never been a dull moment. And when I came to see Baltimore for what it was during my time here — a city in a crucible, in a long and trying period of recovery and transition — I found plenty of stories for the column.

For all its shortcomings, Baltimore has an abundance of potential, and the potential lies in the hearts of thousands of people committed to solving problems and making it a better city for all.

That dream about Dypsky’s saloon filled me with a profound sense of gratitude for all the people who have helped me in so many different ways — with stories for the column, with opinions that helped me form mine, with big laughs and small acts of kindness, with encouragement.

It was the late Phil Heisler, managing editor of the bygone Evening Sun, who gave me this column, and the first one appeared on the Metro page on Jan. 8, 1979. I was just a kid, still new to the city, and the column would have stalled if not for the older reporters (and civic-minded Baltimoreans) who pointed me to stories and ideas to keep it going. They also warned me against making the column personal — that it should be about the people of Baltimore and the surrounding counties, and not me.

So even now, as I try to write this final Sun column — after more than 6,600 of them — I find it awkward to offer personal reflections.

Except to say thank you to everyone.

That includes a large supporting cast of reporters and editors, many of whom moved to other newspapers and other careers in the years after the unfortunate sale of the Sunpapers by the families that owned it. The age of corporate ownership and downsizing has been rough, and the biggest loss was the collective knowledge and talents of hundreds of solid journalists who produced an award-winning newspaper we were all proud of.

The late Peter Kihss, a reporter for The New York Times, encouraged me to stick with the column; a columnist, he said, can carry a paper through rough times. A priest once told me he saw the column as an urban ministry. I never presumed either as my mission; I just loved the job.

My sincere thanks go to the hundreds of readers who commented on the column or called to report a problem, or scolded me, or set me straight about some aspect of life here in the Greater Patapsco Drainage Basin. Three years ago, when I shared the news of the untimely death of my younger brother, Eddie, so many of you were kind and comforting. I’ll never forget that.

My father was an immigrant; his native language was Portuguese. There’s a word in that language, saudade — pronounced “sow-dahd” — that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese. It’s an expression of melancholy longing for someone we once loved or something we once experienced and now miss. Saudade is always a mixed feeling, when you feel sadness and happiness at the same time. I’ve seen it defined as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”

Sun publisher: Nobody asked me, but The Sun will miss Dan Rodricks

I think all of us, Portuguese or not, have some saudade in the soul. It lives there quietly, like a personal folklorist who whispers to us and ignites memories, happy or sad. It’s probably what stirred up that dream about Dypsky’s saloon to remind me, in these final months at The Sun, that it’s been a wonderful life.

So I’m feeling the saudade today, with mixed feelings about leaving a job I’ve been lucky to have for nearly a half-century at a Baltimore institution. But I’m not going anywhere. Baltimore is home. I am, still and always, happy to be here.

According to Hirsh Goldberg, who served as his press secretary when he returned to Baltimore and became mayor, McKeldin was a lifelong teetotaler because his father was an alcoholic.

I’ve said this out loud many times: You’re lucky if your family, immediate and extended, manages to plow through life without anyone becoming addicted to alcohol. Consider yourself fortunate if you’ve never had a close friend drink himself to death.

I make those declarations based on 50 years as a journalist and on the heartbreak of two good friends gone too soon, one from liver disease, one from suicide.

So many stories have come my way about people under the influence of alcohol: Drunk drivers and barroom brawlers; violent spouses, abusive parents and traumatized kids; men and women impoverished and even left homeless because of alcoholism. (“Smokehound” was a term I learned years ago for people chronically drunk from cheap liquor or “smoke.” Never heard the word until I arrived in Baltimore, where, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it likely originated in the 1930s.)

We all tend to personalize things. As I listened through the years to people describe various hardships, booze would often be a factor. Hearing these stories, I would think of family and friends and, for the most part, felt lucky that sorrows related to drink were limited.

But, in all of that, the concern was impairment — the effects of alcohol on judgement and behavior.

Now, says U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, it should also be about cancer.

In an advisory issued last week, Murthy said alcohol is a leading cause of colorectal and breast cancer, as well as cancer of the mouth, throat and esophagus. A warning about that, he said, should be on the bottled and canned beverages we buy and drink.

Murthy linked alcohol consumption to nearly a million preventable cancer cases over the last decade. About 20,000 people die in the U.S. every year from alcohol-related cancers, according to his advisory.

“Cancer risk increases as you drink more alcohol,” Murthy said.

Before the Surgeon General’s advisory, most Americans were not aware of this link, and many are bound to reject the warning as another example of nanny state alarmism. It comes at a time, post pandemic, when people in large swaths of the country, mainly red states, have turned against government and dangerously down on science — even as their chances of dying prematurely grow higher than peers in blue states. A Washington Post analysis showed harmful consequences for residents of states where public health initiatives are rejected as too expensive or oppressive.

Murthy’s advisory comes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaxxer and first-rate quack, stands in line to become secretary of health and human services in the next Trump administration.

And the warning arrived at an interesting time in Maryland: Gov. Wes Moore had just expressed support for changing state law to allow grocery stores to sell wine and beer. There was quick backlash, and Moore reportedly backed off. I don’t know if it’s the main reason, but the Surgeon General’s advisory certainly would not have helped the governor make the case for expanding access to booze.

Murthy’s advisory should inform anyone interested in living a long life, and even a cancer-free one.

“I think it was high time somebody said it,” says Dr. Niharika Khanna, a professor in family and community medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Evidence of a cancer risk from booze has been growing over the last decade. “It has slowly accumulated to a point where a lot of us believe that many of these cancers directly associate with … alcohol,” Khanna says. “Eventually, I’m pretty sure, we’re going to all come to a place where we agree that alcohol does, indeed, associate with big cancers — colorectal, breast, liver, mouth, esophageal … ”

The American Cancer Society says it’s best not to drink alcohol at all, but those who do should limit themselves to two drinks per day for men and one drink a day for women.

Booze is so ingrained in American culture, it’s hard to imagine a national retreat from it. But, as Khanna notes, that was the case with cigarettes until the Surgeon General’s warning.

“I think the Surgeon General’s office is trying to do what was done for tobacco in 1965, when the Surgeon General was very courageous and said that tobacco associates with cancer,” she says. “And there was a huge pushback from the industry — ‘Not a chance, you’re wrong, there’s no data’ — until, finally, we got to a place where the entire public health community was saying the exact same thing, that tobacco is related to cancer.”

In 1965, an estimated 42% of U.S. adults smoked cigarettes. The national rate is now around 14%, according to the National Cancer Institute, and a Gallup survey last year put it even lower, at 11%.

“The number of people who smoke has gone down [significantly], but it took years to get there,” says Khanna. The same could happen with alcohol, though, these days, the forces against that kind of change are probably even bigger than Big Tobacco.

In the latter, the John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd-led band famously performs for a crowd that had come to hear country-western music, not blues and soul. The crowd turns hostile, throwing beer bottles at the Blues Brothers until they change their tune to the theme from “Rawhide,” the 1960s TV show about cattle drivers.

Something like this happened to Crack The Sky during its early tours in the mid-1970s.

Booked to play My Father’s Place on New York’s Long Island, the band found itself caught in the club’s transition from a rundown country-western bar to a spruced-up rock venue.

“We opened for the Earl Scruggs review,” recalls guitarist Rick Witkowski in a new book about Crack The Sky. “Earl Scruggs co-wrote the ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ theme. They were bluegrass and we were 180 degrees from bluegrass.”

“The Earl Scruggs gig was in front of this flannel-shirt kind of crowd,” says Joey D’Amico, Crack’s drummer. “We were doing ‘Sea Epic’ or something and this guy at a table full of maybe 10 or 15 people starts counting down with his fingers — three, two, one and they all scream, ‘You suck!’ … They were throwing bread heels and bottles and I think some fruit.”

It was a demoralizing experience for a band that, in 1975, had its first album hailed by Rolling Stone as the magazine’s debut album of the year. Crack The Sky formed in West Virginia, at Weirton along the Ohio River, but it became forever identified with Baltimore after an experience not unlike one depicted in the Coen Brothers’ film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

In that epic set in Depression-era Mississippi, three fugitives from a chain gang make some quick cash by presenting themselves, along with a skilled guitarist, as the Soggy Bottom Boys. They record “Man of Constant Sorrow” at a rural radio station, then continue their odyssey. Meanwhile, their song becomes a radio hit throughout the Delta — something the four men do not realize until they sneak on stage to perform at a political rally. The crowd goes wild for the Soggy Bottom Boys.

Something like this happened to Crack The Sky in 1976. And it’s a great story, told in oral history form, in a new book, “All Things Crack,” by longtime fan Tyson Koska and published by Baltimore-based BrickHouse Books.

While Rolling Stone praised the band’s debut album, Crack The Sky did not really benefit from that acclaim because the album’s producers were new to the promotion and distribution of records.

It was the 1970s, a decade before compact discs and 25 years before iTunes. It was a boom time for the record industry; Fleetwood Mac, Jefferson Starship, Boston and other bands sold millions of albums.

Not so Crack The Sky.

The company behind its first label could not deliver records to record stores. It could not even deliver records to record-signing events. Airplay on radio stations was good, but it did not turn into sales.

Except, for some reason, in Baltimore.

“There were plenty of records available in Baltimore apparently,” says Crack guitarist Jim Griffiths. “In other places people went to stores and they didn’t have it. Baltimore had them and people bought them.”

Radio stations of the time — WKTK-FM (105.7) and WAYE (860 AM) — had a lot to do with that. Chris Emry, at WAYE for the start of his long radio career, believes he might have been the first DJ to give Crack The Sky air time. Both stations played three or four cuts off the debut album, and the band caught fire among listeners in the Baltimore region.

This was unknown to the band as it headed for Maryland on its dismal tour of country bars and discos. “We get down to Baltimore and we really didn’t know what to expect,” Griffiths says.

On the night of March 18, 1976, the band was expected at the bygone Four Corners Inn, at Jarrettsville Pike and Paper Mill Road in Jacksonville, Baltimore County. As band members arrived, they were startled by the quality of the warmup act, Sky King. “I couldn’t believe those guys were opening and we were headlining,” says Witkowski. “I was intimidated.”

As Koska’s book tells it, the crowd’s reaction to Sky King was mild and polite, nothing more. “It made me real nervous,” says Joe Macre, Crack’s bass player. “They had chops. They were killin’ it.”

But the customers had not come for Sky King. They had come for Crack The Sky.

“We started to walk on stage and got a standing ovation before one note,” Witkowski recalls.

“They knew our music, enthusiastically,” says Griffiths. “It never happened before that night, and it was the most amazing feeling of pure excitement.”

“We went in thinking it was just another gig, and afterwards I let myself get excited,” says John Palumbo, the band’s songwriter and lead vocalist. “People knew the music and it knocked me out how they responded.”

“We were rock stars all of a sudden,” says Witkowski. “They ended up booking us for three more nights, four shows in all, each one sold out.”

The rest is rock history, and a lasting legend around Baltimore.

“I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star.”

Peter O’Toole, as Alan Swann, in my favorite film, “My Favorite Year,” a 1982 comedy about a 1950s TV show, with a poignant turn into the space between hero worship and enabling an alcoholic.

“I haven’t seen a man chew gum like that since Jean-Paul Belmondo in ‘Breathless.’”

What I heard a woman say about a guy who attracted her attention across a sprawling Baltimore office.

“Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

Ralph Fiennes, as Cardinal Lawrence, in “Conclave”

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

This opening line of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is one of the greatest in literature. The 1967 novel brought Gabriel Garcia Marquez international fame and, years later, the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is an extraordinary and challenging read. I always suggest Marquez’s 1988 novel, “Love In The Time of Cholera,” for those just starting to read his work. Also, “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor” is nonfiction, from his days as a journalist in Colombia, and a great tale.

“It’s what Ted Williams had striking out but that Stan Musial lacked hitting a homerun.”

The late George Frazier, columnist for The Boston Globe and jazz critic, used this line to explain “duende,” the mysterious, charismatic spirit that appears only in certain performers, and only at certain times.

“That’s a bunch of junk!”

How Monroe Cornish, candidate for mayor of Baltimore in 1983, repeatedly described the positions of his Democratic opponents during a live televised debate.

“Fishin’ ain’t catchin’.”

A favorite expression of an old friend, Tom “Bush Hog” James, who believed fishing was more about friendships than fish.

“With his pin-striped suit and club tie, Bobby stood out like the America’s Cup yacht at a Middle River marina.”

My description of Robert S. Shriver III when he appeared in Southeastern District Court to face the misdemeanor charge of scalping tickets to an Orioles-White Sox playoff game, October 1983.

I could proudly fill numerous columns with the prose of the late Carl Schoettler, one of the finest feature writers for the Sunpapers of Baltimore. Here’s what he wrote of artist Harry Evans Jr.: “He loved to paint a long block of rowhouses — say ‘East Pratt Street near Central Avenue’ — stretching toward infinity in a blaze of purples, reds, violets, greens and yellows lush as a bank of bougainvillea.”

Here’s what Carl wrote about the last Orioles game at Memorial Stadium in 1991 and the “Field of Dreams” spectacle that brought so many great players onto the diamond for the last time: “Fifty thousand fans stood up and roared when Brooks Robinson trotted out to third base, the first of the Orioles in the post-game ceremonies. He flicked a ball into his glove with a gesture as familiar as your father’s touch, your brother’s arm across your shoulder.”

When I was a cub reporter for The Evening Sun, I worked a story about a man whose bonding company was under federal investigation. He supposedly had provided performance bonds for city contractors who were not qualified for them. We had a meeting at his office on Saratoga Street to get his comment on the allegations. “Sonny,” he said, “if that’s true, you can kiss my — 42nd Street Times Square and I’ll give you 20 minutes to draw a crowd.” I reported that as “denied the allegations.”

The late Melvin Perkins was a perennial candidate for political office. He ran for governor, for mayor, for Congress. He ran as a Republican, as a Democrat. He kept all his files in shopping bags and coat pockets. He spent time in jail and other institutions. One day, he wandered into the Sun newsroom. An editor told him to leave and called him a lunatic. “Oh, yeah?” Melvin said. “I have a document from a judge certifying that I’m sane. Do you?”

A memorable headline from a gardening column in The Evening Sun: “You can put pickles up yourself.”

On campaign finance reform, the late Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro, a member of the Baltimore City Council from 1966 to 1991, said: “I don’t think a politician should have to tell people he’s a fat cat until after the election.”

One day back in the 1980s, in the newsroom of the bygone Baltimore Evening Sun, reporters and editors were astonished at a photograph of an historic Chesapeake skipjack on the bay. It was a wonderful image, taken that very day from the deck of one skipjack and showing another under sail at sunrise. A surprise to all because the photographer who took the picture was often suspected of shooting photos from the front seat of his car: “Great shot,” said reporter Michael Wentzel, “but how did [the photographer] get his car on the deck of that skipjack?”

Many winters ago, as a new homeowner, I discovered the furnace on the fritz and called the home heating company for a repair. A tall, taciturn fellow named Harold came out to fix it. He fixed it by turning the power switch on. I felt stupid. “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “You’re normal.”

In media interviews and countless speeches, Dr. Gallo, emeritus director of the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore, repeatedly made this point: The record shows gaps in vigilance at every 25 to 30 years, with devastating results.

But it’s now clear that those lapses in collective memory — and, along with them, overconfidence in our medical armor — are not the only factors that put the public at periodic risk from viruses.

We have today, with the incoming administration, the real prospect of what I described in a column in 2020, during the pandemic: “A regressive government that is skeptical of science and cavalier about funding research.”

That seems like understatement now as Donald Trump proposes anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s secretary of health and RFK has at his side, helping with the selection of staff, an adviser who wants the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw or suspend approval of the polio vaccine. This adviser, attorney Aaron Siri, works full time at challenging government approval of vaccines and vaccine mandates.

And RFK, while denying that he’s an anti-vaxxer, has a long record showing he’s exactly that. For one thing, he spread the thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines were to blame for autism.

With his nomination needing Senate approval, he’s now trying to soften his image, saying that he supports the polio vaccine and that, more generally, none who chose to be inoculated will be denied a vaccine of any kind.

But if Kennedy and Siri succeed in making certain vaccines unavailable, Americans won’t be able to make that choice.

Considerable damage has already been done.

By elevating this quack to be health secretary — part of Trump’s apparent effort to bring the worst possible people into the federal government — the president-elect further elevates vaccine skepticism and, in so doing, heightens the risk to public health.

So it’s not just failure of memory and lapses in vigilance that present a threat, as Dr. Gallo stated. It’s more than that now. It’s active, know-nothing, anti-science.

“It’s just shocking,” says Catherine Raggio, Maryland’s former secretary of disabilities and a survivor of childhood polio. “I’m appalled that anyone would consider not requiring the polio vaccine for children given its success in nearly eradicating this disease.”

Raggio served in the O’Malley administration from 2007 to 2014, and she’s a longtime leader in promoting independent living for people with disabilities.

She wrote a memoir, “Great Falls I Have Taken,” about the polio that ravaged her legs as a child and left her with permanent disabilities.

Raggio grew up in Pittsburgh. Diagnosed with polio as a three-year-old in 1950, she was hospitalized, on a ward with other children with polio, in a place called the Industrial Home for Crippled Children. She was separated from her parents for 14 months.

“My first memory in life is waking up in the hospital and screaming. Two nurses were putting sandbags over my legs to keep me still,” she says. “I guess the thinking was that the more movement you made, the more damage you did to your body with the polio. I don’t know if that was accurate or not. They didn’t know that much about it at the time.

“I was in a hospital cubicle. I have a vivid memory of exactly what it looked like. They had taken my baby doll away from me. I was all alone and scared, and that’s my first memory of life.”

Raggio’s book is based in part on her mother’s account of those years. It describes the debilitating and lasting effects of the virus on Raggio’s body as well as the psychological effects from her institutional treatment. She became “a tough little cookie,” she writes in her book. “Make no mistake, however. I was traumatized by polio, the treatment I received and the disruption of my young life. The effects of the trauma lingered for many years.”

Polio was once the most feared disease in the world, and every 20th Century parent’s nightmare. The virus attacked the nervous systems of children, weakened muscles or caused paralysis. Thousands survived in respirators known as iron lungs. In 1952, there were 57,879 cases; more than 3,100 victims died that year and 20,000 were left disabled.

“By the mid-20th century, the polio virus could be found all over the world and killed or paralyzed over half a million people every year,” according to a World Health Organization history. “With no cure, and epidemics on the rise, there was an urgent need for a vaccine.”

Two major things happened: Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital successfully cultivated the virus in human tissue in 1949 and, five years later, Dr. Jonas Salk developed a vaccine. By 1957, annual cases dropped from 58,000 to 5,600, according to the WHO. By 1961, there were only 161 cases. The vaccine saved millions of lives.

I am happy to provide this information, given Dr. Gallo’s warning about memory failure, but, more importantly, given Kennedy’s nomination and his association with Siri.

That anyone would want the FDA to revoke the polio vaccine — or any vaccine that has stopped the spread of childhood diseases — is nuts. Even nuttier is giving anti-vaxxers power, or even advisory status, over this nation’s public health policy.

Instead, make a list of 12 things you’d like to do in 2025 — just one per month — then check them off as you go.

This is more practical than making resolutions that invite futility and, ultimately, make you feel like a loathsome sluggard.

I’ll make two suggestions for each month (plus one, for a total of 25 to go with the new year) to get you started. But come up with your own — 12 things you’ve been meaning to do for a while — and stick the list on the refrigerator.

January: Buy some stationery — in Baltimore, there’s Paper Herald on St. Paul Street — get a good pen, and spend one afternoon writing (yes, by hand!) a few, brief letters to a few old friends. … Attend the Jan. 18 revival of H.L. Mencken’s Saturday Night Club, with music, food and drink at the Mencken House in Union Square. A fundraiser to benefit the house as well as the restoration of Mencken’s piano, it’s envisioned as the first in a series of Saturday night gatherings.

February: Spend one winter afternoon writing letters to Republicans in Congress, urging them to extend the prescription drug benefits of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. … Visit “Lynching in Maryland,” a permanent exhibit that opened in October at the the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture “to honor the victims of the 38 documented racial terror lynchings that occurred in the state between 1854 and 1933.”

March: Get to a bookstore: Greedy Reads, The Ivy, Charm City or, on the Eastern Shore, The Bookplate in Chestertown. … Cook something challenging: Try to bake a timpano, the Calabrian pasta-meat-cheese concoction, shaped like an upside down kettle drum, made famous in the film, “Big Night,” and featured in Stanley Tucci’s cookbook. (This was on my list last year, but I didn’t get to it.) … Bonus suggestion: Actually attend Baltimore’s Saint Patrick Parade on Sunday, March 16.

April: At mid-month, drive to Darlington in Harford County, park near the Stafford Road Bridge and find a place to watch the herring and shad run up Deer Creek. If you don’t spot fish there, drive across Conowingo Dam to the hamlet of Sleepy Hollow; you’re bound to see the migrating fish in Octoraro Creek from the Dr. Jack Road Bridge. … On a rainy day, make a long-overdue visit to a public library.

May: If you’ve never actually seen a Baltimore oriole in the flesh — or, pardon me, in the feather — get some binoculars and head to Cromwell Valley Park in Baltimore County. Your chances of seeing one are good there. Look for them in tall sycamores, and near Minebank Run. … If you’ve never actually seen Baltimore’s Kinetic Sculpture Race, do yourself the favor and mark it on the calendar: May 3.

June: There are a couple of times this month when the Orioles play a day game away. Watch it at the Swallow at the Hollow, York Road and Northern Parkway. It’s a great place to hang out and talk baseball (or any sport) with customers and bartenders. … In the first week of the month, you can watch artists painting street scenes in Annapolis, en plein air.

July: You can work up a nice sweat and then cool off by hiking the upper Gunpowder River trail in Baltimore County, finishing at the Prettyboy Reservoir dam. The mist from the bottom-water of the reservoir spilling into the pool below the dam drops the air temperature 10 to 15 degrees. … If you haven’t been to Prigel Family Creamery in Glen Arm for an ice cream, this is the time to do it.

August: Head to Garrett County and hike up Backbone Mountain to the highest point in Maryland (3,360 feet). … Or go to Snow Hill, Worcester County, and rent a canoe or kayak to paddle the Pocomoke.

September: Go to a Navy football game; you’ve been meaning to do that for years. The Midshipmen have at least three home games in Annapolis and the Army game in Baltimore in December. … Look for August Wilson plays at Everyman, Spotlighters and Chesapeake Shakespeare during the fall, part of the ongoing Wilson celebration at Baltimore theaters.

October: Give yourself the Charles Street Challenge: Starting at the old Pabst Brewing Company on the south side of the city, walk Charles Street all the way to Bellona Avenue on the north. (This will probably take more than one day.) … Visit Green Ridge State Forest in Allegany County and enjoy the fall foliage (and perfect solitude) from the observation deck there.

November: This is the start of a great time to see the migrating bald eagles along the Susquehanna River at Conowingo. It can be an epic experience. … Open your house for board games — Monopoly, Ticket To Ride, Stratego, Scrabble — set them up on different tables, invite your friends and neighbors to drop by and play. You’ll wonder why you didn’t do it before.

December: The annual illumination at Antietam National Battlefield happens as darkness falls on the first Saturday in December: 23,000 candles on the fields where thousands died to save — and thousands more died to end — the union during the Civil War. … Do all your holiday gift shopping in thrift stores or in neighbor bulk trash; it worked out beautifully for me this year.

So what happened in 1974 informed votes in 1976, when Americans made Jimmy Carter the 39th president of the United States.

In 1974, a scandal-scarred Republican named Richard Nixon resigned the presidency to avoid being impeached. A month later, his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon of any and all crimes in the attempted coverup of his administration’s connection to the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building.

Ford said he granted the pardon in the nation’s best interest. But a nation that had grown cynical — from a long war in Vietnam that Nixon had promised to end; from the corrupt practices of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, former governor of Maryland; from Nixon’s efforts to stop the investigation of the Watergate scandal — did not buy Ford’s high-minded claim.

To many, the pardon suggested the president was above the law. It appeared to have been arranged in return for Nixon’s resignation. And the most cynical among us believed Ford had agreed to the pardon a year earlier, when Nixon picked him to replace Agnew.

So people remembered this in 1976, when Ford ran for election. It was the year of the nation’s bicentennial, and, as if to restore pride in the country, a majority of voters looked for someone new, a real Washington outsider.

Enter James Earl Carter Jr., a Naval Academy graduate, a Democrat of Georgia, son of a peanut farmer and the state’s former governor. Carter won, though his victory over Ford was narrow.

For most of his first year in office, Carter enjoyed high approval ratings. But stuff happened. A lot of stuff. Bad stuff.

There was a revolution in Iran that caused a slowdown in oil production, and that caused an energy crisis in 1979, the second one in six years. The Iranian revolution also inspired the takeover by militants of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of 52 American hostages, a crisis that lasted more than 400 days.

After a disastrous attempt by the U.S. military to rescue the hostages, many Americans who had voted for Carter expressed bitter outrage at the failure. The president’s reelection appeared to be doomed.

There were other developments: An inflationary cycle that had started during Ford’s time continued, unemployment grew, as did interest rates. (The average rate on a first mortgage was 11.2% in 1979.) There was also the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and, in response, Carter’s call for an international boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow.

The 39th president’s approval rating plunged into the low 30s as he faced the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood actor and California governor.

Then, on Election Day 1980 came the march of the Reagan Democrats in eastern Baltimore County, perhaps the clearest sign anywhere in the country that Carter would be a one-term president.

The east side was the stomping ground of Don Hutchinson, a Democrat and the county executive at the time. Hutchinson visited polling places and talked to poll workers and voters. Times had been tough in Essex, Dundalk and Middle River for those who had worked in Baltimore’s traditional industries — steel, iron, port shipping and auto manufacturing. They had little patience for Carter’s sermons about a national malaise and a “crisis in confidence.”

There was a robust turnout of blue-collar workers and their kin at every polling place. What Hutchinson heard from voters that day was loud and clear: They were determined to fire Jimmy Carter. People who had voted for Democrats for decades switched to Reagan the Republican. Many never switched back.

Reviewing his four years, January 1977 to January 1981, it’s clear that Carter’s defeat was guaranteed by both circumstances beyond his control and by bad luck. (The disastrous military operation to free the hostages in Iran in April 1980 — eight U.S. service members were killed in an air accident and their bodies left behind in the desert — was likely the last straw for most Americans.)

Reagan won in a landslide. The hostages were freed on the day of his inauguration, though he had little to do with it. The record shows that Carter had negotiated tirelessly with Tehran, but that the Iranians deliberately stalled the release of the hostages. In the book, “Guests of the Ayatollah,” journalist Mark Bowden wrote that the Iranians had decided to accept a deal and send the hostages home, “but they had also decided to deny Carter the satisfaction of seeing it happen on his watch.”

So that was the end of the Carter presidency.

But not the end of Jimmy Carter. He became a respected former president, a superb role model, an author, an inspiring humanitarian.

News of his home hospice care arrived with Presidents’ Day 2023. But last month, at age 100, he managed to vote in the 2024 presidential election for Kamala Harris. He died Sunday. Despite the bruises he incurred during the rough patch of history that marked his administration, Jimmy Carter will be remembered as a man who served the nation honorably — never impeached or forced to resign, never vulgar, never scornful of the law, modest, humane and decent.

Have a news tip? Contact Dan Rodricks at drodricks@baltsun.com. 

Nobody asked me, but you’d think a national museum devoted to American history would have a place for visiting school children to eat their bag lunches. However, as a Baltimore parent recently discovered during a field trip, there’s no such place at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington. The small group of sixth-graders that Dan Baldwin chaperoned from Mount Royal Elementary School were not allowed to eat their lunches in the museum cafe, even when there were plenty of seats available; a security guard told them they couldn’t eat on hallway benches, either. Baldwin found the woman at the customer service desk polite but resolute. “She made it clear,” he says, “that there was nowhere inside the building that the children could eat.” So they ate outside on a chilly, windy day. Hard to believe the museum’s planners did not include a simple lunchroom for visiting school kids, who constitute a large part of most any museum’s customer base.

Nobody asked me, but now that Gov. Wes Moore can wear the Bronze Star his Army superiors recommended he receive years ago, questions about his premature and erroneous claim to it will probably fade. Those questions, while troubling, never threatened to kill his career; they are even less likely to do so now. Moore’s failures to correct the record — that he was recommended for the Bronze Star but never received it — are bound to come up again, but explanations about delays and the medal-issuing process seem to hold up and blunt criticism.

And no one can strip Moore’s honorable service from his biography.

Nobody asked me, but the governor’s support of supermarkets selling beer and wine is a solution looking for a problem. Who in Maryland is begging for this? Is there some groundswell of support for buying vino at Giant, brewskies at Safeway? If there’s a clamor for this convenience, I haven’t heard it. “We’re out of step with the rest of the country,” Moore told Maryland Matters. That’s no argument. Are people leaving the state because they can’t buy a six pack of Modelo at Weis? I don’t think so.

And, on the benefit-to-corporations versus harm-to-small-business scale, that idea is a loser.

One more thing regarding the governor: I hope he ordered that a portion of scrap steel from the Francis Scott Key Bridge be saved and recycled into the new span. It would not take much, just a couple of tons of symbolism — a nod to the original structure that collapsed in March — poured into the steel of the second bridge.

Nobody asked me, but, as you count your blessings of 2024 and list your hopes for 2025, be thankful you live in the time of Lamar Jackson.

And be even more thankful that you’re a Ravens fan in the year when Jackson and Derrick Henry are in the same backfield.

Nobody asked me, but after driving some of Baltimore’s ridiculously rough streets, every motorist should go into concussion protocol.

Or start wearing helmets.

Nobody asked me, but few things in the male wardrobe are as comforting and as stylish as a wool cardigan with a shawl collar.

And few things are as goofy as the guy who wears both a belt and suspenders.

Nobody asked me, but it would be fitting for a Maryland institution, perhaps one of our law schools, to name an annual award after the state’s long-serving and retiring senator, Ben Cardin. The award would recognize quiet integrity — that woman or man, in public or private life, who maintained principles and worked tirelessly for some common good, even when no one was looking.

During an exit interview over breakfast in October, Cardin mentioned one of his Senate colleagues, the late John McCain of Arizona, and what Cardin called “one of the great moments in American history.” In 2008, when McCain was the Republican nominee for president, a woman at a town hall claimed Barack Obama, McCain’s Democratic opponent, was an Arab. “No, ma’am,” McCain responded. “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” That was a moment of integrity and truth prevailing over the kind of nonsense and innuendo the right spews in the time of Trump. Cardin’s point: The nation needs more people like John McCain — and, I would add, like Ben Cardin.

Nobody asked me, but the mournful tributes to Ed Gilliss, the Towson attorney and former Baltimore County school board chair who died suddenly on Sunday, should include praise for his substantial pitching talents. I witnessed Ed’s dazzling slow ball in recreation league baseball nearly 30 years ago, at the coach pitch level. With patience and precision, he tossed ball after ball into the compact strike zones of six- and seven-year-olds, gently urging them to keep their eyes on the ball and swing. He was so good natured, so cheerful and encouraging with all those little boys. I don’t know if any of them remember Coach Ed, but this parent certainly does. Rest in peace, you good man.

I met a much younger man in a wheelchair; his legs had been amputated below the knees, and he was homeless.

I met charitable people from Harford County; they had come to Baltimore to hand out Christmas stockings and modest gifts to men and women arriving for lunch at Our Daily Bread.

And I met Shelley Grant, who told a story about the kindness of a stranger that seemed too good to be true.

Or, let me put it this way: I was inclined to believe her story until she added that the police officer involved “was A.I.” That threw me off, a quirky suggestion that the officer who had helped her get home was a creation of artificial intelligence.

But that just might have been Shelley Grant’s way of saying she was surprised by her good fortune. Maybe, acutely aware of the times we live in and the distinctly uncharitable nature of our cynical president-elect, she has come to expect little from her fellow Americans. It’s a common condition these days.

Still, here’s the story:

Driving back to Parkville from Johns Hopkins Hospital last Thursday night, Grant ran out of gas on Perring Parkway at McClean Boulevard, about three miles from her house. It was an hour or so after midnight, when the temperature was about 20.

Grant, who is 67, had no money. In fact, she said, after paying bills, including the cost of repairs to her home, she usually has little left from her fixed monthly income.

So she sat in her car and prayed. “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” she said, “and I called on Jehovah … and [soon] behind me was a police car, a police SUV.”

A 23-year-old Baltimore County officer, Brandon Urbas, approached her and offered to bring Grant enough gas to get to the nearest service station. And that’s what he did. “He came back with two gallons of gas and put it in my car,” she said. “Then he said, ‘We’re gonna start your car and take it over to this gas station on the right and fill it.”

And that’s what Urbas did, with a tap of his credit card on the gas pump. “That brought tears to my eyes,” Grant said.

The young officer, who recently completed his third year on the county force, went beyond her expectations, a stranger (a real one, not an A.I. one) showing some genuine kindness on the way to Christmas.

I happened to meet Shelley Grant on Monday in Baltimore as she accepted gifts from a family assembled on Fallsway behind a hooded pickup truck loaded to the roof, and above the roof, with Christmas stockings filled with necessities and treats.

“We do this every year,” said Phil Serrell, who lives in Harford County and worships at Lighthouse Church in Street. “We started six years ago, with 30 stockings. This year, we have 1,600. … It just came out of me, remembering from my childhood, having a stocking when I woke up on Christmas.”

With Serrell were members of the Jourdan family, also members of Lighthouse Church. They handed stockings filled with toiletries and other items — cookies, sandwiches and drinks, socks, gloves and hats — to men and women near the entrance to Our Daily Bread.

“We just come down every year and we don’t know where the Lord brings us,” Serrell said. “This is our fourth day out this year. … We just drive the streets and look for people.”

Serrell and his volunteers spend the year accumulating items for the annual giving tour. “This has become our Christmas, our tradition and our legacy,” he said. “We’ve been given so much, we’ve got to give back.”

One of the many people accepting the Christmas stockings was Gavin Vaughn, who at 38 has lost his legs to diabetes and gets around in a powered wheelchair. He currently resides in the city’s shelter on Fallsway.

“I’ve been there five or six months,” he said. “I’m trying to get out.”

He applied for housing assistance. His hope for the new year is to live independently in a place that’s affordable — provided the Republican billionaires and millionaires in Washington do not prevail in cutting rental subsidies.

As for the man in the pajamas: His name was Charles Moore, and I had been mistaken about his attire. He wore a multi-colored, two-piece sweatsuit of fleece, well protected, he said, against the cold.

As we walked along Fallsway, I asked about his life. At one point in a long roll of stories, Moore held out his large, strong hands. Decades ago, he said, he had trained to be a boxer with the late and legendary Mack Lewis at his gym in East Baltimore.

“My father died when I was 13,” Moore said. He learned to fight “to protect the angels.” The angels, he explained, were his seven sisters.

I imagined this 77-year-old man as that long-ago boy feeling responsible for his siblings after losing their father. Year after year, and year after year, we go through so much — some of us more than others — on the long way to Christmas.

Those were all good times, and thank you very much.

But my best hour of the waning year would be the one that occurred Thursday, Dec. 19, between 9:45 and 10:45 am in the city of Baltimore, and it started with the sight of tiny girls in chiffon gowns.

I was walking along Preston Street, headed to the Meyerhoff, having been invited to one of the four concerts the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs each year for school children. They are called “education concerts,” and Thursday’s was for children from kindergarten to second grade, those of Santa age.

As I approached Cathedral Street, I could see many yellow school buses; police blocked off sections of Preston Street for them. At precisely 9:45, there came from these buses a parade of three-foot-high children, their teachers and parents. That’s when I spotted two little girls in full-length gowns.

Having been informed that they would be treated to a concert at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, they obviously had decided the occasion called for formal attire. So their Halloween princess costumes found second use as daytime evening gowns.

Let me stop here and admit that, despite my chosen profession, I am as vulnerable to cuteness as any guy on the street. So the sight of these two preschoolers, among hundreds of boys and girls in winter coats, instantly improved my mood.

The news of the day before — and the month before, pretty much the whole year before — had been pretty much depressing. Little girls in chiffon provide relief; they apparently are a good source of dopamine.

The parade to the Meyerhoff was orderly, and soon the concert hall filled with the chatter of children and the cacophonous warmup of the musicians.

The Meyerhoff had been decorated beautifully for a holiday concert, with sparkling lights on pine trees and wreaths, large snowflakes hanging in the space above the orchestra, and the whole tableau rendered theatrical with artful lighting.

Brian Prechtl, a BSO percussionist who directs the education program, had invited me to the concert. I expected an “education concert” to include a lecture of some kind, something about the sections of the orchestra or the difference between violin and viola. But, in my haste, I had misread the best part of Prechtl’s invitation: Student dancers from the Baltimore School for the Arts were to perform an abridged edition of “The Nutcracker” ballet with the BSO.

There are several events throughout the year that delight the senses and even produce a thrill: Lamar Jackson running for a Ravens first down, Cedric Mullins robbing someone of a home run in centerfield for the Orioles, the stretch run of the Preakness, a robust rock concert at sold-out CFG Bank Arena, a brilliant sunrise on the Chesapeake, tall ships entering the Inner Harbor. The BSA’s annual holiday production of “The Nutcracker” should make that list.

And Thursday, for about 45 minutes, the students from that Mount Vernon school took their act to the Meyerhoff to perform with the BSO and conductor Stuart Chafetz.

It was great to see Maria Broom, the actress and storyteller who teaches at BSA, introduce the school’s localized version of “The Nutcracker.” Broom appeared in a quilt-pattern cape that swirled about her and seemed to magically open a door into Tchaikovsky’s Christmas Eve fantasy.

The rest was bliss — Phoenix Brown as Grace and Michael Brabazon as the Nutcracker Prince; Lisa Berger as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Edward Lee III as both Cavalier and the Snow Prince.

The cast of dancers — the Lieutenants, the Mice, the Rat King (normally the Mouse King, but this is a Baltimorized version of “The Nutcracker”), and those who performed as Fanfare, Shimmer, Spirits, Fireworks, Naiads, Candy Canes and Flowers — exhibited precision and poise, charisma and confidence, a level of stage presence beyond their years.

Congratulations to Amy Hall Garner, Iris Andersen Grizzell and anyone else at the BSA who taught them how to do this — to project energy and grace, and to be courageous on stage. It took hard work, physical discipline and full-on collaboration to pull off such a great performance.

Seeing young people succeed like that instills hope.

So, just a few minutes into it, I found some unexpected emotion rising in my chest — a feeling of pride in these young dancers from the BSA, in the symphony behind them, in the hall named for Joe Meyerhoff, and even pride in all those little kids in the audience, who seemed awed by the talent on stage.

It was a great moment in city life, and the finest hour of the waning year.