My Lifelong Childhood

"Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home: Is this a holiday?"                                William Shakespeare (1564-1616)                                       "Julius Caesar Act I, scene 1) Some years ago, I read a novel by the author, Richard Ford entitled "Independence Day", a Pulitzer Prize winner and a story that follows the protagonist through the titular holiday weekend and the challenges in his personal life.  It is a pastoral meditation on a man reaching middle age and assessing his place in life and the greater world in general.  This blog, less reflective and skillful than Ford's, is about my Memorial Day weekend during a difficult time for everyone. Julius Caesar got it right with the above quotation, very fitting, but even more so for our current times.  When I saw all the photos of huge parties all over the country, his advice, sadly, went unheeded.  Our weekend started off with a mutual decision to leave the old homeste

"COURAGE IS THE THING.  ALL GOES IF COURAGE GOES"                                         Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) How many times a day do we hear the term, essential   worker , on the news, perhaps pausing for a few seconds, and then going about our day.   The Essentials  could be the title of a super-hero film or a mission impossible  Netflix series...or, it could mean material items we feel we cannot do without.  By definition, it means something that is absolutely necessary.  If you do a little bit of research on IMDB.com, the independent movie database, and enter it as a search term, you will actually find at least three productions by that title: one about an aging spy called back into action, one presenting a series of great classic films, another, a documentary on a collection of short stories. But the term,  essential, at least during this pandemic, has taken on a more prominent place in our jargon and has become embedded in courage and heroism.