What more suitable prompting for tears than the finding of evidence that
one's parents loved each other! By all means stifle tears in certain
circumstances, but do make time, Chris, for some tearful blessings on them
surviving now merely in you and maybe your siblings.
And write them a poem. Best from Max
The one that comes to my mind is by Philip Larkin,
Love Songs in Age...
She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
On 19/05/11 5:57 PM, "Christopher C Jones" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-05-14 at 20:22 +1000, Max Richards wrote:
>> Good luck, Chris
>
> Right now I am going over the long out of date cheque books and bank
> statements of my mother's and burning them.
>
> In between I find not only letters from myself to my parents but love
> letters and cards between my parents. I am so fortunate that I had
> parents that loved each other as much as they loved their children.
>
> I am told, that to prevent crying, push your tongue hard up into your
> mouth and stare into the middle distance.
>
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