A religious education

Religion was not an issue in my family; indeed, it was never discussed.
My only religious training came because the Minta required
that all students take classes in their respective religions.
My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted.
Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays.
The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed:
We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years.

         Edward Teller, Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: "I Love You"

Early on, I noticed that you always say it
to each of your children
as you are getting off the phone with them
just as you never fail to say it
to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.

It’s all new to this only child
I never heard my parents say it,
at least not on such a regular basis,
nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.
To say I love you pretty much every day

would have seemed strangely obvious,
like saying I’m looking at you
when you are standing there looking at someone.
If my parents had started saying it
a lot, I would have started to worry about them.

O course, I always like hearing it from you.
That is never a cause for concern,
The problem is I now find myself saying it back
if only because just saying good-bye
then hanging up would make me seem discourteous.

But like Bartleby, I would prefer not to
say it so often, would prefer instead to save it
for special occasions, like shouting it out as I leaped
into the red mouth of the volcano
with you standing helplessly on the smoking rim,

or while we are desperately clasping hands
before our plane plunges in the Gulf of Mexico,
which are only two of the examples I had in mind,
But enough, as it turns out, to make me
want to say it to you right now.

and what better place than in the final couplet
of a poem where, as every student know, it really counts.

                                        Billy Collins

Good advice

Do not tell people how to live their lives.
        Just tell them stories.
                And they will figure out how those stories apply to them.

                                    Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Such accidents

We are all such accidents.
We do not make up history and culture.
We simply appear, not by our own choice.
We make what we can of our condition with the means available.
We must accept the mixture as we find it —
the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

                        Saul Bellow, Great Jewish Short Stories

 

 

 

 

 

We are stardust

The matter we’re made out of was cooked in the center of stars.
We’re made of star-stuff –
    the calcium in our teeth,
        the carbon in our genes,
            the nitrogen in our hair,
                the silicon in our eyeglasses.
Those atoms were all made from simpler atoms in stars
        hundreds of light=years away and billion of years ago.

                                    Carl Sagan, Rolling Stone interview, 1980

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basketball season begins

You've got to remember now,
    this is not rocket science.
        This is a game kids play.

            Bill Russell (1934-2022), Fresh Air interview

 

 

 

 

 

 

Change

Progress is impossible without change;
        and those who cannot change their minds
                cannot change anything.

                            George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What?