June 26, 2018

Greetings from where I got off,

There is a condition most of you are familiar with but probably have ignored, or more likely, forgotten about.  It is best referred to as The Fleeting Thought.

Before we go too deep, I will explain I am not talking about a serious malady such as amnesia or ADD or Alzheimer’s. (Which, by the way, no two people in a row will pronounce the same way, but I digress.) 

Writers in particular are afflicted with this condition.  If anyone made a study (no one has, I checked) to observe the average writer you would find them staring into space for long periods of time.  If asked, (no one has, I checked) the writer would explain he/she is thinking, or more dramatically, ‘creating’.  In truth they are trying to remember what they sat down to write.

This kind of space staring and occasionally the beginning of an interesting sentence is inspired by The Fleeting Thought.  A brilliant idea, sometimes fully formed, with footnotes, appears in the brain, usually unbidden.  The writer, thinking this is inspiration from their muse, quickly writes out the words, just knowing that this will lead to something amazing.  Sadly, no writer can produce the words faster than they can vanish.  Hence the ‘fleet’ in The Fleeting Thought.

Normal people (by which I mean non-writers) are also victims of The Fleeting Thought.  Everyone has started a sentence that led to a derailment they could not quite recover from. 
 Or you had something on the tip of your tongue, felt strongly compelled to share it and couldn’t get past ‘Umm…I ..’

Scientists have studied this phenomenon for decades but virtually all of them lost interest when they couldn’t put their finger on what they came into the laboratory for, and went to work on something else.  A few focused individuals produced studies on The Fleeting Thought and then prescribed a series of electrical shocks interspersed with leeches as a cure.

The Fleeting Thought is less about what we forgot and more about what we are given.  There is something created in your mind and ready to be shared, you know it, you act on it.  And then you lose your train of thought.  You see it flying on the track, steam and steel and locomotion, churning across the dramatic ravine onto the trestle and rushing across the tree lined hill and then it vanishes and you are left with an image of your third grade teacher whose name you can’t remember. 

There are a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon.  Some might include the words ‘synapses’ or ‘prefrontal cortex’ or ‘brain-fart’.  These are merely distractions from what is probably the truth.  Which you will recognize in the next paragraph, assuming I can recall it long enough to share.

When we leave this life and journey into whatever astral plane awaits, we are not finished expressing ourselves.  Most of it consists of the snappy comebacks we wish we would have said when playing dodgeball that one time or when we got teased because we couldn’t back up a trailer.  But there are also beautiful expressions of love and wonderful ideas for breakfast and great rhymes and awesome song lyrics and the perfect sentence to describe grass stains.

And so we spend generations haunting the earth, hovering near those still living and whispering these bits of genius into their subconscious.  But it is not a perfect system, there are wavelength issues still to be worked out.  There is no app for any of this, I checked.

And so occasionally we who are still in this world will be given the words from those in the next and it might seem like enough.  We plunge ahead, determined to inspire or change or amuse, and we almost make it, and then are left with Mrs. Ahearn.  (Who I am pretty sure was my third grade teacher.)

At the point of derailment we have a choice; either admit we have no idea what we were going to say, or fill in with whatever we can patch together in the moment.  Which is what I did this morning.



Hope this finds you plunging ahead,

David

Paths in El Tres

June 18, 2018

Greetings from the confluence,

You crowd into the bus that careens down the road between Arpatado and Turbo.  You may have someone else’s child crawl over your lap or be sitting with your knees between those of a stranger.  The driver is shouting out the door at potential customers as he manages money, barks at passengers, and maniacally weaves in and out of obstacles.  The bus will roar between traffic, lurching to a rolling stop to take on riders or spit them out, with barely a still moment.

If you don’t know where to look for it you will miss the narrow path that leads from the main road.  Once you are on it, pitted, rocky and uneven, you can make your way across other farms, stepping gingerly across the cattle guards.  The path rises up over a few hills and in the heat it may seem further than the mile or so it really is.

Every other place you look is filled with banana trees.  If flew you over the area in a small noisy plane it would be all you could see, from one horizon to the next, banana trees.  It is what this part of Colombia runs on.  But this space, green and lush, is open, with a few trees, some crops that are meant for the people who live here. 

The land falls away from the path, slopes down to a modest house.  It is bright against the green; a blue roof and whitewashed walls.  And you have reached where our paths crossed.

My son makes the introductions in Spanish and then English, and there is the awkward smiles and polite, unsure handshakes.  The teenage children flutter around, curious about us, no doubt instructed to be on their best behavior.

Alberto offers to turn on some fans, he can see his guests are wilted by the heat.  There is no glass in the windows to prevent a breeze, but at that moment the fans are welcome.  Lunch is already prepared, and Irlene sets to serving us.  Rice and fish soup and plantains and yucca and an impressive red tilapia that looks as if it just leapt from the water.  It is all delicious.

Lunch disappears, and we have coffee and offer some gifts from our home to theirs.  We try to express through Carson’s translation, what it means for us to have their family caring for our son for this year.  Somehow in that moment we go from visitors to friends.  Something shifted in the normal tension that exists between strangers, especially from such different paths, and our lives converged as they should.

Alberto shows us each tree he has planted.  Here is corn, here is a yucca plant, here will be a tree that will shade the house someday.  Here is where the boys dug a pond that will have fish.  Here is the well, and up the hill, the holding tank for water.  Those are our chickens, our turkeys, our ducks.  God is good.

The children are throwing a frisbee from among the gifts.  As predicted it lands on the roof of the house.  I am asking Alberto questions and Carson becomes a conduit, connecting my curiosity to Alberto’s stories.  Slowly the struggle for expression fades.  I can feel trust forming, friendship, mostly because we have Carson in common.  In that moment literally, but for the months he has lived in El Tres, we have all slowly become closer.  We have been unaware that would lead to this day where our lives would flow together.

After a while we gather in the low shed behind the house.  It is a primitive structure, dirt floors, patchwork walls, held together with wire and repurposed nails.  The roof is a quilt of corrugated metal.  Chickens have lived there.  So did Carson and his family, for a while, until the new house was finished. 

We sit in plastic lawn chairs and listen to the rain fall on the metal roof, a gentle percussion that forms a relaxing background to the moment.  There is no way to measure time or to feel the presence or the expectation of the next thing.  Irlene sits in a hammock and Alberto unconsciously sways her in a gentle arc.  And we talk.

We talk.  The time slows further.  After a while I forget that Carson is translating.  All of us have relaxed into the exchange, the pattern of Spanish, the moment Carson finds the words, and then English.  And then back.  We share our stories, the first layer of knowing each other. 

In a space of an afternoon we exchanged our lives, enough so that we could see each other, and seasoned with laughter and tears, we made a new life that includes one another. 

Among the host of reasons for Carson to be in Colombia there was the idea of building relationships.  I thought I understood that in the abstract, but it wasn’t until I found out that I was part of the relationships did I realize the impact of the connection. 

This morning as I look out my window at the lush green place that surrounds me, I can feel the presence of our friends in El Tres.  We now share an understanding of each other, those first few tendrils of connection that form a relationship.  I find it encouraging to know it can happen.  It is there for us to create with people we see today, some of whom speak our language and share our culture which should make it easy.  In some ways it can be the most important thing we can do in our day.

Hope this finds you lost in translation,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith

Boston Tableau

June 4, 2018

Greetings from the tableau,

On my table was a cup of coffee, my closed laptop, my hat.  My hands.  It is the only claim I had staked to the real estate, but generally it is a widely accepted social flag that this is my space.

She totally missed that cue.  She sat down and put a huge purse on the table between us.  There were other tables but she sat with me. There was no exchange, nothing to take the awkwardness out of it.  Well, I suppose only one of us felt awkward.

The Starbucks was two blocks from my hotel.  I knew it opened at 5 am and I was there when they unlocked the door.  It is on a side street of Boston’s theater district, at the moment hidden from view by some construction on the building next door.  But I knew where it was.

It was just dark enough on the narrow street that it should have given me pause, but I have a foolish naivete about some circumstances.  As I walked past the shrouded scaffolding, knowing I’d find the coffee shop on the other side, I nearly bumped into three men standing behind it smoking.  All of us were startled.

I sipped my coffee and watched the people walk in.  The door swung again and again the tables along the windows began to fill.  I could see our reflection in the glass, our twin world slowly turning the dark into color. 

It became obvious they came here each morning.  A cluster of women, some carrying purses, or paper shopping bags, tucking them around their legs as they nested among the tables in the corner and along the front of the shop.  They knew each other.  I looked at the over the rim of my cup and tried to imagine what was happening here.

Not office workers getting an early start.  Not waitresses on their way to work.  Not mothers out to get a 5:15 cappuccino at a hard to find coffee shop on a bleak street in Boston.

Sprinkled in with the first customers were the street people who had just been smoking outside and a few other stragglers.  They fumbled with their coins and wadded bills at the counter and sat down with their coffee, stuffing their belongings at their feet.  Some still wore the blankets they slept in.  They were not at Starbucks for the Italian Roast, but because it was open and it was dry.

I watched the group of women, some with coffee, others pawing through their bags, taking out wrapped food, or papers, all of them talking in quiet conversations.  And then I knew what I hadn’t absorbed at first.  The women were all men.

A few more filtered in and joined the group, men in wigs and loose floral dresses.  Heavy makeup.  Some were very adept at the application, others clearly not so.  I could not hear all of what they said, but I could tell they were relating things that had happened during the night.  They passed papers to each other, I could hear them making plans.

The restroom is for customers only.  Once one of them bought coffee and got the code for the door, then they all had the code for the door.

Other customers swept in, ordered, rushed out.  The usual morning rush, people grabbing a fast coffee, people with phones and papers and briefcases and credit cards and fitted suits and a place to go next.  They would not see the others at the tables. 

I thought about this moment and realized how often I have repeated it.  Up early in a strange city, out running, or searching for coffee, and I find myself at home with those who have no home. 

A man in the other corner shouted something, no one looked, not even the baristas behind the counter.  He wore several layers of clothing and a tattered knit hat.  He held his cup of coffee with both hands when he raised it to his mouth, still muttering.  Same guy from Atlanta and Phoenix and Salt Lake and LA and New Orleans; just a different coffee shop, a different wet street that smelled a little bad.  Just a different doorway to sleep in, another steam grate, another shelter that locked the door when it was full.  The newspaper he used for a bed had a different masthead but it was the same newspaper they all sleep with.

The woman was at my table, the purse between us.  It was vinyl, worn at the straps and the edges.  I could tell she was living out of this bag.  I don’t know why but it struck me strange that there was a hand sanitizer clipped to the outside.  I said good morning.  I figured we were going to spend some time together, might as well break the ice.  Except she didn’t know I was there. 

Some of the women had gone outside to smoke.  In a minute a couple of the street people had joined them, cadging a cigarette from them.  It was lighter outside now and I could see them together, laughing, sharing whatever it is they had in common.  It was like a silent movie with no subtitles.  Try to guess what is being said; what the man in the ill-fitting wig and the blue polyester pantsuit was saying to the toothless guy with the sleeping bag draped over his shoulders.

 I don’t know whether they would describe it this way, but I could see this was a treasure for them, to be with other people from the fringe.  Just to be with someone from the tribe who understood without any explanation.

Coffee was $2.14.  It was easy to get another cup and leave it my table when I packed my laptop up and put on my hat to leave.  The woman sitting there didn’t say anything, nor did I expect her to.

I pushed open the door and walked out into the richest nation in the world.

Hope this finds you among your tribe,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith

Road Energy

May 28, 2018

Greetings from the source,

Most people would not feel it.  You have to be close enough to sense it, and understand the relationship so that you would even seek it.

This fourteen mile rectangle has aged.  There are cracks in the blacktop.  When I bend over to stretch, sweat is dripping from the brim of my hat.  I watch the drops, made bright diamonds by the morning sun, chasing each other to the pavement.  Noiseless splash, the tiniest of impact on the bitumen, staining it slightly darker. 

The cracks are crosshatched like the lines in my hands.  The edges of the road are crumbling into pebbles.  A little farther on the pavement will run out and I will be on dirt for a few miles.  It has aged differently there.  I know this road intimately, know this swale tucked in between the field and cemetery.  This road and I have aged together.

Fourteen miles.  If you multiply the number of times my foot has struck the roads, or pushed off to propel me to the next step, there are millions and millions of pounds of energy driven into these roads.  I have been running out here for most of thirty years.  I am not up to doing the math.

Some of the roads have not survived without help.  This morning there is new blacktop, a sexy ribbon of ebony splitting the fields, unblemished yet by yellow lines.  I know that underneath this clean layer there lies the pavement and rock and dirt I have run over.  I can feel it.

I run until the new road gives way to it’s old face, pitted and scarred, creased with the weather and wear of cars and tractors and a man who runs in fourteen mile rectangles. 

It is a warm morning, and my legs are tired.  I coast to a stop next to the cemetery, lean over my knees and feel the heart pounding in my ears.  Feel the sweat coursing over my back, down my legs. Feel the miles, the ache of fatigue, the trembling from the willing but not willing muscles. 

I push up, hands on my knees and stand straight, my shadow does the same.  I can feel myself planted on the road, from my head down through my spine, through my legs, feel the feet pressing down into the cracked road beneath me.

Billions of pounds of energy I have poured into this fourteen mile rectangle.  Morning after morning, season after season, year after year, converting my desire into the next footfall down into the world, where the power I created is driven into the pavement.

Physics experts will tell you that the energy is returned with each step, but not all of it.  What they won’t tell you is that it is not wasted, it is not lost.  It is kept there, there in the road.

As I stand there panting in the sun, seven miles from where I would finish, I feel it.  I close my eyes for a moment, feel the sweat flip off my eyelashes, and feel it soaking into me.   The road knows what it owes me, what I have invested in it.

I look ahead and watch the road lead off under a patch of shade, over a small creek, up the hill ahead of me and disappear.  It is urging me to move, to take the next step and the next.  It is promising me it will give me the power I saved in it. 

I know this promise.  I have felt it all my life.  Every time I swung my leg over a bike and headed for the horizon.  Every time I reached the end of my driveway and looked at four or fourteen or twenty and knew the road will live up to its bond with me.

I lean forward only slightly, and my legs are already moving, reaching out for the first step, the first push off, then the next landing.  They know the relationship after all these years, without me explaining the physics.  They move me, muscles turning the desire into power, giving the road this first gift knowing that it will give it back, now and on the next day I need it.

With each footfall we renew our pact; I give it the energy, it holds it and pushes me on with it, keeping a small share for the day when I am not sure I have what I need to finish.  This road, and every other I have crossed, has always lived up to that promise.

Hope this finds you striding out,

David

 Copyright © 2018 David Smith

DNA Thread

May 21, 2018

Greetings from the thread,

It has been estimated that there have been 108 billion people living on our planet since our beginning, including those of us still here.  One hundred billion people, scattered around the globe, making the most of what life they were offered, and then passing it on and on until the most recent seven billion stepped in.

Among all of this enormity is a tiny thread, vibrant and tenacious and yet so small you might never know about it unless you met me.  I exist in this thread, and so do all of those related to me, both in history and in time to come.

Not long ago my daughter gave me a home DNA testing kit.  I was curious about it but I didn’t really understand how much I would know once I got the results.   I figured I knew enough about my ancestry that it would be interesting but probably not earth shattering. 

What has been fascinating is to see my thread stretch back into time, caroming around the globe.  Some of my line moved from Africa across Europe to flourish in Britain, and another through Asia to become our Native Americans where my grandparents twisted the two strands together.

I hadn’t considered my DNA would show where my Scottish family came from; that just a few hundred years ago my thread wove through Scandinavia, Spain, while on the other side of the globe the Chippewa were unknowingly charting the future for their share of the line.

My report tells me the history of my DNA for nearly 20,000 years.  Generation after generation, getting up, making coffee, getting the kids ready, going to get food, cleaning up, laughing, telling stories, making love, taking naps, mourning, hoping, starting over.  Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of children growing up and repeating the process and making their way across the world and through time until this morning.

I make coffee and read about them and wonder about their stories and feel a connection that is a little unsettling and encouraging at the same time.  There is a mystery and there is a literal kinship, that links us.  This tiny, vibrant, tenacious thread that has survived everything that the world throws at people since the beginning of time.

And here I learn that 23andMe knows of over 1000 people who share my thread.  If I want to connect with them, all I have to do is click a button.  I find this a little intimidating, for reasons I can’t quite voice I have resisted taking that step.  That will be for another morning.

I know this process may seem a little frivolous to some, but if you trust the science, and I do, it is fascinating to see what it has revealed.  I am interested in some of the details but for now I am content to see the beauty of the whole landscape.  The more I look at it, the more I see and the more amazed I am.

Earlier this week I got up to run and went outside to taste the temperature before I laced up.  The sky was clear, and the stars fought for attention in the arc above me.  I stood there long enough to get chilled and stared at the brilliant unknowable multitude of lights.  As with every other time, I am amazed at the number of them, and knowing some of their light is so old that it has been traveling for thousands and thousands of years to reach me.

When I stare at the cosmos I realize two things at once.  First the enormity of creation, and how insignificant I am.  And second, that among all of these stars, on this lone blue marble, cast among 107 billion other specks of sand, how significant I am.

Hope this finds you looking both ways,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith

Felled Pine

May 14, 2018

Greetings from the root of the problem,

It looks like a ship has run aground in our back yard.  Some ghost ship, its rotting ribs exposed, plowed through the forest near our house and finally crashed through the edge of the brush.

It seems to be dragging itself out of the woods now, the branches heaving the carcass from the undergrowth onto to the manicured edge of our yard.

It was a pine tree, long since given up on the evergreen sham, standing back in the woods in brown anonymity.  I would never have paid any attention to it except that during a rather invigorating windstorm recently the pine determined that it was time to retire from the tree business.  

It might have been fifty feet tall when it changed its perspective from vertical to horizontal.  If I recall my completely fictional botany education correctly, and doing some simple math which I never mastered, I can estimate this tree is about one thousand or one billion years old.

This development creates a call for action.  (I should state here that while I do not feel that call, I am in close proximity to others who do, and this initiates the process of osmosis.)  This former tree is threatening to disturb the harmony of the carefully crafted landscape surrounding us, which if not corrected will fracture our Wa.

And so I have set about planning.  First I will need a large, limb-shredding chain saw.  Something with lots of horsepower, or megabytes or kilojoules or whatever.  Then I am going to put together a complex series of harnesses and pulleys so I can climb the fifteen feet or so to the highest flank of the pine to begin cutting. 

There, dangling from that precarious perch, I will flail away at the tree until it gives in, dismembering it one knotty spine at a time.  And then I will begin slicing the trunk into manageable thousand-pound sections, so I can more easily roll them to the curb where the sanitation department can ignore them. 

I have done some time/motion projections and I estimate that I should have the project completed in a fortnight.  Unless I misunderstand the definition of ‘fortnight’ which I recall from my fictional horology class as ‘one million years’.

Or.

It becomes an art installation.  Our community is starved for culture and how better to introduce it than through horticulture.  My vision for this piece would be to put up some tasteful red ropes slung between locally harvested plastic stanchions.  There would be a neatly worded plaque that gave an ambiguous explanation of the piece, and of course an invitation to visit the gift shoppe. (Spelled with an extra consonant AND an extra vowel to instill a sense of expensiveness.)

I would title the work. ‘Reclining Pine’, or ‘Woodn’t’, or ‘Sapless’.  Or something else.  If it was a big hit, we could take it on the road.  Load the whole thing onto enormous flatbed trailers and move it to the Met or the Smithsonian or feature it in other ‘natural habitats’ like someone else’s back yard.

Or.

I hire some well-equipped, trained and experienced experts to dispatch the tree.  Burly men with plaid shirts and suspenders and full masculine beards.  They will swing double headed axes and enormous chainsaws and pikes and other instruments that are manly and loud and are an actuary’s nightmare. 

They would drive huge trucks across our yard, possibly solving my mole problem, and probably creating permanent creases in our neatly ironed lawn.  There would be noise and wood chips and spitting and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.  They would transform the dead pine into bite size pieces and haul the carcass away to some tree burning sect hiding in the woods up near Capac.

Or.

I could just write about it. 

Hope this finds you going with your strengths,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith

The Toms

May 7, 2018

Greetings from among them,

Here’s a truth;  As you get older, making friends is like making a jump shot in basketball.  Seems like it’s pretty natural all your life and then one day someone throws you the ball and you miss the rim by five feet.

Which makes me realize how fortunate I am.  My life is bookmarked with a plethora of people who I call friends.  I am pretty liberal with the definition and so ‘friends’ has become quite a spectrum.  I have friends who I know would help me move or would take me to the airport.  I have friends who have never been to my house.  I have friends who I have not met face to face.  I have ‘coffee twice a year’ friends, and work-friends and running friends.

And there are Tom friends.

This is not the only standard by which I measure friendship, but this week, not for the first time, I found myself smiling at how lucky I am to have Toms in my life.

I grew up with Tom Wolfe and he is my friend.  I met Tom Skaff in my twenties, and he is my friend; I grew up with him too but in a little different way.  For most of my life I have had these two people to turn to, and I have been better for it.

Both Toms live about 500 miles from me.  I don’t see them as often as I like.  Every time we say good bye I know it will be months, maybe a year, before I see them again.  But I also know that our conversation will pick up as if no time had intervened.  If you smile at this, you likely have a Tom friend in your life.

Tom Skaff turned 70 just over a week ago.  Tom Wolfe will turn 60 in a few days.  I mention it because I want you to celebrate too.

These two are very different but have so many things in common, besides me, that it cannot be a coincidence.  I don’t know if it is a blueprint of anything, I only am here to testify.

We have bicycles in our history.  We have hundreds and thousands of miles of riding a few feet apart in that exceptional intimacy that exists in that space.  Early mornings, two lane roads, splitting the fog on our way for a twenty mile into the countryside or an adventure to Maine and back. 

They are both men of faith, which has challenged me and encouraged me.  They both live their faiths as much as talk about it, which is as authentic as it comes.  My friends are both intelligent, deep thinkers.  That said, they have both told me at different times to stop over thinking and will from time to time point out my navel-gazing tendencies. 

I can’t tell you how many times I have laughed with the Toms, laughed so hard I could not catch my breath and my eyes were watering.  I have spit water out to laugh.  I have laughed in church, in movies, in meetings, at funerals and it was always their fault because I turned and saw them laughing first.

They have seen me cry.  They have held my shoulder and waited with me for grief or heartbreak to pass.  They have also been the friend who has said it was time to get over it and move on.

In that vein, they have both at different times shook their heads at me when I was angry over something that would not matter in a week or a month.  Their perspective has saved me, even when they were not in the room.

They are remarkable fathers.  Paired with this is their patience, which I have tried to emulate with varying degrees of success.  But like most passionate people, even their patience has limits.  It is rare and memorable thing when you reach that limit with either of them.

Anyone who knows my two friends will use the word ‘kind’ when describing them.  It is in their approach to their relationships, to how they work, and in how they raised their children.  I don’t know that it is intentional, this graceful way they interact with others, but it is also an expression of their beliefs.

Both men have faced life threatening health challenges.  They have dealt with tragedies.  They have had disappointments and setbacks.  Watching how they dealt with those things has given me the strength to approach difficulties in my own life.

Tom Wolfe and Tom Skaff have lived balanced lives.  They have worked hard but kept their families and friends always as first priority, both have a way of considering people first in their choices.

When Tom Wolfe began playing guitar we were teenagers.  He said then that it might take him five years to become good, which to me seemed impossibly long.  Tom is still practicing.  This patience and appreciation of simple and enduring beauty is what makes him a good woodworker too.  I’m not sure he would say it this way, but at the heart of this is a humbleness.  He is willing to set aside his ego to learn and fail and break a string and miscut a board and then take a breath and begin again.

Tom Skaff has a servant’s heart.  His compassion for others, including me, in spite of how I must test him, is a testimony of who he is.  He does not have to win every conversation or decision, because he has learned humility as an expression. He has strong beliefs and opinions, and will defend them, but in all of that he makes room for the ideas of others.  When he left to become a missionary in India I was in awe of the choice, but in time came to understand how it is possible. 

When I called Tom last year to ask him for advice for my son Carson, who is a missionary in Columbia, he said; ‘Be humble. Trust God.’

Patience. Kindness. Loyalty. Humility. Compassion. Sense of humor. Curiosity. Determination. A willingness to change, to adapt.  And somehow through decades of every manner of experience, still close friends with me.  This is some of what the Toms have in common.

I am still making friends, some of which are destined to be lifelong connections, maybe as deep as any.  I will admit it’s not as simple as it was when I was running the streets in fourth grade, looking for a game to play or someone to explore the with.  But it happens, usually when I am not trying. 

I don’t compare my Tom friendships with other friends I make.  I will say that I do hold up a mirror and look for the Tom in me.  And I keep practicing.

“From quiet homes and first beginning,

out to the undiscovered ends,

there's nothing worth the wear of winning,

but laughter and the love of friends.”

Hilaire Belloc

Hope this finds you a friend,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith