LONG-LINGERING LIVES

angels and demons, fools and killers,
granted temporary immortality,
come as they will and stay as you will;
each sense with guides and vectors,
each view unique to that only second,
blinking in a timeless void,
making a Universe,
and like a quark, disappearing
with no memory, lest leaks in time
bring it to mind....

Memories of My Almost Happy Great Aunt Lucille

These photos, from 1927, show my great-aunt Lucille in a school play and as President of the Thoron Literary Society. Aunt Lucille became an amateur painter, then a school teacher, married the manager of Loveman's, moved to Birmingham, led the butterfly life, things went awry, divorce, a job as a sales clerk, dependency on her older sister, my Grandmother, being tossed from one of my Grandfather's houses (in which she lived....practically free!) for making extraordinary demands on the family, poverty and death in a tiny studio apartment, penniless and cynical........such is Life!