Archive for November, 2009

Literary Mileage
Pieces Float Away

Monday, November 30th, 2009

I feel pieces of myself floating away as the icons of my youth die. I hate to sound like a blubbering baby boomer, but Ted Kennedy’s death last summer and the subsequent media reviews of his life and times mirror my own coming of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Walter Cronkite’s passing was similar. The news stories replaying footage of Walter sharing the news with us filled me with grief, not just for his passing, but for my own. His revelation that JFK had been killed in Dallas is seared in my memory, along with that of my American history teacher, Mr. Watts, in 10th grade, who told us of the assassination with tears in his eyes.

Both Kennedy and Cronkite represent seminal events in my growing up—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the growing horror of Viet Nam, the draft and what it meant for boys my age, then Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s deaths. The recent news of Mary (of Peter, Paul and Mary) Travers’ death rocked me and even, Susan Adkins, one of Charles Manson’s bloody crew. What bizarre times I grew up in.

The passing of movie stars like Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Richard Widmark, pushes me toward the end of an era—my own. They bring back memories of the first black and white television set we got when I was seven years old. Each publicly reported death hammers home my own days gone. It is shocking, this fleeting nature of time. All those irrevocable days and experiences.

My grandchildren seem to be growing up much faster than my own kids did. I suspect that has to do with the telescoping of time as I grow older and my rather uncomfortable vantage point from the far side of that infamous ‘hill.’

I so much want to put the brakes on time…if I could, would I relish each moment more fully? And if I did, what difference would it make? I struggle to stop bemoaning my fate —that I will inevitably come to an end.

IMG_2367_piecesIn the meantime, I got a thrill this unseasonably warm afternoon inhaling a certain late autumn fragrance of trees turning, wind shifting to the north, cicadas calling it quits. Maybe that’s the best way to accept time slipping away…finding joy, or at least peace, in what is unfolding right now.

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