A cherished friend sent me (via snail mail) an unexpected but certainly much appreciated birthday card. Its face was a print of POINT SUR LIGHTHOUSE by Philip Jon Haysmer. I was touched (yes, emotionally) and I (having been programmed in the late 1940s and early '50s) would have wept if it were in my nature to resort to such 'unmanly' behavior.
In truth, I intend to keep and treasure this card for all my remaining years on this Earth.
I have started rereading an old novel, Ray Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. Although I have read the book many times, I have a feeling that I might be able to appreciate it more now, after a number of years of living life. And following that one, I will be rereading my old and faded soft-cover copy of I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC! For better of worse.
There are many opening lines of stories and novels that I admire. One of them was penned by Ernest Hemingway.
The Old Man and the Sea begins:
"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish."
Don't ask me why that line struck me as it did, because I don't know the answer.
But it did. And it does.
The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.
--George Marshall,
US Army Chief, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Nobel laureate (1880-1959)
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