Tag: memories

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn12 Comments

[…] I’m old but not when I go for a swim. A transformation takes place. In fact, it’s surprising how much younger the body feels in water.

What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You’re trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you’ve become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water.

As soon as your body feels the cool liquid element around you, you’re ageless. Memory takes you back to childhood, and you swim just as you did in your 20s, though this time you have brains.

And that’s the beauty of it. Age has endowed you with knowledge and experience. Now, in water, you have achieved the impossible. You’re young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray. […}

Obviously I feel none of that. I’m just an old man enjoying the water and the quiet, feeling peaceful if a bit tired, almost but not quite like an Irish selkie, who lives on land only temporarily, and whose true home is the sea.

— Roger Rosenblatt, from “Flabby, Wrinkled, Happy…I’m Old But Not When I Swim” (NY Times, August 2, 2025)

Saturday Morning

Live & Learn11 Comments

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

— Victoria Chang, “Passage” in The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022)

Notes:

  • DK Photo at 4:11 am at Oyster Shell Park, Norwalk, CT. 59° F, with heavy rain. More photos from this morning’s walk here.
  • Poem via Read A Little Poetry

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn21 Comments

The particulars of place lodged in me… how I learned the way the sun laid its palm over the side window in the morning, heavy light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.

— Minnie Bruce Pratt, from “Temporary Job” in “Inside the Money Machine” (Carolina Wren Press, 2011)

Notes:

  • See more photos from this morning’s walk here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Watch it.

Live & Learn26 Comments

…on Amazon Prime.

Movie Review on Robert Ebert.com

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn27 Comments

As you embark on something like this, as you comb through the years, you are confronted with something like an identity parade of former selves. Here they come, shuffling into the white room, in front of the black horizontal bars, all dressed differently (up until around the age of 40 at any rate), all with slightly different haircuts, different ideas about the world, all awkwardly taking their place in the line-up and squinting at the two-way glass. Aspects of all these personas have been jettisoned along the way to get you to whoever you are now. The Usual Rejects. Some of these old versions of you will be more familiar than others, but, for most of us, they will all be shuffling around twitchily to some degree or other. Guilty. How do you rate these old selves? Look back ten or fifteen or twenty years. What was that guy like? How would you rank them in the pantheon of former selves? […]

But, still, here they both are, next to each other in the line-up, squinting into the glare, taking their turn stepping forward – ‘OK, you deadbeats. Start talking.’ Some of them you just want to fetch a mug of tea for. To roll out the good cop, the guy who will say, ‘Hey, you were young, don’t be too hard on yourself kid.’ But there are others, the real offenders, who you want to grab by the lapels and scream, ‘Are you kidding me with this shit?’ You want to reach back through the years and drag them down to the cells, where you will turn off the recording equipment and get busy with the rubber pipe and the rolled telephone book.

Because that’s what it feels like to me, the memoir. A forced confession.

― John Niven, O Brother (Canongate Books, August 24, 2023)

Notes:

  • Book Review & Portrait of John Niven via Herald Scotland: “Author John Niven on his moving family memoir O Brother”  August 19 2023
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.