Sunday, May 3, 2009

Sunday misc

We worked a smooth month for the gummint, picked up a few paydays. So, of course, the dryer blew up early last week, by chance costing about a week of census wages to replace. It was about 14, 15 years old, but, still, how do the fates know how to move on us with such precision?
All of a sudden, it is gummy, sticky hot, and shorts are the thing. When we perambulated the pup around the block about dusk I realized that the sun was setting way to the right of the east-west line that is the seawall. Time really sneaks past us while we are flailing away at life.
The primo, only living human with whom I share pre-1950 memories, spent a couple of days here in paradise with us. One of the annoying characteristics of the ongoing process of mortality is the fact that there are fewer and fewer people that share most of our history. I will think, "I only know Whoozis there for a little while," and then I will think about how long that little while is, and it will sum up to 25 or 30 years.
In spring, I always contemplate the A.E. Housman poem, "Loveliest of trees the cherry now." Been doing it for more than forty years, since I was twenty myself.
LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.


Take from seventy springs my sixty-six and see how your math comes out. Best be carpeing them little diems as fast as my gnarly old paws can snatch them up.

1 comment:

chats said...

"Fate is never too generous-even to its favorites." For us it was the refrigerator. And here I was expecting one of the cars to break down...