Another Year

And we are a couple of days into the new year. I remember being a little boy sitting in my one room stone school house (K-8) in Dean's Corners, Town of Saratoga, NY. I was probably around 7 or 8 years old and trying to figure out how old I would be at the turn of the millennium. I didn't have that word, but I had an idea that when the calendar hit that ticker, it had some magic power. It didn't. Now, at the end of this new year, the calendar will be at 2010 and I will be 64. It all seems surreal. I've been reading a lot of poetry lately - some in anthologies - and the editors give the poet's dates. I find that I am fascinated. How long did they live? When were they most productive? Where do they fit in in the development of the genre? I was interested in Yeats's dates - born in 1865, died in 1939. "Considered by many the greatest poet of the twentieth century." Twentieth Century? But he was born in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, and 35 years old before the turn of the century? A memory comes of Naomi's dad, who told that soon after arriving in this country (From Warsaw at age 12 in 1921) he watched a veterans day parade in NYC as a contingent of Civil War soldiers passed by. He regretted not making the effort to speak with any of them about the war. And I didn't spend enough time speaking with him.