Icarus @ 59 # 61

Yesterday I wrote, 'if I am honest there has been a beacon guiding me all my life. I don't really consider myself as having done anything to deserve the life I have or indeed have experienced thus far but there is a light somewhere that draws me through.' I could affirm this with platitudes, like I have worked hard all my life to get lucky. I have been working a long time without a break, 45 years and counting. I started with two paper rounds at the age of 14 and my son Dan has this ethic too. Every Tuesday morning he volunteers at the County Hospital, he works twice a week as a volunteer for Scope, he works as a football coach every Saturday morning at Preston Park Soccer School and three days a week he works in Sainsburys in town. But that's not to say he doesn't have time for rest and recreation, last night he was at football, which he loves, and the team (all men and older than him with only one exception) call him Rosie, which he loves too. But soon he will be off to Africa, working awhile for Medicare and then later onto Australia where he will be working on a conservation project, and he writes too, oh, and so well, and then finally he will go to University, via a visit to his sister in the USA.  A couple of days ago I wrote about temporaIity and indeed our children are only on loan to us so we can help them to grow - sigh, because at the end of it all we own nothing of them except our memories. I stole this poem from a friend's fb site and its sentiment is great, 'We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way around.' I'll miss him terribly when he goes but I am also pleased he chose me as his dad:

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room, 
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around.
~ Margaret Atwood~

I hear a lot of this band leaking out of Dan's room and we used to listen to them in the car all the time, into the mosh pit, 'I don't care if you don't care...'