Welcome! My

Sunday afternoon…Bobbie’s up in Connecticut visiting two of her kids: Mike who’s not long back from a year in Iraq with the US Army and Kim who’s in her fourth year of being the mother of twins among other things.  Me, I’m in my 69th year and missing this woman like a 16 year old in the middle of a doowop tune from when I actually was 16, first met her and was too shy to even speak to her.

*   *   *

Have  you heard John Coltrane’s Stardust?  I’ve been a Coltrane fan since 1963 when Randy and Janie gave me My Favorite Things for my 21st birthday–a debt I can never repay.  The Stardust album is like a French impressionist painting: novel enough to be exciting and occasionally challenging, familiar enough to give you a piece of solid ground from which to launch into the new then safely return.  Ultimately it loves it’s subject and is beautiful beyond any words used in the past.

*   *   *

And two poems, one by Ryokan, a 19th century Zen hemit monk, and Mary Lou Kownacki, a contemporary Roman Catholic nun.  First his:

Time passes,

Thre is no way

We can hold it back–

Why, then, do thoughts linger on,

Long after everything else is gone?

Then hers:

Time

Stands

Still.

There

Is

No

Way

We

Can

Push

It

Forward–

I

Still

Live

In

The

Moment

You

Left

Me.

*   *   *

And, even better, she’ll be home tomorrow!