This summer of nostalgia and reunions has left me dizzy with memories. The two roads of which Frost wrote have never been relevant to me. I’ve always seen only one road, the one in which I was all in. I don’t care if the glass is half full or half empty; speculating on this is a waste of time. What are ya gonna show me today? What are ya gonna be now? What am I going to be? This is all that’s important; all the other stuff is exterior stuff and it’s not really stuff; to describe it, I often use another S word minus one letter
Recently, I walked a path dark and green; the pony trail in Michigan. When they were young, I held the reins and led my daughters on their ponies Billy and Midnight. It’s a trail that always led to the not trending and to the deep blue sea of Lake Superior. Sometimes on this trail, I’d see the passing of a shadow and remember the words of Chief Seattle, delivered 100 years before I was born:
“And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone.”
At that place, on the shores of gitche gumee, today I prayed on the wall where for many years I sought the counsel of silence. There, I thought of you and mourned human bullshit. If we elect Trump to be President of the United States, and have a nuclear war, well okay; we got what we deserved for being a country that’s become drunk and stupid, fiddling while Democracy burned.
But I also tell you of the small maple surviving against all odds.I tell you of Lake Superior and its cold lap dance. I tell you that on the shoreline, I saw imprints in green lichen from the shoes of Walt Whitman, I tell you of tall pines and shallow pools . . . the beginning and reaching of life.
Attention peeps: there is no more than what your heart reveals to you in the names of your who, what, how and where. The only when that’s important is now. We will never know the why. But the “who,” ah yes, the who; I absolutely remember and am dizzy with your words: daughters and son, brothers, nephews, cousins, aunts, Paul, men of Michigan, Sherri, Russell, Seamus, Michelle, Jennifer, David, Ritch, Ken, Bob, Eric, Jon, Nick, Barb, Mark, Mike, Beth.
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