Letters to the Editor
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Distance
I have lived thousands of miles away from my parents for the past 13 years, and there has been thousands of miles of Ocean separating me from my parents for the past 10.
But in a way I feel closer to them now than I ever did before (e-mail, cheap calling plans, and skype help a lot).
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nice one, Gary
that was lovely
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Re: Distance
Lucky you. In that sense, technology is a wonderful thing.
Back in the day, when my parents lived halfway around the world and I was studying in Vermont, it cost $5 per MINUTE to call overseas! LOL
I just see the modern, nuclear American family not being as touchy-feely as it once was. How many families actually sit down to dinner together ... even once a week? Spending time together watching a TV show (yes, there were shows way back when that whole families could enjoy watching) has been replaced by Guitar Hero III, Second Life and Internet chat rooms.
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"The Sand and the Foam"
This article, undoubtedly one of Gary Kamiya's best and most meaningful (as it transcends politics, religion and all that other temporal and meaningless stuff) brought instantly to mind the words to a song by the late Daniel Fogelberg, a person who insinuated himself into my life when my first kid, a toddler named Dan also, was striking the first sparks of wonder in me as a parent.
Now almost 48 hours has elapsed since Dan Fogelberg passed into that grandest mystery by way of prostate cancer, the words to that particular song seem remarkably appropriate to the observance of childhood's end -- and it's beginning again, too, if one thinks strangely, as I do. So I will commemorate Kamiya's vision, Fogelberg's sense of the endless, and my own utter sympathy with GK's thoughts as laid down here, by quoting Fogelberg:
Dawn, like an angel, lights on the step
Muting the morning she heralds
Dew on the grass like the tears the night wept
Gone long before the day wears old
Time stills the singing a child holds so dear
And I'm just beginning to hear
Gone are the pathways the child followed home
Gone like the sand and the foam
-Dan Fogelberg,
from The Sand and the Foam
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it was YOU you were waiting for, pacificwhim!
BettyBoop, you can do it - but you won't like how. my boys (20,21) still live at home; my daughter a subway ride away (i see her about twice a month, depending on how much effort i put into manipulating her). Here's the great solution - Have So Little Money they will have to stay (mine go to CUNY, where it costs $5000 per year - the only reason my daughter can live in manhattan is that she works (she's the ambitious, practical, financial one)). probably that was always the case. since everyone is waxing poetic, here's mine
Gerard Manley Hopkins "Spring and Fall" (1880)
To a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for. -
Great piece, Gary
And david sugarman, that is pretty much my favorite poem, and exactly what I thought about half-way through this article. Thanks for posting it.
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Here's my contribution. The last part of "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas:
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
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Real love
>>>But that's erotic love. The love of a parent for a child doesn't fight time, but keeps pace with it -- languishes in its slow-chapp'd power, if you will. Parental affection is the "vegetable love" that Marvell so weirdly invokes. There is no contest, no victory, no fading beauty, no waning of the "willing soul's" "instant fires." You start out where you end up. You're in it for the long haul.<<<
That was how my father loved my mother. His love for her didn't fight time, there was no contest and no victory, he didn't see her beauty fading, and there was no waning of his fire. Their fifty-seven years together were not enough. Not even close. When I was young, I didn't think there was anything special about it. (In fact, I expected to have the same or better! That should tell you how naive I was.) Now I know it is so remarkable that most likely no one who reads this will believe a word of it.
I don't believe in romancing children. Don't jump on me, I didn't say you were doing that. Only you know whether you are. But I can't figure out where this came from. I know it didn't exist for us, when we were young. (And if it had, I would have hated it.)
Has everyone given up on real love? Why?
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a stupid correction
i HATE correcting; i never do it - but i LOVE that poem so i had to (BAD BAD www.sparknotes.com and you were FIRST on google's list!)
Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
no, you'd never guess what the correction was - it was the addition of an "and" - "yet you will weep *and* know why" but it doesn't make sense without it. it sounds as if the poet was ordering you, or telling you, Know Why! As for all the accents, i haven't a clue why they are there. Joan, i suppose you just shook your head when you read my post, as i did yours - who knows what connections there are? good night, i have to go to sleep - i have to wake early, someone is coming to fix the mini-katrina in the kitchen. (the boys helped - at least the one who does, did. the other is just around for decoration, like me)