Happy memories of his hard-thinking, lightness of wit, and sometimes pressing questions (such as "Why are you taking a writing workshop or reading a book about writing if you aren't going to write?"), insights and classic intellectual banter like our own mini-college course think tank around the big marble counter/stage of that five-star kitchen that guests always exclaimed "you could eat off this floor!" about. always. because you could probably. especially after Sierra mopped it. She was in the Navy for awhile...
Anyways, these flood my mind.
Bill gave me two other gifts, actually both poems. And I'm putting here, to redeem my poetic efforts (in my defense birthed in the barren throat of western Texas, a hairball or tumbleweed of an attempt. I'll work on it.).
The first: ole' "Bobby" Burns To a Mouse, but this was indirect; Bill would just quote one stanza while putting up dishes and smiling while telling me about boyhood days in English class at boarding school.
"The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain,
For promis'd joy."
He thought of it often because it has my name in it.
The second poem was more forward, even critical, a challenge to The Nexts of my ever-changing life. It took me a bit to get the meaning, and if there was question in my mind, he cleared it up the last time we talked; he wanted to make sure I knew that I should be not what the poem describes. This one also by a Robert. Robert W. Service taken from Best Tales of the Yukon.
The Men That Don't Fit In
There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest.
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
If they just went straight, they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of teh things that are,
And they want the strange and new!
They say, "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.
And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who wine in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.
He has failed, he has failed;
he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win.
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.
i like the last one. reminds me of "he was a rock they broke themselves against" from legends of the fall.
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