A quiet day and an amazing essay
Before I started the new business, I would putter around the house on a minimal but constant basis. Now it is condensed into Saturday and Sunday.
Getting a lot done though -- too rainy to work on the tree but there are a lot of indoor projects that need my attention.
Dinner and then surfing...
Regulars will know that I visit Anthony Watt's site:
Watts Up With That on a regular basis.
Some of his co-authors are incredible writers and one of my favorites is
Willis Eschenbach. He is a detailed observer of climate, science and life and every so often, he posts an essay on life. These are worth reading as he is an excellent writer --
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here -- you get the picture.
Yesterday, Willis
posted this:
My Friend Billy
I�ve been thinking a lot about death lately. The gorgeous ex-fiancee is a Family Nurse Practitioner, and she and I have been taking care of her 86-year-old father in his final illness. �Billy�, that�s what the rest of the guys in the band always called him, so that�s what I called him when I came to be friends and play music with him over the past four years. He was a jazz drummer his whole life, and a very good one. Having had the honor of playing music with him myself, I can testify that he was a very skillful, fun, and inventive percussionist. But when he came out of the hospital back in February, he hung up his sticks and said that was it. His time with music was over. I knew then that his days were short. So we�ve been giving him all the love and support possible in the face of his approaching death.
Here in the developed world, we tend to distance ourselves from death. But in the third world, it is ever-present. The first dead man I ever saw who wasn�t rouged, perfumed, and embalmed was on a side street in Trench Town, a dirt-poor, less than fragrant, and more than turbulent suburb of Kingston, Jamaica. It was a strange scene.
Trench Town is not a good place to be at night. Even in the middle of a hot afternoon, it�s a place where you feel a need to take an occasional look over your shoulder. I was walking down the street, the only melanin-deficient guy in sight. (I hear that the new PC term is �melanin-challenged�, by the way, to avoid hurting people�s feelings by making them feel deficient � but then I�ve never been politically correct.)
In any case, halfway down the block, a man was lying in the gutter. At first I thought he was just drunk and sleeping it off, until I got nearer, and I saw he was lying in the proverbial pool of blood. I remember particularly the sound of the flies. I was reminded of when I used to kill and butcher cows and sheep and other animals out in the farmers� fields for a living, and how fast the flies would appear. Seeing that man lying dead in a cloud of flies, in the middle of just another average city afternoon, was a shock to me. The cities I was accustomed to back then didn�t feature much in the way of dead bodies in the gutter. I was beyond surprise.
But the bigger shock was the reaction of the people in the street. By and large it was ho, hum, another day in the life, step over his corpse and keep going, Many people looked once and didn�t give him a second glance. The public level of concern seemed to be on the order of �It�s the tropics, mon, cover him up �fore he stinks�.
I realized then that in such places down at the bottom of the economic ladder, the death of a stranger is no big deal. Oh, I don�t mean that people don�t mourn or grieve their loved ones the way it happens in the industrialized countries. That�s the same everywhere. But in countries where death is more common, countries where most families have lost a child, countries where malaria or some other tropical fever takes away the young and otherwise healthy, everyone lives in much closer proximity and familiarity with death and the dead.
The essay is about death and the recent death of his Father-in-Law and so is not for everyone but this is some powerful and wonderful writing. Willis is at the top of his form.
Posted by DaveH at April 20, 2014 5:10 PM