But you changed that.

Because she was robbed of speech eight years ago by a pair of severe strokes, there is no way to know exactly what she meant by it. It might have been: “Thanks for cooking my favorite meal tonight.” Or it might have been: “What fun we’ve had over these past few days.” Or it might have been: “I love you so much it almost hurts.” It might even have been her approval of the little solar-powered dancing flower I gave her at breakfast that Valentine’s Day morning, the kind of tiny gesture we both treasure far above grand displays of love.

Oh, I know, New Year’s resolutions are supposed to start in the early hours of January when the year is still new. I can hear you smirking at me for taking this long to get around to it.

To be honest, that may or may not be a testament to my good-boy status over the past year, because I don’t know where Santa would find a lump of coal these days, even if he felt my behavior warranted it. Does Amazon deliver coal to the North Pole?

Oh, I know, that’s not what most people think of as a rockin’ New Year’s Eve. Most people want a night on the town that would cause them to wake up in the morning (or afternoon), rub their aching head and moan: “Never again” — behavior that probably involves copious amounts of alcohol and so many drinking games they could make an Olympics out of it.

I was raised in quiet Elmwood Park, just a stone’s throw from Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, and I have always thought of my 1950s childhood as idyllic, calm, and peaceful.

And yet…

And every time I see that, I can’t help but think of Schatze, the sweet-smelling dog of my youth.

Or if not, then I’ll bet you’re a dummy.

“Sorry,” I told them, “but I’ve got to take care of this. You know how Ed is. I don’t want to get called on the carpet.”

Well, not the United States per se, but Florida — that wet, wacky addendum attached to the southeastern edge of the United States. But it’s still a cause for concern, because a lot of folks from the actual United States like to go there in the wintertime.

I gasped and said: “Jim! What are you saying!?!!”

I don’t know when or why I became one, but I guess everybody’s got to be some kind of “guy,” and for me it’s always been birds.

But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than a third of American teenagers these days have a summer job, which means (among other things) that none of them will ever be able to write a column like this one 50 years from now.

So much venom.

So much disrespect.

And at the heart of it all are the American media outlets, which both feed from and generate all the bad blood between us.

Well, as I explained, it’s not a magic trick exactly, because it doesn’t really take any magic to turn a simple napkin into a long-stemmed paper rose with a single delicate leaf halfway up the stem.

But then — after the trick is over — that’s when the magic happens.