UKRAINE

The Russian brute destroys lives

By killing, by grief, by loss.

Cities, towns, and villages

Racked and ruined

By soldier brutes who follow their leader.

Others, sent by the brute, hate the war,

Turn themselves in, desert,

Go home to hide, or worse.

The shirtless brute, astride his horse,

Flexes his muscles and reveals his weakness.

Why?

Useless destruction by a mad hardly-a-man.

When will it end? How will it end?

To what purpose,

Save the exercise of the madness

Of the Russian brute?

 

June Butler (9-25-2022)

The words have been swirling in my mind for some time. I decided it was time to put them down in some kind of order.

MEMORY AND "THE GLASS KEY"

The other night I caught the end of Key Largo on TCM. As I watched, another film noir that I'd seen many years ago came to mind. If my grandmother and I saw the movie in the year the movie came out, 1942, I was eight years old, too young to venture out on my own. My grandmother was not a moviegoer, but I know she loved me unconditionally.

What I think now is that I dragged her to the theater because I wanted to go there or somewhere, not because I wanted to see the movie, The Glass Key, with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. The movie is based on a story by Dashiell Hammett. I didn't like the movie; I found it rough and somewhat scary, and I'm certain Mémere didn't like it. She was not a moviegoer, and I don't remember that she ever went to see a movie again. She took me because, for some strange reason, I wanted to go.

Why do I remember the event and the movie from so long ago? A couple of years later, I became a regular moviegoer with kids from the neighborhood. We walked to the theater, which was three blocks away, three times a week in a rather large group. Nearly every Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoon we trooped to the Rivoli Theater in New Orleans.

Since then, The Glass Key has become a film noir classic. A version is on YouTube, so I'll probably watch it again. A few years later, I had a huge crush on Alan Ladd. The rumor in the neighborhood was that Veronica Lake had a glass eye, which was why she wore her hair covering her eye.

SEASONS GREETINGS

To be honest, my spirit of the season is pretty weak. My hope is that the spirit is alive and well in my dear friends and any who read my post.

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WOULD HAVE BEEN 59 YEARS

Yesterday, September 13, 2020, would have been our 59th wedding anniversary if Tom was still alive. I thought I wouldn't post publicly about the occasion, but I changed my mind today. It's good and proper to honor the man and the marriage.

EASY-CARE FLOWER GARDEN

Easy-care Flower Garden

Pink Rose, white Rose,
Old Roses ask for little.
Autumn pruning tames the wildness.

Lily-of-the-Nile, blue and white,
Blooms and offspring
Faithful year after year.

Monkey grass and concrete crowd Impatiens.  
One winter pruning,
Riotous blooms come spring and summer.

Potted Rain Lilies
Like tall grass in winter
Blossom pink in summer.

(June Butler - 8-30-2020)

INTERIM

Yesterday, I'd written a few words about my state of mind and heart since my husband, Tom, died last year. This morning, I looked at my words from yesterday and thought there might be a poem in there. Here's what I came up with, such as it is.

Interim

My life,
An interim that is not
My life,
A holding place, not
My life.

What's next in
My life
That is not
My life?

Tom fades away in
My life.
It's not right in
My life.

(June Butler - 2-12-2020)

58TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

Day before yesterday was the 58th anniversary of my marriage to Tom. Yes, Friday the 13th! How fitting. We were not married on a Friday, but every so often the anniversary lands on the Friday the 13th.

The wedding anniversary was one of the firsts since Tom died with more firsts to come. Though I tried to act as if it was just another day, I did not succeed, for the occasion was much on my mind. It goes without saying that it was a sad and not a happy anniversary.

When I wrote Tom's obituary, I did the math, subtracting 1961 from 2019, and said, "Tom is survived by his wife of 58 years...", when the truth was that I was Tom's wife while he was living for only 57½ years. When I realized my mistake, I was amused for a bit and grateful for the lighter moment. There's no correcting the mistake; it's all over the internet in perpetuity. Whatever. A half-year mistake doesn't matter, because we were together for a long, long time.

My brother-in-law Frank and my sister Gayle are on either side of Tom and me.

TO SERVE THEM ALL MY DAYS

The other evening, I watched the first three episodes of To Serve Them All My Days. We watched the series when it was shown on Masterpiece Theater I believe in the 1980s. I loved the series then, and I loved seeing it again. The performances, especially those of John Duttine, as the young soldier, and Frank Middlemass as the headmaster of the school, are excellent.

David Powlett-Jones, a young Welsh soldier who was wounded in the leg and suffering from shell shock during WW I has been released from the military hospital and sent to apply for a position as a teacher in a boys public school in Devon.

David was promoted to 2nd lieutenant up from the ranks because great numbers of young officers were killed in the war. He's hesitant about teaching in a school with upper class students because he's from a coal mining family in Wales.

13 episodes of the series were filmed, and I can't wait to watch the rest of them.

The story is taken from a novel of the same name by R F Delderfield. After seeing the series, I read the book, but I found it long, tedious, and quite disappointing. The story improved with the cutting that was necessary to film a TV series.

UPDATE: I've now seen the entire series and thoroughly enjoyed every episode, including two that were not part of the Netflix series but are available on YouTube. If I had known the entire series was on YouTube, I'd have watched earlier.

WHO AM I?

Since Tom died, I am not myself. I hardly know who I am. After being one of a pair for so many years, I seem to have lost my identity. When I fill out forms, I check off "single" rather than "married" now, and that doesn't seem right. I have also joined the ranks of widows, a group in which I do not yet feel at home. I go through the motions of living everyday life, but I feel like a displaced person in my own life and my own house. Even so, I want to stay in my house as long as possible. The thought of moving is quite daunting.

I've never had difficulty being alone. In fact, time alone has always been a necessity for me, even when I had very little of it. I remember retreating to the bathroom when Tom was home in the evening, and the children were young. I'd lock the door and spend as much time as possible in the bathtub. That was my time alone to recoup and recover.

Tom and I shared interests, but we both had different interests, too, and went our separate ways to follow the interests that differed. Yet, all the while Tom was the strong thread that ran though my life even when we were physically separated, and I knew we would be together again. Now he's gone forever. I'm not drowning in sorrow missing Tom. I have my sad moments, but, the truth is I'm not quite as sad as I think I should be, and I feel a bit guilty about it.

To complicate matters, when I stopped going to church several years ago, I gradually lost my religion. By religion I mean I lost faith in church and Christian denominations. Then I lost my faith in God. I say "lost" because not having faith is a loss. My faith was a comfort to me, and it left me at a most inconvenient time.

It is said that faith is a gift. Job said,"Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." What's not there is not there, and wishing or saying it's there won't make it so. At the moment, I don't feel like blessing God, if there is a God. I don't call myself an atheist, because I have no certainty that God or a First Cause of some sort does not exist. I assume I now fall into another unfamiliar group of agnostics.

I WANT YOU BACK!

I Want You Back!

Tom, I want you back! Not sick,
Not in pain, not far too thin.

I want you back as you were,
Not young, in your fine maturity,
In the time before the cancer,
Uninvited, came and took you away.

(June Butler 4-30-2019)