Regardless of your opinion of Ted Kennedy, this eulogy by his oldest son is something you won’t soon forget. I heard it today, on my father’s 81st birthday, while driving home from Seattle. Hard to see the road through tears.
I saw my heart beating today from behind its walls. In darkened chambers easily mistaken for underground rooms, a handful of workers labored without pause. The workers are valve gates, flanges of flesh regulating blood flow with relentless precision. It’s easy to see why one day they might quit from fatigue or boredom. But one can hope they’re in quest of a gold medal for length of service.
The last European survivor of World War I has died at age 111. Harry Patch’s late-life interviews are cautionary. Reading this story, I’m struck by a glaring hole: unmentioned is why nations sent millions to be slaughtered. A close friend of Patch said the veteran stressed two messages: “Remember with gratitude and respect those who served on all sides, (and) settle disputes by discussion, not war.”
I’m a big fan of a guy’s blog. He’s a storyteller, and a damn good one. Even if he wasn’t, he’d win my award for best blog name: And I Am Not Lying.
Jeff Simmermon hasn’t posted much lately, and I just found out why: he apparently has testicular cancer.
His account of learning about the tumor and what’s ahead is entertaining yet poignant, like his other writing. The piece also conveys an attitude worth emulating when confronted with a serious medical problem.
The older I get the more I wonder how I’ll handle what’s likely inevitable.
In February on a rare sunny day, I helped friends dig up and move a Japanese laceleaf maple from their backyard to their front. No chance the tree was going to survive the unavoidable mugging at our hands.
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In an interview broadcast today, singer John Mellencamp described to NPR’s Terry Gross the inspiration for the song “Longest Days” on his 2008 CD, Life Death Love and Freedom.
He said his grandmother called him Buddy. She lived to 100. Late in life she often asked him to lay in bed with her as she rested. Once, side by side, she asked him to pray with her.
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A writing professor I know often uses time travel as a plot device. His novel about Abraham Lincoln involuntarily appearing in Chicago in the 1950s bring him to life in a unique way. More intriguing is the professor’s unpublished story imagining himself as an adult occupying his boyhood body and mind.
That’s a journey I would gladly take. I already go back in dreams. Why not make it real and less overwrought?
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