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In my words, November 25 – December 1

When Akram moved in in August of 2010, the apartment I’d lived in for over twenty years suddenly wasn’t mine anymore. For awhile things stayed pretty much the same, then one day Akram let me know that he really didn’t like the painting called A Dog Biting its Tail by the artist Paul Divone that I had hanging in the living room, a painting I loved, and sometimes looked at drinking my morning coffee planning the day, but I moved the dog to the work room where it fits just as well looking down as I write. As things turned out, Akram began to draw to make better use of the energy that built up as he studied for and took USA medical exams. He hadn’t drawn anything since his medical school days in anatomy class in Bangladesh, but on the wall where the dog used to bite its tail are Akram’s drawings now. This is what Time does.



Around my birthday I wanted to look at my baby pictures. They were in a white photograph album my mother had given me. I couldn’t find it anywhere and really tore the apartment apart looking into every box, going through all my stuff. Finally I told myself that I must have thrown it out by mistake during one of the times I was organizing and making more room for Akram. But what did it matter? Who even remembers that baby? A grandmother who treasured me has long since taken me with her into her grave. We know we do not last; our photos tell us that as we grow older, wiser and so on. For awhile, a poem or two might outlive, a song someone might sing, but here and now is it while the great eternal abyss of restful forgetfulness that some call death hasn’t swallowed us yet and remains an abstract thought. Today I went to look for something I keep in a leather briefcase in a box on the shelf above where I write and there was the white photo album with all my baby pictures in it. Because I had remembered the album bigger than it was (I guess because I was in it), I never bothered to look in the briefcase. My photos had been within a few feet of me the whole time. They were still alive.



Right now I am the lucky duck; I have the dog biting its tail watching as I write, I have baby pictures to give to my niece and nephews, and there are the drawings by Akram with more to come. I can have and look. Carpe diem, one and all. Carpe diem.


Drawings by Akram


Eternity

Oh what a weary while it is to stand
Telling the countless ages o’er and o’er
Till all the finger-tips held out before
Our dazzled eyes by heaven’s starry hand
Drop one by one, but at some dread command
Are held again and counted evermore!
How feverish the music seems to pour
Along the throbbing veins of anthems grand
And how the cherubim sing on and on—
The seraphim and angels—all in white—
Still harping—still enraptured—far withdrawn
In hovering armies tranced in endless flight!
…God’s mercy, is there never dusk or dawn,
Or any crumb of gloom to feed upon?

by James Whitcomb Riley

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