Boomers
Some say the millennium generation
have the most individualists
and that we boomers are
nothing but conformists
How wrong, how general
a statement of a generation
which holds old hippies,
politicos, idealists, realists,
back-to-the earthers, and
plain old fashioned grunts.
I see us as the great mixture
of competitive over-achievers
who went to Washington with
high hopes and no money
as well as the ones on motor
bikes who bought cheap shacks
on the Pacific now worth a
couple mill.
No, we were all different, and
happy in our eccentricities, those
of us who sang all the songs in
cars speeding along country
roads as well as the city folks
who we wanted to be but not
really. Boomers can't be
categorized and if you try,
we shall change, just for the
heck of it. We are the generation
of mercurial dreams....
Love in Stages
Under the same sky, along
the same, big river,
From Missouri, from Iowa, up
and down the Mississippi,
my parents have had 64 years
of married love in stages only
I have seen as I am the oldest
and witness to change.
They might not remember
the first years, when I was very
small and yet knew that they
were lovers, special to each
other with nick-names and
moments of passion which created
our big family.
I have an incredible memory
from age one and like any oldest
child, watched and wondered at my
parents as they grew up before my eyes.
The beginnings were romance and roses
love after war, and children, young,
not always understanding each other
and quiet days of worry. But that changed
to the expansiveness of busy times,
children, success, the loss of children,
sadness, and some disagreements which
I as a teen thought appropriate for the age.
Forty was so old, so old, from my young
eyes and forty-five was older, Their love
merged into love of home, children, a silent
change from youth to forbearance and
forgiveness, a necessary practice for two
so different, with varied expectations.
Give and take, dance and bridge,
home and work, moving and staying put
all streaming into one river of acceptance
and changing dreams. Reality made
new partners in life. Commitments
renewed on the twenty-fifth and thirtieth
anniversaries, while children grew and left
and moved away farther into new lives.
A second stage of dancing and accepting
differences of onions, of aspirations, of
dreams and the dying of dreams. This type
of love was new to me, a love without
romance unless worked upon, like a
tapestry with a set pattern but unfinished.
I was not around to watch all the changes
of love, of life, of becoming one and
then two and then one again. I sensed
a change but could not tell where the
hearts lie.
A third stage popped into focus after
years of illness, each taking turns
at wellness and energy and sickness
and health. I saw what I had only imagined
was possible, love without the need
for return, love unrequited, love sacrificed
for the sake of the other-real love, real
Love
unto death. Being in love and just being.
So, one couple can travel this route to
a certain type of freedom, of perfection,
but my path has been strangely fragmented.
My journey was not so neat, but more exotic.
Like a pilgrim with a shell and sack, I
searched
for truth and love and found both in stages.
Three men led me to the same love. The first
all romance and roses, fine wines and
walks at midnight around the campus lake.
The second, the husband and father
a place in which I experienced the death
of expectations and the birth of a different
type of hope. But not to be til death us do
part.
The third, unrequited, pure love, without
any hope, well a little, but full of the
joy of freedom and death to self. A holy
love which gives me a taste of heaven
What my parents did in one life-time,
I have accomplished in three, and yet
all love, all stages are gifts of time,
person, patience and a little
bit of luck. I think and write in
gratitude that love is real in stages.
Like the map of America, like
the Oregon Trail, like my ancestors
footsteps on the wooden stairs in
Iowa, Missouri, California, Oregon.
I trace the movements of love in
places, from Indiana to England
to Malta, and back again, through
the points on the globe to the brighter
points in the sky, those stars which
remained the same in all places,
like love, like guides to my soul.
Now, all three of us are at some
ends of some journeys undefined,
unseen, awaited in a faith we share.
We three cannot discuss such loves,
as we come from generations and nations
which did not do such things. We are
sharing in silence, in private, in the
quiet knowledge that love never ends.
The best things are those we cannot
articulate, but live, and live in stages.
