I want to express my sincerest condolences to the people of Great Britain for the early loss of some of their most innately beautiful people, esp. John Lennon & David Bowie. And to thank that great nation for sharing their heroes with us.
We are better because they were here with us, showing us how to grow, how to love (not just the person beside us, but those who live in other places that we will never know personally). They showed us how to be & how to die.
As I learn more about Lennon, I see how he had so much to share after so many losses: never knowing his father, his mother’s early death, and the death of his best friend, Stewart. I can’t help but wonder how he carried on.
Bowie, on the other hand, grew up in Brixton, a place I wandered around late one night, only to be told later, how “dangerous” it was. Those people had obviously never been to an American city. Bowie showed his strength as he tried to live for his daughter. He hung in there for a good, long time. If you look at his photos, it is obvious that it wasn’t easy those last few years.
It’s interesting how a melancholy child can spend years thinking she had the saddest childhood imaginable, then she revisits some of those places & has all these amazingly wonderful memories of loving parents, and brothers & sisters who she had adventures with. And even the walk to school suddenly looks like a wonderful walk down Memory Lane.
Justice says time & distance alter the past “somewhat.” For me, it is almost a totally different past. It has a lot to do with working with troubled kids for 30 years. Hearing horror stories about kids being used as money for the parents to get more drugs. (I won’t even go into it because it will make you cry too.)
If I could go back & be happy for all the times that I didn’t realize would mean so much to me now, I would. 😉 ❤
Peace, love & the joy of having learned how precious life is,
Sherrie
Sherrie Miranda's historically based, coming of age, Adventure novel “Secrets & Lies in El Salvador” is about an American girl in war-torn El Salvador:
http://tinyurl.com/klxbt4y
Her husband made a video for her novel. He wrote the song too. You can find it in YouTube under the same title as the book. ❤ ❤
In the poems I have been thinking of and writing the last few years, I have grown aware that childhood is a subject somehow available to me all over again. The perspective of time and distance alter substance somewhat, and so it is possible to think freshly of things that were once familiar and ordinary, as if they had become strange again. I don’t know whether this is true of everybody’s experience, but at a certain point childhood seems mythical once more. It did to start with, and it does suddenly again.
~ Donald Justice, from an interview with The Missouri Review, quoted by Linda Pastan, “Yesterday’s Noise: The Poetry of Childhood Memory,” Writer (vol. 105, no. 10, 1992)
Credits: Art – Pascal Campion. Quote: Memory Landscape
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