He ate a piece of watermelon, and sloppily spit out the seeds, everywhichway. Outside the heat was turning the atmosphere into a sauna, suffocating. Inside, the electric fans to give a breeze were circulating the air throughout the first level of the house. How great it felt, now at last, relief.
He grabbed another piece of watermelon. Far away in Prague, President Obama was giving his second speech to the city. Far-off in Indonesia, an earthquake plummeted down upon its inhabitants. Across the world in the United States, Tiger Woods was getting ready for a comeback in a gulf tournament.
There was life.
Young and old students of higher education had discovered the Facebook Forum, he read, and so now it was being used for dating and in some cases, malice and mayhem.
It is a new tool—to connect you with the rest of the world—one and all becoming friends of the global thinking generation. What new stories will come out of this to-morrow, and become award winners.
Most likely the new breed will enjoy these haunting, semi fictional tales, spiced up to create an appetite for more, for the crowded cinemas, and television programming, and all with a healthy cut of sarcastic humor, and with a four-lettered vocabulary.
I’ve watched them, he thought.
He contemplated on his grandchildren. What of them? Which ones of them? They will have to find their own space under the stars; perhaps by rebellion or war—surely not by peaceful measures? That would be something.
Or will we or they all have to move to Mexico?
Our deepest hopes, will science provide them? Thus far our past civilizations have proved otherwise.
And meanwhile, in nearly every state in the United States, sounded the protests of Democrats and Republicans alike, over the bad choices of Congress and the elected president.
Do we want good men, or blind men? Take President Obama. Take F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway. What heroes must our future students aim for, or look at? Take their cases. Three drunks and a president that gets a Ph.D., from a Christian University, not for what he’s learned, but for showing up and giving a speech, who is for abortion; and gets a Nobel Peace Prize, not for what he has done—because he hasn’t done anything up to this point for peace, but for what they expect him to do.
There is Albert Einstein. There is Mario Varga Llosa. We can adjust to these two? One created the Atom Bomb, the other got a Nobel Prize in Literature, that uses ever cuss word known to man in his writings.
And what of our children, who must carry on the torch, make their own marks in the world?
Robert Bly (poet) is obliged to make his own echoes in the crowded valley of life. Bravely and with his last ounce of stamina (as I write this) he faces the problems that come to every aging man of eighty or more.
He wrote many good books.
Are you a man of eighty?
Take the case of Robert Hall, poet and university professor, who lost his wife early on to cancer.
Take the case of Ann Sexton. Take the case of Truman Capote, or Sylvia Plath.
Think of these writers from the 1950s, and onward, they nearly broke the delicate atmosphere of the times. Were there two sides to Elvis Presley? Does he now have a forth dimension among the living?
Has modern music become the youth’s poetry?
Perhaps and perhaps not: take Guns and Roses.
Do Folks on welfare have codes of conduct? It all sends your mind sailing.
There is adventure and Romance everywhere. Everyone nowadays thinks s/he’s a scholar, and therefore, practices their wit and wisdom. And even though not very smart become long-winded.
The old man, still half full of life sat back in his easy chair, exhausted, thinking of the new wave of thinking coming to pass—intoxicated by the gift of life.
Thereafter, he laid down on his wide and long bed, a siesta, darkened the room, listened to some Nat King Cole music, remembering when he was near dead a while back, his lungs nearly filled to the rim with water, drowning in his own body. All his family and friends devoted a moment out of their lives to his near death experience, which death had been expected for days. People brought flowers and cards as if he could see or read them—nearly in a coma status. Perhaps his children became more reassured the closer he came to death. So it appeared.
They all waited in the cool corridor of the hospital. Then the children up and left, the moment they found out they’re be no funeral this week. And his mother and brother put away their prayers in their pockets, and wiped their eyes dry.
Story No: 614/4-9-2010
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