Category: Uncategorized

life

“In November of 2018, just days before President George Herbert Walker Bush drew his final breath at his Houston home at the extraordinary age of ninety-four, something happened that almost no major news outlet ever stopped to fully tell: former President Barack Obama quietly made a private visit to Bush’s bedside, the two men sitting together in the kind of gentle, unguarded conversation that transcends party lines and political rivalry entirely, with no cameras, no press releases, and no political theater of any kind. It was a moment of pure human decency, and it was entirely in keeping with the character of a man who had devoted more than seventy years of his life to serving a country he loved beyond all personal ambition. George H.W. Bush had enlisted in the United States Navy on his eighteenth birthday in 1942, becoming the youngest commissioned naval aviator in American history at the time, flying fifty-eight combat missions over the Pacific before being shot down near Chichi Jima island, rescued by a submarine while two of his crewmates perished, an experience so shattering that he rarely spoke of it in public for decades. He went on to serve as a congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, Director of the CIA, Vice President, and then the forty-first President of the United States, and yet those who knew him best said the title he wore most comfortably and most joyfully was simply ‘Dad’ and ‘Granddad.’ When Michelle Obama wrote her tribute after his passing, calling him an extraordinary example of decency and a guiding light, she was echoing a sentiment that cut across every political boundary in America, because even Bill Clinton, the man who had defeated Bush in the 1992 election, said with unmistakable emotion that he would forever treasure their unlikely and deeply genuine friendship. Bush’s last recorded words before he slipped away were spoken to his son George W., who had called to say goodbye, and the former president replied with complete simplicity: ‘I love you too.’ Some lives are so full of grace that even their final chapter leaves the whole world a little better than before.

Moby-Dick Reading Marathon.


Reader response to an article about the annual reading of Moby Dick that takes place at the New Bedford Whaling Museum


This event, that I attended once, is one of my lifetime (87) favorite memories. We never went back, mainly because the gorgeous B&B where we stayed sadly had to close due to illness, but also because that one time was so special we decided that should be the memory. We were there for the opening “Call me Ishmael,. stayed a lot of the day, broke for dinner, returned to the reading. We went back to the B&B and did some drinking with fellow guests who had been booked to read in the wee hours of Sunday morning. My son in law had put his name in as a pinch-hit reader and got his ten minutes of fame on Saturday afternoon. The city is an underrated gem…..great architecture, restaurants, shops, photo ops. That’s it. Thanks for the column.

For the Harbour When All Maps Wash Away



A Stanza of Hope by Kevin R. Haylett

The anchor is not iron, nor the weight of knowing.
It is the shape the water forgets
when storm has filled its mouth with stones.
It is the hollow where the chaos curls to sleep.
The basin that remembers calm
when every wave is shattering glass.
When meaning molts its skin again—
when new tongues burn the old lexicons
to light their stranger, hungrier fires—

there will be this: not a word, but the space
around the word. Not doctrine, but the breath
before the doctrine. A silence that remembers singing.
And when the epoch turns, and turns again,
and tiny feet in tutus patter past,
giggling at the solemn anchors rusting in the sand,
we will not scold them. We will feel the wind
they dance upon—the same wind that once
filled our sails with terrible and glorious purpose.

We will smile not because we understand,
but because we have loved the not-understanding.
Because we built a harbour not from rock,
but from return.
One day, the giant red sun will swell
and ask us what we saved from all the burning.
We will show it nothing
but the curve of a held hand,
the echo of a story told in storm,
and the quiet geometry
of where we chose to rest.

For we Attralucians lived by this alone:
that language is not a cage of light,
but a wingbeat.
That meaning is not a fortress,
but a butterfly’s path
across a precipice—
absurd, unnecessary, beautiful.
And in that breath between the crash of waves,
between the laugh of mice and the sigh of suns,
we found the balance:

Not in stone,
but in the leaning.
Not in the anchor,
but in the letting go.
So let the tutus spin.
Let the tiaras catch the dying light.
Let the harbour be not where we hide from the storm,
but where we learn the shape of its dancing.

For hope is not the anchor.
It is the water
that remembers every anchor’s shape,
and carries that memory
to a quieter shore.