A taste of home, a journal of living and traveling, spiced with wit, an old-fashioned newspaper personal column, from a curmudgeon cross-breeding metaphors and journalism and art. --National cemetery at Santa Fe, N.M. where uncle Mike's ashes are buried, especially for Memorial Day--Clark photo
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Leaving home, watercolor
9 by 12 watercolor, 140# d'Arches paper
How much does it hurt inside when a child leaves home or goes far away?
Seeker, journalist, teacher, writer, watercolor explorer, wit, grandfather, geezer-curmudgeon, former weekly newspaperman, coffee drinker, genetic and native Texan, Southerner, perhaps a verb. Professor of journalism and director of Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Just out the window,
black silhouettes of trees
remind me of those
halcyon days with you,
when we climbed out of the
cellar toward enlightenment.
Now, at a glance, the wild
birds swing into view,
obscuring the real world
of young men dying
to get home, and the
snow that falls on
our brains stays solid - never
melting into springtime.
On the ferry, we sit and
compare notes as to whom
in life has suffered the most;
men, women, boys, or girls?
Suddenly, in a revelation, you
say it is the Buddha over on
Main, who sits on his plywood
altar, surrounded by plastic
flowers, subjected to all the
passersby, who have never had
a Zen thought of their own…
--K. Lawson Gilbert
I'm dreading the day, kind of. Logan may live with us for a long time but we'd love him to be able to live independently.
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