MAY IT BE SO

Monday night.
It is late.
And once again I sit to write after a busy day.

Stuff has happened.
Good stuff and not so good stuff.

Deadlines are looming. Some are being missed. But some are being met.
And there are some victories. There are defeats.

We are slipping and sliding into early winter. It can be scary.
Lots of things can be scary.

As I wrote in a comment to another website, we think of ourselves as young in our dreams– until something happens to remind us that the years have passed.
A close friend dies; we attend a reunion; we attend the wedding of a young man or woman we knew as a child; a Dear Grandchild calls on the phone and says, “Grampi, we found our piano books.”

Or another war starts or a crisis of some sort looms and we watch some of our leaders behaving like idiots or scoundrels or worse – and we know it – and we can do so very little about it – and we remember that there was a time we believed that we could change the world and make it better.

Well, we know more of the world now.

Our two Grandkids are the second pair of kids we helped to raise, if only for a few years.
We’re not raising them now, but we are blessed in that we see a lot of them.
What a terrible world it would be without Grandkids!

I remember hearing and playing that ballad It Was a Very Good Year a lifetime ago –

But now the days grow short
Im in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine
>from fine old kegs
>from the brim to the dregs
And it poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year

Hearing it now makes me feel both ways – young and then…older.

And the memories – lots of memories.
What a terrible thing it would be to lose the good memories.

I am wondering tonight if it is inevitable that a great nation, as it ages, even if it is not really old as nations go, will lose its edge, will find that the virtues and the values that made it great and dynamic and resourceful and irresistible and yes, even exceptional, will fade – and the dark side of reality will move irresistibly into the forefront.

I stood behind Robert Frost a lifetime ago [really behind and off to the side] as he read from his The Road Not Taken:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Rarely, if ever, can a person go back.

I am wondering tonight if a nation can go back once it has taken wrong turns, really wrong turns.

May it be so.