RonPrice
Nov 10, 09, 11:33 pm
In this great, this massive, bunker-city of an airport I began to reminisce about my mother’s coming out to Australia in 1974 in her 70th year and going through a similar series of airports to the ones I would see in this trip. She came to hold my hand, so to speak, while I was going through my divorce after eight years in a first marriage. She told me she took a small flagon of whisky to help her cope with the exigencies of the trip from Toronto Canada to Launceston Tasmania. I could also not help reflect, during that flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong and especially as the plane flew over Broken Hill, Tennant Creek and Darwin that I had not flown in that region for 23 years. Such a lot of water under the bridge since then, nearly all of my middle age and the first years of late adulthood.
During that flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong I was sandwiched between a charming young woman aged 32 and my wife. All flights, except first class, are sandwich experiences and they have been that way since my first experience of travel by air in 1967 at the age of 23. I only slept for four hours during that first night-flight. This attractive woman who was going to be with her husband in Switzerland helped to occupy the time. She had an MA in Italian with a specialization in sociolinguistics. We had a good chat about her course and many other subjects in life and academia. We also talked about he Bahá'í Faith en passant since she asked several questions I told her I was going to the Baha'i WorldCentre in Israel. The conversation was so engaging that I wrote the following poem:
It’s thanks to Roger that this poem
goes the way it does as I fantasize
a courtship, quite brief, a marriage—
now there’s the rub—an aborted
fantasy in its opening phases and
such a charming woman, far too
late and simply does not fit into
her lifespan or mine—what one
calls our life-narrative, the story
of our lives which can really only
go in one direction--fantasies and
dreams a bonus for life’s periphery
or, as that Bard once said: “these
dreams are the children of an idle
brain begot of nothing but vain fantasy
which is as thin of substance as the air
and more inconstant than the wind,
which woos.”
Here at the age of 65 I sit with life
whizzing by to its final hour of my
recorded time and with this world
religion in its fifth epoch and a
dozen years to go before the end
of the first century of its Formative
Age, a Formative Age so very unlike
the Greek age by the same name.
I travel to the BWC to renew and
reinvigorate the focus, the new focus,
that has emerged in the last decade,
in this new millennium—spreading
the teachings over the internet with
time out occasionally for fantasies,
the engagement in an insistent and
concupiscible appetite and many
sleeps due to an anti-psychotic
and anti-depressant medication
keeping me nicely contained to
do this job for a Cause I have
been a part of for half a century.
During that flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong I was sandwiched between a charming young woman aged 32 and my wife. All flights, except first class, are sandwich experiences and they have been that way since my first experience of travel by air in 1967 at the age of 23. I only slept for four hours during that first night-flight. This attractive woman who was going to be with her husband in Switzerland helped to occupy the time. She had an MA in Italian with a specialization in sociolinguistics. We had a good chat about her course and many other subjects in life and academia. We also talked about he Bahá'í Faith en passant since she asked several questions I told her I was going to the Baha'i WorldCentre in Israel. The conversation was so engaging that I wrote the following poem:
It’s thanks to Roger that this poem
goes the way it does as I fantasize
a courtship, quite brief, a marriage—
now there’s the rub—an aborted
fantasy in its opening phases and
such a charming woman, far too
late and simply does not fit into
her lifespan or mine—what one
calls our life-narrative, the story
of our lives which can really only
go in one direction--fantasies and
dreams a bonus for life’s periphery
or, as that Bard once said: “these
dreams are the children of an idle
brain begot of nothing but vain fantasy
which is as thin of substance as the air
and more inconstant than the wind,
which woos.”
Here at the age of 65 I sit with life
whizzing by to its final hour of my
recorded time and with this world
religion in its fifth epoch and a
dozen years to go before the end
of the first century of its Formative
Age, a Formative Age so very unlike
the Greek age by the same name.
I travel to the BWC to renew and
reinvigorate the focus, the new focus,
that has emerged in the last decade,
in this new millennium—spreading
the teachings over the internet with
time out occasionally for fantasies,
the engagement in an insistent and
concupiscible appetite and many
sleeps due to an anti-psychotic
and anti-depressant medication
keeping me nicely contained to
do this job for a Cause I have
been a part of for half a century.