This morning I made it to Calf Pasture Beach just before the sun came up. But the stage direction couldn’t have been better… just as I got to the end of the pier the sun winked itself awake and inched above the horizon, first the barest of slivers & then a proud orange disc.
The water lay flat… only a few birds to be seen, and even fewer boats making their way into the Sound… and I thought about yesterday’s New York Times Magazine Section. The last Sunday of the year the Issue is given over to recalling the lives of some notables who have died over the past year. The editors call attention to the selection to those who are not featured… Bob Hope not featured; but the woman (I forget her name) who served as the “manager” of the pro-wrestler Randy Savage was featured. Anyway… curious stuff. And I find the writing in the Bios to be uniformly good and enlightening in their approach.
And I wonder what the editors would do with the pastiche presented this morning. A car crashes into a home at 1:00AM in Union, NJ killing 3… the toll of deaths in California mudslide reached 14… and then this: 20,000 people died in the quake that struck in Iran… the latter is “old news” actually, the disaster occurring on Friday — the day after Christmas. There were secondary tremors as well and it seems that the toll will rise further.
20,000 souls. Numbing. Is it easier to deal with the larger loss of life than the smaller and closer loss of life? And yet there are stories for each and every one of those who have lost their life in that earthquake… each had parents, siblings and friends… most were probably poor, and for many, they probably did not even know that they were poor. But their lives were precious.
Too easy to take our lives and those who we love for granted. Too easy to not be thankful for the blessings that we enjoy everyday.
The beautiful sun is shinning over the Sound. What can be so bad?
HAPPY & HEALTHY NEW YEAR
qui fuerunt sed nunc ad astra