IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

MEMORIES~1963

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys

Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys

One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more

And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar

In the 60's we all assumed Puff The Magic Dragon was a folk song about smoking pot. The truth is that the writers, Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow, will tell you it's a fantasy based on a poem about fading into old age. If you were alive in the early '60s, as I was, you may look back on Puff with nostalgia and a different take on life.

Puff was the imaginary friend, a Dragon, of a little boy named Jackie Paper. The lyrics explain that Jackie's life was temporary and that Puff lost his roar when Jackie was gone.

I tell my children and their spouses that they better live in the present and enjoy their children every waking moment, they'll be gone in the blink of an eye.

Play with them, read to them, take them places, make them laugh, hug them when nightmares come, and never, ever be too busy for them. They are your legacy, your reason for being, nothing else matters.

I haven't practiced what I'm preaching, I've spent most of my life away from home, traveling to far off lands, away from my family.

It was left to their mother to make sure they appreciated what's important in life. Her example gave them the values necessary to attract the right partners, people with the same values. Their marriages, like mine of sixty years, reflect that.

My kids aren't blinking, their living.

I'm often told I have a beautiful family and that's true, they take after their mother, but what people don't know is that appearances are fleeting, what's important is that moral compass that points in tandem between two people, it's about principals that lead and inspire their own children into the next generation.

Don't Blink!

Comments

SILENCE IS APPROVAL~Jewish Meme

How often do we learn something awful, clam up, and ignore it, hoping it will go away. It never does, it just gets worse and our silence becomes its enabler. Life is like that, we don't want to get involved. We have enough to worry about and ignorance, after all, is bliss. Wrong, ignorance is acceptance. The easy analogy is governance. We sit in a management meeting or a board of directors where we become aware of something nefarious and keep silent for fear of being disloyal. To speak up takes courage and courage has consequences. When a whistleblower comes forward they are vilified, they become the victim of power and power corrupts. We've seen this in Washington for years, management teams being selected for their weakness rather than their strength. Weakness breeds indecision and silence, strength breeds courage. A new administration always starts with a ray of hope that the management team, aka the cabinet, will be outspoken and advise and consent with courage, no...

CHAOS REVISITED

" a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order." Isn't four years of this enough, seriously? The constant media drumbeat, TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, dominating the headlines, the news shows, and our conversation. This did not happen by accident, this was a calculated strategy by a certified narcissist. "Narcissism: a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others." The Trump supporters say that "this is just Trump being Trump" that, my friends, is precisely the problem. Now that he's lost the election and his sycophants in Congress have replaced their horns with silence, if not acceptance, wouldn't you think the man would suck it up, acknowledge the inevitable, exhibit a modicum of humility and devise an exit strategy that would highlight his accomplishments not feed his addi...

A TALE OF TWO CITIES~A REIGN OF TERROR

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." Charles Dickens Paris in the 18th Century was in turmoil, it was the reign of terror, the French revolution was raging the atmosphere was chaotic. Washington, DC in the 21st Century is in turmoil, the pandemic is raging and the atmosphere is chaotic. Is this an analogy? Maybe, but we need to fill in a few gaps. Paris in 1789 was suffering from unemployment, hunger, and p...

Search This Blog