THE WAY I SEE IT

From the other side of the world from where I customarily sleep and play and seldom work, now that I’m retired, I’m still trying to make sense of things. I’m doing what Albee called, “the old pigeon hole bit,” trying to fit all the pieces neatly into appropriate boxes. I’m trying to make sense of the speeches of politicians and their lackeys who obviously want me to believe they’ve got solutions for the problems of a noble nation that has been taken down a wrong path by a sadly inadequate, woefully incompetent president and his advisors. I’m trying to figure out what I should be doing about suffering and loss in a world where I am treated more kindly than most people. I’m trying to figure out what I am responsible for, what I am accountable for in a world obviously wider than the one I see daily from my perch on the hill above Fashion Valley in San Diego.

“We Are the World” is the central lyric in a song sung by bright-eyed, energetic young people in Las Vegas-type after-dinner shows conceived in Los Angeles and presented on luxurious cruise ships that haul people like me to exotic ports for a one-day-look at exotic places. We are emphatically NOT the world.

The adolescent Russian girl begging for coins from foreign strangers as they come back to the bus after their tour of The Church on Spilled Blood is the world. The little Iraqi boy on the CNN news report that came to me between Stockholm and Copenhagen, the little boy whose body was almost, but unmercifully not quite, destroyed by a cruel act of war is the world. A child dying today and the ones who will die of hunger tomorrow in Africa are the world. The kid growing up in a pocket of poverty in the southeast part of otherwise affluent San Diego is the world. In the next few days I will be posting on THE BLOG some photographs of wondrous places I am visiting in August, September, and October. This statement is my disclaimer. The photographic images and the rhetoric don’t match. That’s the point.COPENHAGEN'S MOST FAMOUS RESIDENT
David on the harbor in CopenhagenTHE OLD OPERAHOUSE OFF PALACE SQUARE IN COPENHAGEN.

ALAS, POOR YORICK

Stanley has died
and Andy
and Jeannine
and I am alive past my seventy-second birthday
and what it means...
what it means, what it means, what it means
is that I’m supposed to make sense of it
because it’s part of the package
it’s in the picture
it’s the way it’s s’posed to be
for all of us
Death with a capital D
happens
sooner or later and
it’s not a dirty trick


what’s a dirty trick
is a little boy or girl killed
or maybe even worse
maimed way beyond the comfort zone
in war or
just plain meanness or
care less or not at all ness
but my friend Andy and
my friend Stanley and
my friend Jeanine
and Yorick
did what all of us knew all along
we must one day do
in good time
with God’s blessing.