Pictures of New York Trip will be posted soon. I had a trip of a lifetime with my mom. I can’t wait to land at LAX in a few hours for Thanksgiving. There’s no place like home. I stumbled across the following blog entry my mom had sent a while back. As I get older, I become more and more appreciative to have her as my mom.
Blog entry 3
Besides dancing, writing keeps me on my toes
One of the things about writing is that one must be consistent. If you miss too many days you’ve lost momentum and you are sidelined—out of it, never in it long enough to count. Writing (blogging) is a marathon. At best you set the pace and lead the pack. At worst you keep going alone and cold and get to the finish line long after the winners have been cheered, the rest have crossed and there’s nothing left but silence and a stark littered landscape reminiscent of Pasadena the morning after the Rose Bowl.
But you ran the race to the end of the course because you like running and because there’s a course. So what does that have to do with staying forever young? Kids do things with no ulterior motives. They skip and run because they feel like it. They roll down hills because they like to get dizzy and see the sky trade places with the grass over and over and over again.
Ideally writing a blog, or anything else should not be painful. It should be fun or shouldn’t be done. Ideally. But sometimes it’s more fun than other times. Those are the times when you experience something that is indescribable, but you try to nail it down, to hold onto it anyway, using whatever tools come to hand or to mind. You can’t
help yourself and you’re off to the races. This impulse came over me on a visit to San Francisco when my daughter and I took in the Tutankhaman exhibit at the de Young. So I wrote some rough impressions in a notebook, which I found today in a file. I worked on it a while and found I had a poem. Here it is:
You Are Here X (the de Young Museum August 2009)
Now is the edge of Eternity
Words cannot convey
They are mightier than that
Words have the power to conger and transport matter through time
Tutankhaman, Tutankhaman, Tutankhaman
Spoke these words writ by scribes:
“I will live as long as people say my name.”
And they did for a time and then not
For thousands of years
His mummy in its golden sarcophagus
Along with much that he possessed
Including his words, were swallowed whole
Deep in time
To a golden city in a golden state in an unformed nation,
To San Francisco in the year of our unborn Lord 2009
In Golden Gate Park at the de Young Museum
Throngs of murmuring tourists listen to the story of Tutankhaman
They pause to ponder his life, his words
They say his name
They think about where to have dinner
They have made it to the edge of Eternity
And they are hungry
For now
