Daily Archives: October 22, 2012

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

They Can’t Afford the Dues

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Fall                                                             Fallowturn Moon

Woollies at Stefan’s tonight.  This was our first regular meeting since Regina’s death so our conversation focused on Bill while Bill, St. William as Tom called him, kept turning the focus to Regina or to us.

Bill places his hand over his chest and says he prefers to live life from there, rather than here, and he taps his head.  He says we can all live from the place of love.  “All men could have this in their lives.” He spread his arms to include those of us in the room.

“Yes,” Tom said, “but they can’t afford the dues.”  We have a running joke about our dues-zero.

Bill said, “Exactly.  They feel like they can’t afford the dues.  And they’re high.”  We meet at least twice a month and have an annual retreat for four days.  We work at maintaining our relationships.

Those dues pay off in nights like this.  We can gather in a living room with our hearts open to a friend and he knows he can count on us.  And he can.

Family, Myth and Story, Politics
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Fall                                                                         Fallowturn Moon

Talked with the grandkids last night, their parents, too, all frozen on the screen after their computer went black.  We had a long distance phone call over the internet, though, of course, it was a phone call in the same sense that a refrigerator is an icebox.

Finished my 4th quiz for the mythology class, the end of the Odyssey material, now we move on to Hesiod and his Theogony.  Also turned in my first essay exam in over two decades.  A blast from the past.

[Hesiod and the Muse, by Gustave Moreau. Here he is presented with a lyre, which contradicts the account given by Hesiod himself, in which the gift was a laurel staff.]

The last presidential debate is tonight and I say it can’t come soon enough.  This campaign began just as the last one ended, it seems, dragging on and on, making our political process captive to so many extraneous influences.  The British system, I think, allows for more focus on policy differences, less on personalities, gaffes, external events like the Libyan embassy security.

We have our system, not theirs, so we can only wait through the last fattening of the television companies, then head into the ballot box and hope that, despite the hanging chads with which many of us baby boomers will enter the polling place, our votes will be counted.