Notes From Another Side

  Dream 1:  Boarding a jet to Paris. The jet's enormous, wide as a football field, and you can choose any seat you like. I settle in a cozy corner row, comfortable, but somehow but I forgot to bring anything to read.  I get up, wander till I find a rack of magazines. I grab one, but then can't remember how to get back to my seat. No matter; easy enought to find another one. The plane takes off so quietly that I hardly notice we're in the air. At times, the jet pitches low and we cruise through city streets before ascending back into the sky.  Maybe I sleep as we cross the Atlantic. I don't remember. We land in a tunnel that resembles a cave and troop out into daylight. This is France. A bus takes me into town. Lacking French currency, I wander about searching for a bank. I find one in short order. Don't know how long I will stay. Dream 2: Back in Rogers Park. I need diapers for my child, so I stroll south on Damen Avenue until I reach Devon. Rogers Park has changed....

The first line of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl"  published in 1956:  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ... Damned straight as we reach the end of 2024. Many of us baby boomers imagined that by now we'd be living (if we were still alive) in a technologically advanced, George Jetson-like world where the problems of hunger, poverty, war and discrimination would be greatly diminished, if not eradicated. Ha. Not so much. The poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, published in November 1920, seems eerily prescient. (Please note this poem is in the public domain.) The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the ...

Two friends and I often have coffee on Saturday mornings. Outrageous fortunes have hit each one of us, losses, illnesses, the whole gamut. Well, of course, that's the way life goes. I'm in my early seventies and my friends are in their eighties, which makes me the kid of the group. We talk about death sometimes, and it seems to me our attitudes are less fearful than when we were younger. We've been fortunate to make it this far, and we know the Grim Reaper waits patiently (or not) around the corner. Which is surprisingly okay, the cycle of life and all that.  Death be not proud , right? Apologies to John Donne. If there is an afterlife, he's one of the people I'd like to meet.