~Upstream and Down~

When people die, friends and family eulogize them, unless, somehow, they are "famous," in which case everybody gets into the act… as is the case with J. D. Salinger, author of, among other things, the acclaimed The Catcher in the Rye, a book you may have been exposed to in high school, and if not, then you must have been meaning to read it lo these many years. If you fall into this category, it's time you meet Holden Caulfield. Get thee to the library. Apart from his publications that ceased decades ago, Salinger has been getting his share of recently ignited posthumous attention after living out the last nearly half century of is life as a media endorsed "recluse," before dying at 91 this week. For the past five decades he was a resident of Cornish, New Hampshire, a town touted for harboring its share of "reclusive" artists. Salinger got out and about—church suppers, book stores-- and maybe stayed home just as often, like many folks do in towns w...

Sometimes  cold and shadowy winter sings in tones so low you'll  miss them  if you don't put on mittens and scarf and squint into the setting sun. Then the quiet aria becomes a duet, then a quartet, until soon all nature raises its voice in harmony. Do you hear it? Do you join the chorus? RD~

In silence, with no fanfare, you blew your crimson trumpet  and heralded the snow.

A tiny planet traveling at about 67,000 MPH makes a trip around a nothing special star 93 million miles away—and we who ride along mark its completed circuit with a big celebration. These circuits—years—accumulate into centuries, millennia, eras; we measure our history with them. And yet we seem not to think far in the future to the time when the present  will be but a dusty memory, a two sentence paragraph in a text book--or maybe not even that. Thomas Paine thought he lived in the “the times that try men’s souls.” Haven’t all generations before him, and those living after, thought the same thing? That the decades we live are the toughest, the most meaningful, the ones that will be remembered as especially noteworthy? A turning point? Something more important than anything in the past? When I listened to the 2009 wrap up… pundits declaring certain moments as highly significant and memorable, I couldn't help but think of how many of the events are but  shooting stars...