An email to my brothers and sister yesterday morning:
Listening to Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music — on my iPhone, on the bus – this morning evoked sentimental, grave thoughts and feelings.
about Bill Dalzell
Grammy Handy
Mom and Dad
What they meant to me, how I appreciate some things about them in retrospect keenly.
What death means. My own. That of loved ones. Its inevitability. How death is a poignant part of life, as Walt Whitman said.
Roger
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addendum:
Another email to my siblings (August 15):
Probably platitudes
But
Is it because of Mozart that I am thinking thusly?
When I am enjoying life keenly, partaking of it, appreciate the most, it seems, being alive.
People … the day as felt (sun, breeze, grass, water, the elements) … books, thoughts, and music … the active life of the mind.
I think of those departed.
Real people who loved and appreciated those same things (and people) purely for them own sake; and enjoyed and partook of them the same … who lived in the moment…. those moments as they experienced them are sharp and indelible in my memory.
We got this from Mom and Dad; and I did from people like Bill who cared not a whit for externals.
Then I think to myself, at such times, that Mom and Dad aren’t here to enjoy these things; and friends like Bill, or Dr. Colp: and I can’t share my enjoyment and appreciation with them.
Then I feel their absence keenly, and feel the poignancy of it all.
Roger
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I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
— Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry “
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 15, 2021