Category: Uncategorized

Autumn in Maine Can Bring a Flash of Great Joy.

October 3, 2024

Today I reunited with old friends here in Maine, something that gave me a flash of great joy. Driving home, looking at the myriad of red, orange and yellow leaves, I reflected on why I felt so happy.

Autumn is a special time here, not only because of the beauty of the landscape, but because it is the beginning of “nesting” time, or rather, the anticipation of what is to come after the leaf peepers leave:  the start of what I call the Andrew Wyathesque period of the area:  the grasses will turn yellow and there will soon be a calming down, that may bring sadness or contentment.  It depends.

The weather has an underlying chill.  My good friend, the horse, can’t wait for the first frost that will finally put an end to the pesky flies that pullulate around him.  I am not ready for that first frost, but am resigned to it.  

I have my winter clothes and am prepared.  I hope I will opt for contentment and not sadness.  One of the things I feared most about moving to Maine full time was the sadness I would feel, not because of the cold, but because of the short dark days.

I discovered that weather played a pivotal role in my life when I first lived in Moscow, gazillion years ago, in the late 1980’s.  It wasn’t until I visited Rome, on a beautiful sojourn early one spring to escape the darkness of the USSR, that I realized how the Moscow weather (and lack of sunlight) affected my soul.  In those days, only a rare few had identified this condition as “SAD”:  seasonal affective disorder.  

In the end, it was thanks to my SAD condition that I finally understood why there was only a Tchaikovsky, or a Dostoevsky, or any one of those profound Russian musicians, artists and writers.  I realized that weather and lack of light can affect your outlook on life, especially if you are missing something or are experiencing a longing of sorts.  There is an emotional dislocation. 

I resorted to music and my children, who were very young then, can attest to that.  I bombarded them with songs.  To this day, they tell me, they remember most of the music scores I played in the car, wherever we went, and they have a soft spot in their hearts for them.

Funny how old age can change things around.  I know I will be sad and melancholic when we lose the leaves and the grasses turn yellow.  However, I am anticipating spending cold days ahead with warm and kind friends and acquaintances who understand that we all go through that misplacement of emotions that comes from living life.

I leave you to listen to one of my favorite ballads that captures my heart, my love for my home, and best explains my sentiments nowadays.

Terezin: The Paradise Ghetto

October 3, 2024

PROLOGUE: Because I thrive on music and philosophy and an insatiable curiosity (my own Balm of Gilead), and am trying to make sense of the river of life, I discovered a little slice of what I wrote in my now defunct blog on July 19, 2010, which I thought I would share. Am re-constructing my blog, which used to be a repository of things that maybe some of my friends and family and colleagues would have found of interest. So, here it goes, with a couple of updates:

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What a lovely way to perpetuate the legacy of a young musician and composer, Gideon Klein, whose life was destroyed in the German concentration camps of World War II. Thrice he wrote in a letter smuggled out of Auschwitz, “Don’t Forget About Me.” How many of us have had this thought?

Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, is where all the Jews from the Terezin Ghetto were sent. Terezin is also known for the devastating loss of children… Among the many who perished in Auschwitz and other extermination camps after having “transited” in Terezin was Peter Ginz, an 11-year old boy, who drew his vision of travel in space in the early 1940’s. Ironically, his drawing survived him; it eventually ended up in the national museum in Israel.

It was a replica of this particular drawing that Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia shuttle accident, took with him on his fateful journey. More than 50 years after this boy’s life was snuffed, this replica was destroyed in an overwhelmingly dramatic accident, a terribly sad tribute to the boy’s violent death! Amazingly, the shuttle flight happened on February 1, 2003: Peter Ginz would have celebrated his 75th birthday.

If you like to go down rabbit holes like I do, here is a great read on Gideon Klein.

Below is a short video from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that attests that despite his short life, Gideon Klein was never forgotten. Watch this special short story – it is so poignant:.

“Terezin’s Musical Legacy: A recent Prague Spring concert honored musicians and artists in the Terezin concentration camp who died in the Holocaust. Terezin Music Foundation founder Mark Ludwig pays special homage to composer Gideon Klein, who died aged 26.”

Of Judas Goats

October 3, 2024
May be an image of grass

One of the salient bilingual refrains I recall hearing growing up was how it takes one bad apple to spoil the bushel or “una manzana podrida pudre a las demás”. I hated the connotation because it was always used in reference to that “one friend” who could lead everyone astray, and you just had to get rid of that “friend”.

At the time, I resented my teachers, grandparents, parents, priests, nuns all pointing out to the importance of dumping that “rotten apple”, because sometimes fingers were pointed towards someone I knew and liked. And, of course, I knew better!

Lately, though, I have been engaging in retrospection trying to understand why some people whom one considers friends – who one might have spent time sharing a meal, a warm home, indulging in “old stories” and caring about “old woes”, the ails and ailments and deaths of other friends and children – can perversely aid and abet lies and treacherous behavior, and actually eagerly encourage the ruination of entire families of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, etc., just because. There seems to be a sadistic pleasure in this indulgence…and no compassion for any one of the victims.

Of course, this treachery is as old as the Bible and literature is chock full of these unsavory characters. So, as I am indulging in research for a narrative about this despicable behavior, lo and behold, I discovered a new thing: the “Judas goat”! I had never heard of it.

A Judas goat is raised with the sheep so that it will eventually gain their trust and when the time comes the Judas goat will lead the sheep to the slaughterhouse itself.

So now I need to study this phenomenon more, because I realize that “friends” who act in such a dishonest way, are truly Judas goats who operate because of their dark and rotten ulterior motives, whether they dislike the person/persons they are betraying, or whether they have misbehaved and need to cover their own tracks…that is, tit-for-tat.

However, the irony of ironies is that the Judas goat’s service is finite, and eventually it exhausts its usefulness. And then? Ah, their own masters end up sending them off to their miserable end.

I feel sorry for the Judas goat. After all, it is just a goat that has been trained to fulfill an animal husbandry purpose. However, the human Judas goat, well…now that is another story!

(A journal entry – September 10, 2024).

Unmoorings

September 30, 2024

This old photo that I had taken long ago, of a dilapidated boat with a beautiful sea lion by its side, made me think about death, loss and hope.  Go figure!  

In my own experience with loss, I recognize how important it is for those who remain behind to share in the suffering of the stricken one. The dénouement that sometimes is slow in coming, and which eventually affects us all, can help us prepare for the inevitability of death, of shuffling off our mortal coils, and put things in perspective: that is, truly understand what is significant and what is not. This is something that I, for certain, have failed to distinguish repeatedly.

The sufferer may not realize it, in the midst of his pain and suffering, but the impact of his predicament has a ripple effect on those who love him, and, for the most part, makes the witness a better person for it.

In my experience, faith does play an integral part in all of this. Nihilism brings only despair.  The back pages of my memory of heady college days discussing Nietsche’s nihilism, and other philosophers’ perspectives on death and dying, confirm this to me.

My own reaction to reading others’ descriptions of coming to grip with their mortality validates to me that, as the antidote to nihilism, John Donne aptly meditated:  “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…”

However, I have discovered that death does not just involve a human body that withers away.  Death can come in a myriad of ways. 

Sometimes we are dealt blows that seem insurmountable:  a major disease, estranged relationships, abuse, betrayals, financial woes and other traumatic events, and our lives are unmoored, like a boat being tossed aimlessly in a sea of trouble.

But, every now and then, the boat does not crack open and sink.  Miraculously, sometimes it finds a place of shelter, and maybe, maybe it can even be salvaged.  The thread of life that is unwound by the Fates may not necessarily end up severed…frayed, maybe, but not severed, and life goes on.

Ah, but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now


The blessings that come from working with good young people…

September 29, 2024

Nine years ago I jotted down these thoughts: Today I realized how blessed I am to work with smart, honest and caring young individuals.  They made me laugh, they shared their concerns, they tried to rope me in because I was miffed about a silly ‘chantapufi’.   I realize it is an amazing privilege to share the ups and downs of life with my colleagues.  More than anything, I am very grateful, because these colleagues make my life meaningful.

One of my big regrets in life is that I did not take seriously the little talent I had playing classical guitar.  I was not a prodigy, but I was not bad when I was a youngster.  I did practice but not enough.  My fingers now are rather stiff compared to decades ago, but when I practice long, they regain their youthful spring.  Today, spending what I consider wonderful time conversing with my younger colleagues, made me think of a time when I was their age and ought to have continued with my classical guitar but I did not.   There is a beautiful Tárrega piece, Capricho Árabe (Arab caprice), which has to be one of the most exquisite instrumental pieces ever composed.

I plan on spending time re-learning how to play it.  The lesson I hope to impart to my children and young colleagues -should they ask- is that you are never, ever old to go back and relearn something…  You are never too old to try to capture true beauty.  Compassion, empathy, appreciation for the exquisite and perfect, love of beauty, may be appreciated by the young -if they are lucky-, but these are gifts that eventually, at the sunset of one’s life, one pays closer attention because we finally understand that there are few universal truths – like this rendition of Capricho Árabe, which makes me cry every time I listen to it:

King of the Road, Destination: Bangor, Maine

September 29, 2024

…when men were not afraid to be men…and they were sexy!

I love this song… it may not be PC, but it captures an era…and the rhythm and beat of the song that, -in my humble opinion- have NEVER been matched.  Dean Martin has fun singing this song…and he exudes a masculine trait that is no longer acceptable, but that I am sure some young women today would love to witness.  I certainly miss this.

New York, New York

September 29, 2024

Lately, I have been watching an old series from the late 1950s, early 1960s, called Naked City. In the old days of black and white TV in Argentina, where there were 4 channels or so, my parents watched it every week in Buenos Aires, and they let me join them as a little girl. I remember being mesmerized because of the way the city was presented. All those tall buildings, the NY harbor, the lights. I knew there were strange police stories, what with the sirens and old-fashioned uniforms, but the crux of the weekly subject of the series was lost on me.

Today, I realize it depicts a New York that no longer exists: the cars, the grittiness, the fashion. Even the hoodlums wore nice suits and fedoras!

There are stereotypical characters galore, the police, the lawyers, the Italians, the Poles, the Mexicans, the Germans, the upper East Side types, the bohemians, the old, the young, the neurotics, the alcoholics, the betrayers, the blondes and the brunettes. The narrator always brings either humor, foreboding, or morality to the screen. In this day and age, it could be seen as a bit pedantic. However, it is a window to life as it was, at least in the naked city, a city that had captured my own parents’ imagination. How they loved New York and longed to return. They eventually did.

I grew up listening to their stories of what seemed like a magical world so far away up North, from where I lived way down South. The one thing that comes to mind, in a world pre-globalization, was my Mother’s depiction of what a New York Cheesecake was all about. Her description was mouth-watering, but there was no Philadelphia Cream Cheese at the time, when I was growing up. There wasn’t even a substitute. I just had to imagine, until the day when I returned to New York as a teenager and dug my fork into a slice of it at Chock-full-o’Nuts.

In my retrospection to a more innocent time, I came across an old slide. A most beautiful portrait of a handsome man and a beautiful lady, and a toddler. This is how I remember my parents. Forever. And this is how I envisioned New York and its harbor, because the moment captured in that photograph was a most memorable experience that we were embarking together.

My parents were 27 years old at the time! My Father was a self-made man, an autodidact, an entrepreneur, a man of vision, even at that young age. We were soon leaving on the Queen Elizabeth from NY Harbor to Southampton, England. And I got top billing as a passenger: Miss B.A. Dillon! At the tender age of 1.5 years.

To be continued…

Of Honey Badgers and Life

September 29, 2024

I had to laugh!

In every parody, there is a kernel of truth. I once encountered a colleague working for the competitor. He came across as a gentle gentleman. But, as time went on, every now and then, I would get a glimpse of fangs. I doubted myself, not thinking that he could be anything but a gentleman…a competitor, yes. But not ruthless.

And then one day…BANG! Not only did the fangs come out but the claws as well. After I recovered from the total shock, dishevelled and bruised, I discovered that he was known as the Honey Badger. Moral of the story? Better have the Honey Badger on your side!

May be an image of text that says 'DO YOU SUFFER FROM ANXIETY ATTACKS? ARE THEY OFTEN CAUSED BY STUPID PEOPLE? GET AN EMOTIONAL SUPPORT HONEY BADGER! BErCИИ የቶክርንት 생크수식 ANXIETY COMPANION HONE HONEYBADGER ۷ BADGER Unlike other companion animals that snuggle up to provide physical comfort and a safe space during Anxiety Attacks the Emotional Support Honey Badger instead physically attacks and savages the absolute living hell out of the stupid idiot bothering yoμ, thus removing the source of the anxiety. Much more efficient! Ask your Doctor if Honey Badger is right for you.'

My New Best Friend.

September 27, 2024
May be an image of horse and grass

He greets me and lets me swat away at the pesky flies and caress his head. He is thrilled if I give him a treat. Talking about caresses…if he were a human or a dog, he could lie next to me and I would caress his back to alleviate the anxiety or insomnia he might feel in his dreams.

He is a beauty, and a better friend than many whom I have known for half a century. I am lucky! Between my fox and my horse, how could I feel sad? He brings back memories of riding bare back, something I loved doing in my old neck of the woods in Argentina. Nah, I would never dream of doing it today. It would end in a funny tale of destruction. However, one can dream, right?