A teenaged me painted the prologue to Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” on the back of my closet door; my private and quiet rebellion to a mother very similar to Eugene Gant’s mother. There is still a desperate and layered division between us at 63 and 83 years of age….

“Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth….”

It goes on, but I will allow the readers to discover the rest on their own. It spoke to me, a schizoid, of the utter and undeniable loneliness of life. That book was my “Catcher In the Rye”. It forever changed me. I haven’t read it since my 30’s. I am so afraid that it will no longer move me the way it did in my youth. Some poetry speaks to a time or generation, or a time of life. It can go from profundity to perversion to puling as the decades pile on.

Speaking of poetry, Renee Good was a poet! She received the Academy of American Poets Award. Her writings are now a small and intimate part of her legacy to the world. I lack the skill to copy the poem in its correct format, but I will provide the link.

Your “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight” protagonist reminds me a bit of her. I suppose it speaks to us in different ways.

Tim Minchin is undoubtedly genius, a true polymath. His writing, music, comedy, acting and message has evolved from the conventional mocking bite of his early works to the haunting and sobering, albeit less confrontational songs “Apart Together” and the tribute to his wife, “I’ll Take Lonely Tonight.”

We are all just so fragile, precious and fleeting on this planet. We should seek to always be The Helpers. To contribute far more than we collect. I came from dis-opportunity. I never attended a college, but I never stopped learning and growing. I live on the edges of poverty, I have never had a new car, a designer bag, a house with a view, a savings account…but I, unlike the accumulators of wealth and power, know that these are not how a man is measured. It is not about standing victorious on the bodies of those you ruined. We are lifted up, not by the machinations of despots and dollars, that thirst can never be quenched, but by living in empathy and altruism.