The perspective and relativity of age
While
viewing the feature about Stalin’s summer house, one of the interviewed Russians was a woman
who might have been forty. She was a bit partial to Stalin. “He wasn’t so bad,” I believe she said. “He
did some good things for our country.”
Welllllll…. It occurred to me
that her education was flawed, to say the least. It also occurred to me that the fall of the
Soviet Union happened a little more than twenty years ago. There’s a generation of young adults now who
either don’t remember it, or weren’t born yet.
When
I taught Mod Civ in 2010, very few students knew about the opening of East
Berlin and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Most of them were BORN
in 1989 or 1990!
That
reality goes for many things in our world.
In my world. At age 65, going on
66, I am realizing that my time of “power and influence” is over. What little power and influence I had,
anyway. But even in the poetry world…
the odds of my ever moving on to a larger stage than the one I am on are slim to none. Then I also curse myself for my temptation to
hanker after fame. Saint Emily
Dickinson, help me!
2 comments:
Sister,
I only recently discovered your poetry; cannot recall where. But 66 is still relatively young if you have all your marbles. I had about 100 poems published in good print journals between roughly 1968-1972. Stopped writing as obligations increased and resumed after retirement in 2008. I'm doing well, perhaps because I have no other obligations now other than writing. I average 6 hours a day, two shifts of three hours each. I hope for you too "the best is yet to come." A computer sure beats a Remington portable, carbon paper and Eaton's Corrasable (sp?) typing paper. You and Liz Dolan are two fine writers of a certain age. Keep at it. And good luck.
Donal Mahoney
Thank you for writing here, Donal! I appreciate your own observations as a writer. I will look for Liz Dolan's poetry as well.
Anne
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