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Re: 30:06:67 - It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

Posted: 02 Jul 2017, 22:42
by Quaco
Deebank wrote:People tell you that everything happens for a reason and they're wrong.

Things can and often do happen for no meaningful reason at all - it's just the interaction of our genes and environment with blind chance.

We, as a species, love to overlay everything with pattern and meaning where often there is none.

Agree. We only find the 'reason' later on, once we've accommodated to the random thing. I guess 'making the best of it' or 'learning from your mistakes' becomes a reason if you are able to continue on and grow.

Re: 30:06:67 - It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

Posted: 03 Jul 2017, 10:27
by Goat Boy
I can picture the swans. It’s funny how an image can stick with you for so long and be so lucid when everything else fades.

I don’t much else to say but thanks for sharing this.

That’s such a heavy experience for anybody to go through but especially one so young.

Re: 30:06:67 - It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

Posted: 03 Jul 2017, 13:33
by Neige
Thanks Ray, love reading your lucid prose

Re: 30:06:67 - It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

Posted: 16 Jul 2017, 00:40
by Rayge
Thanks very much everybody, for kind words and wishes. I'm fine. Writing it down at last was very lightening, especially since I had been carrying the burden so long I was no longer aware of its weight. It was also nice to sit down for a few hours and knock out 3,000 words. It's been a while.

Would one of the admins do me the kindness of shifting this into Births Marriages and Deaths, so that it doesn't fall off the Ninnyland cliff, please? I may want to come back to this if anything else turns up, in my memory or in the world.

Just a day or two ago, for instance, I started looking through my mother's 'important' bag, where she kept things like policies and certificates, as well as mementos of my grandparents, and found, not only letters I'd written home from school trips, and one or two Dad had written to me, but letters between my parents when they were, ahem, courting in World War II. Once I realized what they were, I stopped reading, put them back in the pile, placed the pile and everything else back in the bag, zipped it up and put it away.

Some other time, maybe

Re: 30:06:67 - It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

Posted: 17 Jul 2017, 07:44
by Fonz
Read them while you still have chance...
Your Mum wouldn't have kept them safe for them not to be read by you. Maybe they'll shed some more light on their relationship, and give you some more pieces of the puzzle?

Re: 30:06:67 - It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

Posted: 17 Jul 2017, 10:32
by Modesty Forbids
Fonz wrote:Read them while you still have chance...
Your Mum wouldn't have kept them safe for them not to be read by you. Maybe they'll shed some more light on their relationship, and give you some more pieces of the puzzle?


Oh, it's not a question of delicacy, fonz, or of intruding on their relationship in any way, it's the emotional overload, the thought of them young and in love in the middle of a War, the amount of vitality there, and what happened to them later, how my mother was crushed by his death: and a socking great reminder of my own mortality, focusing on my own loss, as I close in on seventy years old.