An email to my brothers and sister, yesterday morning:

 

Pete, Ralph, and Carol,

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

 

*****************************************************

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

 

*****************************************************

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