Seventy-Five: Questions and Answers

 [I wrote this poem to mark my 75th birthday a couple of days ago. If you prefer, here is a link to a video of me reading it: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zxk8cfmeyhh6oehky9kl8/20250531_220555000_iOS.MOV?rlkey=ffbj59vwahqro27akepito3n9&dl=0] 

 

1  Memento Mori [Often translated as: "Remember you must die"]

 

I’ve already written so much about my life

And my manner of  dealing with my eventual death --

Ignore? Delay? Bargain? Face?  --

That as this milestone approached I thought

I’d nothing more to say… Wrong!

Death is eternal. It’s always with us.

 

Looking back, I see I’ve pulled a Jedi mind trick

On myself:

I’ve imagined my death, to get me to live:

To do good, to make a better world.

To touch and be touched by the lives of others,

To leave a legacy of inspiration and connection.

 

I’ve defined myself by this contest with death,

Racing through life to accomplish enough:

As if by running fast enough

I could outrun my end,

Make an end run,

Like going to warp-speed in Star Trek.

 

As if by being good enough:

Faithful, sinless, self-sacrificing,

I could out-saint my ceasing.

 

As if by believing hard enough:

in something else -- eternal life?,

God?, the Eschaton? Some Grand Simulation

Of all of us? – I could out-believe

My inevitable end.

 

But all of this now seems silly,

Vanity, and chasing after wind: 

As if the point was to make

An impressive performance,

To convince me and you.

 

 

2  Vita plena ["Full Life"]

 

Now, as I reach three-quarters of a century

I find this life-long strategy has broken down:

Oddly, I no longer feel so afraid

Of my own and others’ deaths.

This puzzles me:

Where has my lifetime of anxiety gone?

 

Am I now finally inured to my fear of death?

Have I rubbed it down to numbness,

Even worn it out? Has my fear of nothingness

Finally come to nothing? 

Am I even the same person that I was

When I first began my career of fear?

 

Perhaps it’s all that I’ve accomplished

In my own, one life: Articles, books,

Scouting the frontiers of psychotherapy research

The science-y fiction of imagining a new

Kind of therapy, new ways of helping,

Or better: old ways made new, returning

To the lasting ways of seeing, doing,

And being with each other.

 

Or perhaps it’s family: The amazing family

From which I’ve sprung; strong, stubborn,

Visionary, inspiring both me and others

To see farther, to craft better.

Treasuring my siblings, each exemplary

In their own way. Together, we’ve seen

Our parents through their dying, filling

These shared memories with meaning.

 

And the amazing family Diane and I

Have grown up with:

We growing ourselves as parents,

As our two sons grew themselves to adults,

And our grandchildren now grow themselves

Into young adults.

 

Truly it has been a life full of incident,

As if to say:

I wasn’t just sitting around, you know!

Maybe the specifics of what happened are not

As important now as they once seemed:

Who did what to whom, and why?

But I do know that it’s been a life full,

Rich and intense, like a fine glass

Of petite sirah wine.

 

 

 

3  Quid Nunc? ["What now?"]

 

All this now leaves me with more questions:

How will I keep myself motivated to work

So hard, if the stakes are not life or death?

 

As two new-old friends we saw yesterday

Asked us: What is next for you?

What is important for you now?

 

I think what they meant was:

How will you use your remaining time

Between now and your death?

And are those projects that have occupied you for so long:

The psychotherapy and research writing,

The organizational work

(Let Emotion-Focused Therapy thrive!),

The training and supervision, and yes, even

The bits of therapeutic work.  Do you

Really want to continue doing these things

Indefinitely, until you fall over?

 

I wasn’t happy with my answer then,

Nor am I satisfied now: A book project?

To develop my poetry? Science fiction?

Spending more time with our grandkids.

Protesting against autocracy.

All worthy goals but maybe not the point.

 

I told them: This is the very question

I’m struggling with in this poem:

I’m working on it!

And then our time ran out.

 

What I do know is that these are important questions,

Questions worth asking, even if good enough

Answers have not yet arrived, or possible.

 

So I sat and savored this conversation, rich

And intense, like a glass of petite sirah,

And the inkling of some answers came into focus:

 

 

4  Responsio ["Answer"]

 

If I’m honest, I’m sure what’s

Taken the sting from death is this:

A deep sense that we’re all connected,

Each to each, more deeply than we can ever say.

You live in me, and I live in you:

Past, present, future,

Quantumly entangled.

 

Difference, privilege, marginality, imposing

Our will on unwilling others:  All of these

Are vanity, and chasing after wind.

 

Instead, it’s kindness I seek.

The true JEDI mind trick

Is justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.

To look for greater connection to each other,

to make our shared joy more,

And the pain we cause less?

 

This is worth living for,

Even after three quarters of a century.

 

                

-Robert Elliott; Lodi, California; 31 May 2025 

 

 

Fifty Years: An Anniversary Poem

 Entry for 19 August 2023:

(Diane & Robert fiftieth wedding anniversary, with notes for our grandkids)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A Story of Us and How We Got Together

 

You

Me:

50 years

Watergate to Ukraine

Green youth to gray age

 

You

Me:

Grand Forks

Palo Alto

 

Both born in the very midst of a turbulent century

In the shadow of two great and horrid wars

Grandchildren of the Great Depression.

 

First-born to bright, educated, caring

But quite young parents

Themselves youngest, or almost youngest, children,

Dads still studying, arcane lore.

Moms doing odd bits of work and raising us

Your mom as short as my mom was tall

All of us learning as we went.

 

You

Me:

Pleasanton

Lodi

 

Raised in small, flat California towns

In the process of becoming suburbs

In the buttoned-down 1950’s.

 

Children of privilege

That we did not even recognize at the time:

WEIRD WASPs.

(Note: By WASPs we don’t mean the stinging insects

but White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant;

and WEIRD stands for Western, Educated,

Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.)

 

You

Me:

Santa Cruz

Los Angeles

 

Wearing the privilege of oldest children,

Used to responsibility for others

But ambivalent about our power,

Proud but burdened.

 

Glad to escape to university

As soon as we could

We happily exchanged

The small uptight inland places

For a counter-cultural beach town

That we were almost too square for.

 

Looking back, it’s striking

We could have shared so much:

But it’s no surprise we immediately

During orientation week

Recognized each other as fellow refugees.

 

And then remained friends for years

As we grew, experimented,

had other crushes and connections,

Began to learn who we were,

And eventually, in a time of transition,

found our way back to each other.

 

And thence to the big city and marriage

Full of the usual sorts of contradictions

Shy extraverts

Traditionally heterosexual

But androgenous, tolerant and curious

Sheltered from major loss and trauma

But acquainted with sorrow and failure.

 

Optimistic pessimists (or is it the other way round?)

Blending acceptance and pickiness,

Stubbornness and flexibility.

We like a good laugh but do not suffer fools gladly;

We do not insist on our way

But do not like at all to be pushed around.

 

We did not imagine that our shared background

And rampant contradictions would turn out to be

Just what we needed for a fifty-year journey together.

2. Fifty Years Passes

 Like the time-lapse photos

our granddaughter Mizuki took

Of her flight here from Seattle,

Or a magical version

of our living room gliding love seat

which our grandson Yuki immediately takes to

Rocking it vigorously as he tries

to reach the land of his imagination,

We now play back the past fifty years

Since our wedding:

They flash by in our minds,

Rocking us repeatedly back

To places and people

Both remembered and (until now) forgotten.

 

Days, years; beginnings, endings;

A rhythm of repetition

And each moment unique:

Toledo, Sheffield,

Toledo, Leuven,

Toledo, Toronto,

Toledo, Melbourne,

Toledo, (sons to Cleveland),

Glasgow.

Pleasanton.

 

Over these many years,

The elder generations pass:

The last remaining grandparents, then parents,

Aunts, uncles, teachers,

Friends timely and untimely lost,

Until we are the elders,

And our passing, still unknown

Is nevertheless not that far away.

 

In the meantime, we’ve been looking

Through old photos of us

Excavating the layers of the years:

We wonder at our younger selves,

When was this?

Who were those people?

Were they really us?

 

Yet we know the answer:

Yes, they are all still in there

Mizuki’s time lapse

Of flickering faces and places

This crowd of us

Wildly varying hairstyles

Strange, but not strangers to us,

In all these different places

Exotic and mundane

With all these different people

Who we have loved

And who have loved us.

            *          *          *

Yuki’s commandeered our rocking sofa;

It’s now a time machine

Swinging us creakily through the years.

“Don’t swing too hard!”

We tell him repeatedly

For we fear It will break us

And our old-but-young-at-hearts hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 (Link to Mizuki's airplane timelapse movie)

 

3. The Secret of a Long Marriage

 

It appears that being married for 50 years or more

Is unusual enough these days

That people want to know what our secret is.

 

The fact is, we don’t know

And fear to look too closely

As if that might jinx the whole thing

Like the poor centipede trying to figure

How it walks and falling

Into a ditch instead.

 

Nevertheless, friends have pressed us

With questions and pet theories:

One said the secret was “Inertia”;

Another, “Failure of Imagination.”

To these I’m inclined to add

“Insecure Attachment” and “Stubbornness”.

 

But I think all of these miss the point:

We know that close relationships

Are inherently unstable

And difficult to maintain.

 

Stability is either an illusion,

A skewed family system (psychobabble

for one person having too much power),

Or the result of hard work.

 

As in the universe itself

Entropy is the law.

 

We learned this in the tenth year of our marriage

When I had survived my tenure vote

(Following years of severe workaholism),

When our first child was two

(Sorry, kids and grandkids,

But having kids

Is a huge stressor for couples),

Only to face the abyss between us.

 

A year of couples therapy helped us through this

And from that experience

We took two essential things:

One: A microwave oven, which lasted 34 years

(we gave up on it, before it gave up on us);

Two: Not taking ourselves too seriously,

Which is timeless.

 

The fact is, we are both very aware of the other’s

annoying habits, limitations and emotional allergies,

Which we constantly try to correct

Even though we know perfectly well

that this is impossible

And would make the other

A perfect person,

who we wouldn’t even recognize

… And might even feel inferior to.

 

And we know all too well

that even though other people

Might see us as caring,

thoughtful, good-hearted and so on,

We can each at times

“In our present imperfection”

act like jerks toward the other,

Especially when stressed, ill or emotionally injured.

 

And so from time to time

One or the other of us

Realizes that there’s a problem:

Something’s gotten out of balance between us,

One of us has begun to disengage.

 

This means:

There is an unattended-to injury

That must be addressed,

Painful truths spoken,

New understandings to surprise us,

New accommodations to be forged.

 

The result:

We muddle through,

For better or for worse

Helped by friends and family

Deeply grateful for the time we’ve had together,

Knowing it to be completely mundane

And at the same time completely amazing,

Treasuring the times we’ve had with each other

And the times that remain to us

Knowing that it’s all temporary

And therefore infinitely precious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Coda

 

(Note: A Coda is a part

Near the end of something

Where you review

The main points of the whole thing,

so you can finish.)

 

We are two people with many similarities,

And just as many inner contradictions

As most people.

 

We found each other when we were still pretty young,

Thought it would cool to get married,

Then found out how hard it is

To make a life together.

 

If we wanted to stay together

(Which we did),

We had to figure out

How to make our little family

Work over a long time.

 

But we didn’t do this on our own,

Because we had a lot of support

From the people who loved and surrounded us

And who we loved and still love.

 

Eventually, we reached a point where

There is more happiness than pain,

And many shared moments

Of joy and connection,

Built on all

we’ve been given by life.

 

And we know that these moments,

Won by hard work and stubbornness,

These moments will always be

And will always have been.

 

For this we thank you,

Our family, our friends, our community.

 

                                    -Robert Elliott, 18/19 August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Drawing by Mizuki Elliott, (c) 2023) 

 

 (Link to 50-year slideshow of Diane & Robert, created by Brendan Elliott)

 

(Link to Robert reading this poem) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science My Mom Taught Me

Entry for 14 May 2023 

Note: For Mother’s Day this year, I thought it would be appropriate for me to bring back the poem I wrote for my mom for her 75th birthday nearly 20 years ago, April 7 2004. (At that time, she exclaimed, delightedly, “I get a poem… and I don’t even have to be dead!”) Although she passed on eleven years ago, in 2012, and I’ve written plenty of other pieces for/about her in the meantime, this one I think best captures what she has – and continues – to mean to me. 

Further note: I’ve been going through old files lately, and last night I found the “Robert Jr” folder my mom kept about me, full of old poems and letters, along with a few photos. Amongst all this stuff about me, on small pieces of paper, I found a series of hand-written, undated affirmations that she wrote about/to/for me at one time or another. In them she wrote that she loved me, and God loved me, and that I was going to be all right and would do good things in my life. I never saw these handwritten pieces, did not even know they existed until now. Small prayers, tucked into this folder and perhaps forgotten, but still: messages, angels, blessings down the years. 

 

1. Science as Love and Relationship

 

A good place to start is that ancient photograph,

Recently rediscovered, from 1950:

 

There the two of you are, the same age

As the youngest of my grad students. 

Both of you are tall, almost toothpick thin.

He is looking at the camera, tight jeans and shirt,

Like a rebel with cause to smile.

 

But you are looking down, through large glasses,

Your face framed by billowing hair,

With toothy grin, and your arms

Awkwardly but carefully wrapped round

A very small bundle.

 

The two of you look like nothing

So much as a couple of computer nerds

From half a century in the future.

Code geeks, rolling out your first promising program,

Ready for beta-testing.

 

But the code is genetic,

The language is life,

And the program is … me.

 

2. True Science is Risky

 

Although I learned magic from my dad,

It now seems clear to me that it was you

From whom I first learned science,

To which I have now devoted so much of my life.

 

But yours was never the normal, safe kind,

Digging away at the coal face

In the mines of knowledge,

Like Disney’s happy dwarves.

 

No, not that kind, but instead

The one that goes off to Far Tortuga,

Toward distant Galapagos unknown,

In search of the evolution of the human soul.

 

For you, big ideas have never been too big:

The nature of reality; the journey of the soul;

Jung’s famous paper on flying saucers;

The archetype of the Mandala: As without, so within.

 

Instead of Aristotle … Plato’s forms;

Instead of Archimedes … Pythagorus’s numbers;

Instead of Moses’ law … the Kabbalah’s secrets;

Instead of chemistry …alchemy’s transformations.

 

Oh, you did chemistry, too, at least early on:

You would disappear for hours,

Into your laboratory at the back of the house,

Full of strange smells and odd bits:

 

Broken glass, mosaic pieces,

Rolls of wallpaper, bolts of cloth,

Cans of precursors and catalysts,

When plastics was new technology.

 

And you would emerge from your lair,

To confront your family with some new concoction,

Sometimes lovely, or quirky, or primitive;

At times, a disaster, but always something new.

 

No, for you, science has always been risky:

Working at the edge, making something new,

You have become an expert in the peril of experiment,

And I have followed you, where I could.

 

 

3. Science as Inspiration and Passion

 

Your mother (my grandmother) taught me many things:

How to travel and how to be in a new place;

The importance of hard work and getting up early;

The ninety-nine percent of sweat that makes up genius.

 

But you taught me a far more valuable lesson:

The one percent of inspiration that redeems all the rest,

The moment of epiphany, the pattern opening,

The intensity of the new connection breaking through,

 

The science of cutting to the center of the world,

Of seeing what others don’t choose to see,

Of waking to awareness when others sleep,

And the flow of following the spirit far into the night.

 

When I see these things in myself, I recognize you.

The passion of discovery is too powerful to resist,

Even if we wanted to; the daemon must be honored;

It is ours, and we must let it speak through us or die.

 

 

4. Science as Always Starting Anew

 

I find it odd that I describe my dad in a series of narratives,

But you as a set of ideas, a paradigm, a model.

There is, however, one story that is always you,

The story in which you are always re-inventing yourself:

 

Child of the Depression with a single mom;

Big city girl; prep school party-er;

Young, anxious mother and seamstress;

Small town society woman in a flat land.

 

But your life makes a strange turn: You take up philosophy;

You quit smoking just because you feel like it;

You return to religion and start teaching Sunday school;

You become a small business owner and a writer.

 

Years pass: You’re CEO of a large and raucous family,

With the habit of taking in strays (both human and animal);

And you’ve gradually evolved into a spiritual leader

Of a small but loyal group of friends.

 

Then, your life turns again:  Warned in a vision

Of the impending end of civilization, you become

A gentle survivalist and take your family

Into the mountains, like Noah waiting for her flood

 

You seal several tons of wheat into cans,

Which are still there after twenty-five years.

Well, we can’t get everything right, but now you live

In a beautiful little valley: Murray Creek.

 

Now you are matriarch to three generations and 60 acres.

A combination of Ariadne, Daedalus and Theseus,

You become a labyrinth designer and unwinder

Of ritual journey spaces of stones, words and image.

 

Reading widely and deeply, you map the interweaving

Stories of your own and humanity’s spiritual development,

Join a religious order, become a spritual director,

And finally, start a Crone Circle of wise women.

 

Curiously, all these things somehow fit together:

Clearly, you’ve never stopped starting over;

For you, science is leaving behind what no longer works,

A selfsame process of adding on, differentiating, elaborating,

 

Just as you are always the same person,

The passionate, intellectual adventurer, the one

Who keeps transforming herself, like an endless succession

Of butterflies, emerging one from the other.

 

 

On Nonbinariness: A Talk Given at Westhope Presbyterian Church, Saratoga, California

1. Introduction

 

Marjorie Pearson asked me if I’d be willing to talk here today. I’ve had lots of interesting discussions with Marjorie over the years, and really appreciate how open she has been to my issues about my gender identity.

 

She was interested in why I recently decided to add “they/them” as my preferred pronoun; before this I didn’t specify a pronoun at all.

 

My “coming out” has so far consisted of adding this information about my pronoun preferences to my email signatures on my personal and work email accounts, and to my Zoom label.

 

I’ve never really talked about my gender identity publicly before, and hardly ever privately.

 

2. Gender and Spirituality

 

Where to start?

I can remember being uncomfortable with male gender roles when I was a kid.

For a long time I was afraid to grow up, because I feared I would become a callous, hard man.  Over the years, my experiences of deeply understanding my many female clients only confirmed my fears, and as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man.

 

In fact, the most important spiritual figures in my life were women: my mother, my grandmother, my childhood mentor Margaret.

 

I experienced my father as generally a kind, wise person who was not forceful, avoided conflict and was a bit distant.  Also, his wisdom was more worldly.  Although his insights were valuable and interesting, they didn’t strike me as spiritual or particularly inspiring.  In the end, for me he was more of a fellow traveller on the same or a similar road.

 

On the other hand, it was my mother, grandmother and my friend Margaret who were strong, inspiring, powerful.  I do have to say that in the case of my mother and grandmother they were also rather controlling. 

 

However, these three people deeply inspired me to do more and to be more; I went to church with all of them; they provided a strong moral compass for me; and they helped me get closer to God.

 

This was important, because from a pretty young age, I had real trouble getting my head around male images of God.  For me, God has always been female.  Nevertheless, to try to find a less extreme position, my compromise has been to adopt a gender-balanced trinity: Jesus/son = male; Holy Spirit = female & Father replaced by a gender neutral Parent.

 

In church, I’ve always been more comfortable when there was a female priest (I’m pretty much a life-long Episcopalian), although gay men will do if needed (and have done for most of the past 25 years).

 

3. Growing up Female-Identified

 

From a young age, I was pretty much always more interested in girls and women than boys and men. 

 

I can remember imagining having long hair.  In the 1950’s and early 1960’s it was always cut short, as was the custom for boys then, but I don’t think I was ever really comfortable with that.  Then around 1970 I started growing it out into a gender neutral Afro.  When that stopped working for me around 2000, I started growing what hair I had left out into a pony tail; at that point, my dad was doing the same thing with his hair, as were my two sons.  It felt good to finally be able to do that.

 

So I guess you could say that I’m “female identified”: Certainly, my main role model has been my grandmother, who was public figure (radio and TV personality) in Chicago, then retired to become a professional writer. From a young age I aspired to be like her. Also, as I was the oldest of her grandchildren, she encouraged me.

 

It’s hard to know, but I think I might have preferred to have been born as a female.  In addition to having long hair, I think I would have liked to have been able to have children, scary and difficult as that can be.  I feel somehow incomplete as a human being for not having had that experience, and even guilty for having evaded the process.  Although I love my two boys and do not for a second regret who they are, I certainly would have been happy for us to have had girls, and to have helped to raise them as strong women. 

 

4. Finding a Balance Professionally & Personally

 

I have certainly found it fulfilling to have been a therapist for many women, who have certainly given me plenty of vicarious experiences of what complete jerks men can be.  As I noted earlier, as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man, even as I worked to support my female clients in developing their own sense of personal power, helping them maintain a balance between their need to be themselves and their need for connection with the important people in their lives.  In recent years, as I’ve come to work with more people from East Asian, I have come to pride myself in being a kind of wise “auntie” to many of them, occupying the role that might have been provided by an experienced older female figure in many traditional cultures.

 

But of course I live in the body of a man. I don’t necessarily reject that, but as I’ve been saying I identify more with women and strongly value the more traditionally “feminine” parts of me: empathy, emotionality, sensitivity, poetry, and an interest in the arts and music, as well as literature. I’m not interested in dominating or “winning”. So in general I tend to feel like I have more in common with women than men, and would rather hang out with them.  I’ve always tended to have more female than male friends, and have in my career really benefitted from a succession of female mentors and therapists. 

 

5. Psychological Androgyny and the “They/them/their”

 

In the 1980’s, psychological androgyny was a big thing in academic psychology, and that always made a lot of sense to me.  Psychological androgyny is the idea that we are all mixtures of traditionally male and female characteristics, and that maybe the ideal might be a flexible balance of characteristics traditionally associated with men and women.  Thus, for me personally, the pronouns “she/her/hers” and “he/him/his” can seem too limiting; for this reason, “they/them/their” are my current preferred pronouns.

 

Nowadays, of course, I think a lot of people feel like psychological androgyny is too limiting:  Why should certain characteristics be associated with women and others with men?  Why can’t women (and men) have whatever characteristics are true and work for them? That makes sense to me, but perhaps because I was brought up with traditional gender role stereotypes, I still like the idea of psychological androgyny, even with its somewhat outdated dialectic of traditional gender roles. But here I am.

 

Lastly, like my grandmother, I have ended up a writer, although not of novels like her but of professional and scientific books and articles about psychotherapy and psychotherapy research.  And that is where I discovered the appeal of “they/them/their” to refer to generic people whose gender wasn’t known, or whose gender wasn’t relevant.  This is actually an old usage in English, going back centuries, so in spite of what most of us were taught in school, I happily abandoned the use of generic masculine pronouns and now find myself preferring gender neutral pronouns.  Long live “they/them/their”!  I’ll take them, and happily embrace myself as a slightly queer, nonbinary person.

 

After all the times we’ve said goodbye (Haiku sequence)

 

            1

 

Three weeks: we haven’t

Seen so much of you for years

But now it must end.

 

Last morning: dropping

you off at the train station:

we hope you don’t break!

 

Little suitcase rattling

Behind, you roll away on

the balls of your feet.

 

From the car we watch

between gray cement columns

as you disappear.

 

Driving away, I’m

almost blinded by tears I

cannot drive away.

 

 

            2

 

So many goodbyes,

more than thirty years; why does

this one hurt so much?

 

Like after two years

when you finally made it

to kindergarten.

 

You don’t fight, you don’t

protest; you just turn and

walk bravely away.

 

Why does it always

feel like I’m the one leaving,

and not you somehow?

 

            3

 

There’s melodrama

to this leaving, feeling I

may not see you again.

 

A part of me won’t

let go of you, so I can

hold on to myself.

 

Like saying goodbye

to you is hard because it’s

goodbye to me too.

 

 

            4

 

But more than that I

want to see you free, flying

out across the sky.

 

I imagine your

migration, the worlds you find

beyond my end.

 

To end, a blessing:

do good, take our love with you,

enjoy the journey.

 

                                                -Love, Dad, 10-17 Jan 2022, Pleasanton

 

Note: Saying goodbye again to Kenneth this year reminded me of the poem I'd written about a previous goodbye last year, so I'm taking this as an opportunity to belatedly post this piece.

Extended Family

Right now I’m sitting at a table in a restaurant 

on Sentosa Island in Singapore 

Looking out over the tropical treetops

At the incongruous fleets of ships and refinery towers in the distance,

Listening to babies crying in the languid heat of the afternoon

While Christmas songs play in the background.

And right now I’m thinking of Diane just waking up

On a cold frosty morning in Glasgow,

Or maybe dreaming one last dream before she wakes for church.

And I’m also thinking of our son Kenneth not quite as cold,

In the middle of the night, 

Waiting at the Cedar Rapids airport in Iowa in America

to give his roommate a ride home on his return 

From his Thanksgiving trip home.

And right now I extend my mind to our other son Brendan, 

Closest of them all, in Tokyo 

In his study sneaking in some programming on a late Sunday afternoon 

While Mayumi and our granddaughter Mizuki have a girls' shopping afternoon

And Yuki plays a video game.

 

Right now, thinking of you all,

My scattered family, around the world: 

many places, many times, all interconnected.

                                         -1 Dec 2019, Singapore