We Received Duty to God and Faith in God Awards

    I earned these as a Cub Scout and later as Boy Scout; later as an adult we receive other religious accolades and aplomb, at times. We recognize others in their service and devotions. We uphold and sustain others' in their callings and duties.

    In trying years we hearken back to God, and try to do His will more. Even in the years of prosperity we ought to do the same. Be gracious and thankful, and give to others and to God for all He does. We have to do our own parts as well.

    We deserve medals, of the type when were children. But we do not often get them.

    Maybe the boys were favored over the girls? It has been said to me recently. Priesthood and passing the sacrament, for one gender only. The priesthood is a male thing.

    Who makes these rules? The bride of Jesus is the Church, not a woman, as told in the scriptures.

    Who made these rules? The apostles that recounted of the Lord's ministry?

    Or was it the Master Jesus Himself?

    Who makes the rules? God above, or the appointed ones down below?

    Who chose them? How do we know?

    Write it down, says the missionary.

    

    I am writing.

 Christians of the Past and Present

    We try not to be hypocrites, which can be a tricky endeavor, we try to follow the strictures, commandments, and lessons of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Many denominations organize in His name, many of us attempt to follow the the ways of these groups in how they behave and operate. This can be great. We love when Christians assembled and united do great acts of service for Him in His name! Of course, we have some examples of hypocrisy, too.

    Collective action and operations are grand, very often. We also need individual acts to be done.

    We have to be sincere and honest, which can be trying. We have to be thoughtful and loving.

    But we have to try our best.

    Go, do. We have to live up to His promise and covenants.

Suicides Aren't Painless

    As a kid I was not exposed to many suicides. I heard about the kamikaze Japanese pilots hitting our ships and troops in World War II, or watched a few movies like the Poseidon Adventure where the hero sacrifices himself to escape from the overturned cruise ship. Suicides could be heroic, I was aware, but they were not the wretched tragedies that most turn out to be.

    A suicide touched my community last week, and it affected some  in my family directly. I discussed it a little with my sister who lives in the west over the phone; we mentioned a couple of friends that it happened to. She commented about a former tenant of my mother and step-father who had died of suicide. What? Pete? My mind and heart immediately became overwhelmed with my sense of loss and sadness, because I know the people in my life who have taken their own lives, but he was not one of them! My eyes almost instantly filled with tears as I thought, "Not him!" Later I asked my step-dad; he was not aware of any suicide death associated with Pete. I assigned my daughter, another one in the Western U.S., to figure out if Pete is still alive and what his status is.

    The Smiths of Bloomington, neighbors on First Street, seemed to be extra sensitive about the topic of suicide. They thought that the theme song of the popular situation comedy M.A.S.H was inappropriate, because it sang that "suicide is painless, it brings so many changes..." I am not sure what that line really means, or is trying to say, but the Smiths were virulently opposed. Sure.

    

    Me, too. I am opposed to suicide. The ones that have affected me in my life have been hard. Sad. Really difficult to understand. Even now, I review what was going on with some of my buddies and cohorts and I wonder: was it X? Was it Y? Well, many would argue that the questions are moot, that is no longer worth wondering about. I cannot help it. I care about them, I like to solve problems, I like to analyze matters and potentially avoid future issues like those. 

    Right? There are no solutions, easy or otherwise, to all of life's problems. Sometimes death is the answer, it is the denouement. Lamentably, tragically, fittingly. Ultimately. 

    Death is an eventuality. It finds us all. But do we choose it, that is this question. This polemic.

    Suicides take some of us, each time. We ask so many questions, but the answers are not all there.

    We celebrate the lives of the victims, we remember the good times. 

    We try to go about helping ourselves in the meantime. Steel ourselves for better and happier times.

    Be at a point, or points, where we survive the day, the month, the year, the life time.

 Thank You for Sharing

    I thank you, profusely and effusively.

    Is this a poem? Yes, maybe.

    I thank you for sharing, to some a trite and cliched phrase.

    Not to me.

    You shared with me your pains, your angst, your frustrations, your love.

    Your laughs and smiles. I do not forget them.

    You shared in good and bad.

    You shared your manias, which have reasons, 

    Or no reason at all.

    Which is fine. You are fine, you are wonderful.

    You shared the best and the worst.

    Your worst, that is, which is beautiful, understandable

    It is you, who you are.

    I love you, I admire you, with the imperfections.

    While I carry much more. So who am I to complain?

    

    Thank you for sharing. For caring. For loving.

    Times can be hard. I can be at fault.

    You have shared the times with me, the good and bad.

    I have enjoyed the sharing.

    The emergency room visits, the nights of pain or loneliness.

    Estrangement.

    Not the best things to share!

    But you did. I love you for it.

    I apologize for the less than stellar results.

    Who needs perfection? Not me.

    Maybe that is the problem. Not striving hard enough?

    You have to share, which can be problematic.

    If I do not share enough...

    Nevertheless, I thank you for sharing.

    I must share this: I love you.

    If that can be shared too much, then so be it.

    You have shared. Cared. Cried. Tried.

    I thank you.

We Are Everything, We are Nothing. And In between

    Oh, the places we go! To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, a book that gave me hope a generation ago. We go many places in places in life. Sometimes we feel stuck. Sure, we have all felt this. I can feel it, certainly.

    Started this a couple days ago. Sunday this morning, try to sew this up a little. Sew up a little?

    My wife talked about all the coasts and beaches of the world today. Sort of. We mentioned a few in southern and central California. Where did we go? There were some lake beaches not mentioned.

    We must be grateful to wake up and possess our bodies and minds, have free will. We have choices! We have freedoms, even though many of us are impaired by systems and governments.

    Our own choices can limit us, too. Pros and cons, roses and thorns, as my wife mentioned to my daughter.

    Credits and debits, in the financial world.

    We are not necessarily the sum of our parts. But we are more. And less than the dust of the earth.

    

    We are mixes in between.

 Building versus Eroding

    Perhaps we can compare our lives to things that we have in our bodies, which are not our minds or hearts, but we can be compared to teeth. Lately I have been thinking about how a tooth can be strong, clean, and functional for many years, for decades. Perhaps even the lifetime of the adult?

    Then, many of us are not so lucky with those teeth lasting so long. We have do take measures like implants or root canals. It is possible that the tooth, like my molar when I was 49, had to be removed and receive an artificial implant that should be good until I am buried somewhere, or perhaps cremated, or however I ultimately go. Not to be too morbid, but death happens.

    But before that last hurrah, there is a lot of living to do! Yes! An emphatic yes. YES! Okay, having established the enthusiasm for life over death, let us focus on building versus eroding. A tooth builds enamel, or has ways to stay healthy, which keeps it strong and whole. However, cavities and decay can enter the tooth or the mouth, which means that the tooth corrodes and becomes a useless or at worse, a painful obstacle within the mouth. It has to be removed as it goes bad.

    Are people like this? Some of us build and build our lives, while some whither, and spiral down. Some of us erode? Yikes, that is sad and scary! Some of us do not build up as we go, we do not "prosper" and build our character, our relationships, our families, our finances, but we can slide into less. And less.

    Yeah. We hope to build. And gain.

    May we do so. We need effort, care, and most of us need the grace of God to do so. And some help from others, at times.

    Go forth, and build. Do not shrink back.

 Three Little Indians

    We pass through dreams

    In their ambiguities

    Their hazy edges and distorted filters

    Forgotten corners and mixed up plots

    Like this past night

    I awake in the morning

    With some mysteries solved

    In my unconscious waking brain

    My mind, capable of waking up

    From deeper or lighter sleep

    A night, almost restless

    But truly restful

    Which was it?

    Both or neither?

    The dreams meddle in our conscious thought streams

    In our beds and couches

    Where we lay our bodies and heads

    By whom we lie

    Who is it that we sleep beside?

    Who is that? 

    Who is she?

    Who is he? Who am I?

    What am I dreaming?

    What do I want?

    What therapy is this?

    Who am I working for?

    Why do I love?

    We do not call the native Americans or first nation peoples

    Indians

    That is reserved

    For the vast subcontinent

    Of other dreams

    Other climes

    Other thoughts

    And hopes

    Peaceful sleeping

    Dreaming

    And solving those issues

---As I tried to explain to myself and a couple others, I had some dreams that were intricate, seeming to resolve some issues in my life that perhaps go back generations. No more details, nothing specific, but waking up with some mysteries resolved. I was talking in real life about the mystery of my biological grandfather with my grandmother, who died at age 36. He, Fred Smith, went on to a long life and raised three healthy, good people, all girls.

    My dad learned more about it later in life, and connected with these half sisters.

    Could those be the Three Little Indians? Aunts that were not mine growing up. They have their own lives. I met one. It was pleasant. Eleven years ago. About five years ago visited the graves of the grandparents. Both sets not far apart.

    Wow. There was a court document that showed my grandmother, Francis, with Fred. Not sure about that. Not sure what people know.

    Most have passed on by now, their ages much advanced.

    The generational mysteries. The dreams bringing resolution.

Sting Song Lyrics - What Could Have Been

 I am the monster you created

You ripped out all my parts
And worst of all, for me to live, I gotta kill the part of me that saw
That I needed you more

I hope you know we had everything
When you broke me and left these pieces
I want you to hurt like you hurt me today and
I want you to lose like I lose when I play
What could have been
Oh, what could have been

Why don't you love who I am?
What we could have been

I am your ghost, a fallen angel
You ripped out all my parts
I couldn't care what invention you made me
'Cause I, I was meant to be yours

El Problema de Escribir en Espanol sin puntos ortograficos

    Bueno, hay que saber donde poner el enfasis en las palabras, porque si no los pones bien, se puede confudir cualas palabras en verdad estas diciendo.

    No se si me pongo a escribir mas en este buen idioma.

    No se.

Trains - Deep into August

    I was sitting here this morning, no one else awake in the house. My wife went to her first day of the school year. This has become her routine. We danced. It was sweet.

    Deeper into August.

    Sitting here, looking at bills, or some costs of estate tax and escrow payments, incoming money and outgoing cash flows, thinking about wealth, at present, into the future with retirement hopes and plans. I thought about a couple of old foster siblings, Joey and Sophia. Sophia passed away, maybe ten years ago. I can ping Joey; that is a blessing. I will message him and Jason now. The latter, from my middle school and high school years. And even more recently. Romanian connection.

    Indiana, all connected. Hoosiers, we are. 

    That brings me to trains. In my childhood I would hear the train pass through town. Not always. Maybe if it was windy, or if I was sufficiently distracted, or father east or out of town, we would not hear it. But it was something to hear in the summer time, when we awoke early for swimming lessons. My parents were off to their jobs. They had work. We had the summer mornings with the the olympic-sized pool, at the park across the street, before later vacations. Summer time.

    August would herald the end of summer, and here we are now. Here am I.

 

    I was typing, looking, responding to emails, preparing for the next job, thinking a little about the part-time job, where that could lead. Or not.

    The second full week of August. Or the third?

____________BREAK___________________

    Now, the 14th. Thursday.

    What, of these trains?

    They cross our paths in the recesses of our memories; they cross the ways and byways of our nation. For me, I remember hearing the whistle of the train across the park and past the streets heading towards the center of town, over toward the hospital and the downtown not far from there. All of it abutting the campus, the great intellectual engine of my home town. More or less a mile away. To the north. The train to the west.

    Home. There were the trains, the somewhat haunting sound of the horn or sirens blaring from a mile plus away, from that chugging steam or coal engine. To the west, where the sun would set over the city park. Bucolic, with the pool and lots and the fields and the stream, small creek, running down the middle.

    For years now I have not heard the trains pass where I live in suburbia. The suburbs of the greater metropolis. We live here, we grow here, we raise our children here. Like me, and my siblings and neighbors, back in the day in the 1970s. But we heard trains and their noises, and would be affected by the blockage of the train and the east west car and truck traffic, us getting across town as we needed, for jobs, chores, and appointments, or games or food or get togethers. East and west, home is best.

    The train tracks came right through it.

    Either deep into August, or throughout the rest of the year.

    I lived right by a train track in South America for a few months. The regular train cars and engines would shake our little railroad side house and force us to cease from speaking. The papito worked for the railroad company.

    In this world, we have trains, planes, and automobiles. And more. Ships, bikes. Our feet and carts. Space rockets and missiles. Drones.

    Do trains still play a large part? I say so, yes. Not to mention the city metro rails that we use to navigate our large metropolises. Trains are here to stay, like the noisy behemoths that plow through Harper's Ferry, West Virginia (a place that my wife can plan not to live by), a lot to do with the trains.

    We went there at the end of July. Not quite August.

    No whistles here. Only in distant places and my memory.

Can We Eliminate Starvation in My Lifetime? Hmmm...

    (Things can be bad with us, in the United States and elsewhere, in many different ways. Unemployment, other financial problems, relationship issues, anger, hatred, poor health...) Maybe thinking of worse things help us feel less wrecked by our own problems. Do we suffer from hunger in the United States? Sure, there is that. But not like other places.

    With many memories of the 1970s I remember kids making fun of Cambodians. Ha! They were dying and they were starving. They were so hungry that the chicken was the fastest animal in the country, as the joke went. Kids are cruel. Adults are crueler, at least those who perpetrated the terrible crimes of this Missouri-sized country, the former neighbor. China starved millions upon millions the decades before, if the government was not killing them off as political prisoners.

    In the 1980s Ethiopia became the flashpoint for hunger and starvation. I believe that the world came to the fore, including very famous rock artists from the United States and Great Britain, and to my personal satisfaction my church did a special fast, we being a few million worldwide able to forego a couple meals for the benefit of those suffering in East Africa. 

    Hunger has been a problem since then, in places of catastrophe, in places of war and privation, economic austerity and drought. Swaths across Africa, other parts of Asia, even dipping into the Western Hemisphere, especially troubled Haiti or at times a Central American country or Venezuela, or parts of economically deprived Brazil.

    In the last two years we have seen Gaza Strip, the poor Palestinians crammed and cramped, desperately fighting and dying for wheat or any scrap of food.

    It is too much, 2025. Too much.

    Can we get past this plight in the world, ever, once and for all?

    Please.

    We pray, we work, we sweat, we fight, we bleed, we argue, we cajole, we... too often do not care, because we are fat and happy. We are myopic, and we let our brothers and sisters wither and die.

    I guess that is what we need to eliminate: apathy and ignorance of the human condition.

Writing Out a Love Tale - Song

Writing Out a Love Tale

Writing out a love tale

After time

I got words and thoughts and feelings

that don't rhyme

I can't get away away from me, I can't help but come to you

I'm a kid in the 5 and Cent store; I need a dime

You were there late at night when I came home

Kids or no, you always took me in

You smiled with great open eyes

Food and shelter were the constant prize

Most of all was your gentle touch

You were mine!

Writing out a love tale

 Over time

 My words and thoughts and feelings

They are mine

But in every step and blessing

I see you with me now caressing

I can't stop where I started

Without you.

There were moments where we loved so passionately

A few times where we had to be broke free

You and I made the music

We played along and mused it

We could run and play 

And sleep till the next day.

Writing out a love tale

In this time

I wish to grant you everything sublime

You deserve the best to offer

 As a wife, a mom, a daughter

You're the choicest one I've known, all my life.

What more can be said of us?

There's you and me, the rest: all the fuss

I can't corner you deep in

You must permit me to win

Your heart, your hopes, some dreams

I plead, Dear Lord: you must!

Writing out a love song

After time

I can sing and court your favor

So many things that we can savor

I just hope and pray

That you'll be mine today.

 

 Sharing the Planet with Others, Flora and Fauna

    Many kids become fascinated with dinosaurs and learn about how those gigantic beasts from yesteryear are part of the past world and it becomes a vivid part of their intellectual and active imaginations. The rest of us pay more attention to current animals, including humans, that share our planet in our respective environments, be they humid subtropical, or dry desert, both cold and hot kinds, and all the different climates and topographies.

    We listen to a lot of various voices on how to share the resources of our vast, yet limited earth. 

    Milton Friedman, Dave Ramsey, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong.  There are thousands of others.

    Ecologists wish us to preserve and clean up the environment. 

    Makes sense.

    We all should learn to share our shared earth. Heavens, and even the greater known universe.

    Share it. Do not hurt it.

 Living By the Big Mountains

    What percentage of humanity lives by large mountains? Some live high up in them, which is a much smaller number of people. Most Utahns live by the large mountains, like my sister in Salt Lake City. I lived and worked in the Wasatch Front of Utah for five years.

    Before that I lived in Chile, sometimes living closer to the Andes or the Cordillera of Nahuelbuta, not large mountains but smaller, a chain closer to the ocean of the Pacific.

    Then I moved to the San Bernardino Inland Valley by the mountains, and later in Los Angeles and Monterey I lived not too far from other mountain ranges. In the east coast I have lived farther away. I can see some Blue Ridge Mountains, but they are more aggrandized hills.

    More later. More about us fortunate or whatever humans who get to live on or near the mountains...

Distraction - Another Type of Motivation, Learning, Growth

    What is a distraction? It can be a temptation, sure. Especially if the distraction bleeds into other parts of life where it distracts to the point and it takes a person away from their normal duties or obligations.

    This could be food, or drugs, or entertainment, or another person or thing. Even work, making money could be an unhealthy distraction. All things can distract, be it physical or mental, or emotional.

    Distractions do not have to be truly tempting, or pernicious. For me, there is sports that we compete in, which is healthy, which can be a part of hobbies or exercises. However, some of these habits or entertainments can be beyond the pail, therefore, an ineffective distraction. If I watch too much college football, then that could be a detrimental distraction.

    It is normal to have distractions in life. Many or all of us go through them.

    Sometimes they are needed to teach us lessons, to grow with it, resist it, be motivated or educated by it.

    May we get through the worst or hardest distractions, and be the better for it.

    Make sense? I think that I have made it through it many distractions; maybe I have a few more to go through? Perhaps I have made it through the biggest ones?

    

    Possibly. 

    We learn, we grow, and we must learn to forgive or move on past the problems beset upon ourselves and others. We have to pardon our own faults and those of others.

    That is healthy and normal.

    And again, maybe certain distractions are meant to make us stronger, wiser, better. Getting past these temptations or side distractions help us move ahead and put us where we are supposed to be.

    Was Jesus tempted? Yes? Was Siddhartha Gautama? Were all people, at one point or another, distracted and way laid?

    Yes. All of the above.

    Join the human race. Do not be too distracted by distractions. Take them in stride and keep going!

    Love yourself and others, and head to the main thing, which is where you and I are supposed to be.

You Chose Me - Looking for a Tune, Melody, Chords

 You Chose Me

This is me speaking to you

I love you; I have loved you so long

All my life, all I wanted was to serve you

Be yours, you were mine, you and me: us

Together. 

United.

Complete and whole.

You and I.

What have I done? Have I betrayed your trust?

What have I wrought? Did I fall again?

Have I failed? Did I lose it all?

Where am I now? Why do I feel lost?

You found me. I found you... You allowed me to find myself.

I am found through you.

I look for your face, your smiling countenance

I see your eyes, they evince warmth and grace.

You look upon me, a broken man.

Once a boy, who moved on from then.

I am yours, I cannot look elsewhere.

You are the Light, the One beyond compare.

You Chose me.

I know it happened 

You kept accepting me

Your love takes me back again

I love you, I cannot give up now!

I will pray, I will worship you!

You are the One, the Only One that 

loves, with complete mercy

I tripped again last night

Fell to the floor, 

Bruised my shin and torso

maybe  more.

You have seen me 

Battered, beaten

Crying at your door

You loved me

Evermore.

I cannot repay you

I cannot forsake you.

I am yours.

I am yours. 

And, you have made me Chosen.

You have chosen me.

Let me be yours.

Let me be yours!

Because, you chose me.

What Has the Book of Mormon Taught Me? Sometimes Hard to Qualify

    1. Growing up with it as a child, the Book of Mormon showed me that the Holy Bible was true. Many of my cohorts distrusted the validity of the Old and New Testaments. I believed in them as they were taught to me, as the Book of Mormon validates.

    2. It marked me as different. We as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are effectively the only religion to believe in this book, which makes us unique.

    3. Jesus has a plan, even though there are hard times. Individually and collectively, we do have some trials and battles to fight. And endure. 

    There is a bit more. Perhaps dozens more?

    To be continued.

Dream of the Blue Turtles - Prefigurations

 Dream of the Blue Turtles - A Prefiguration

    I have been accused of writing a lot about my first daughter, and much less about my second girl. Why could this be? My first girl, our first baby, made a big difference in my life. It altered things, as they say that happens to us in parenthood. The second girl enhanced life, my life and that of others; things grew and grew from there. But the first one, the pioneer, has made big emotional impacts on me that I notice, I suppose, more. This can be good and bad. Or at least things that I note in writing. Like here in this form. 

    However, the second daughter has done some things that are new and innovative in her own right, not to be outdone or ignored by me or others. All that said, I love them both a great deal-- as much as a dad can? That says it all for me. I love them both; there is no comparison in the scheme of things. I write about one, but I can very much apply it to both. So, take heart, my second daughters. Nothing and no one compares to you. Except of course, my one true love, who is my wife... But a wife and progeny are very different things. People in our lives have different effects on us. Hence, my little essay or foray here:

    The Dream of the Blue Turtles!

    Here goes.

    Sting became my favorite singer, likely when he produced his first solo album, by the name which I have shared. We all knew and loved his Police work, for over a decade, which was always catchy, fun, and in my opinion, genius. Walking on the Moon. Invisible Sun. On and on. Dee doo doo da. Who could make better stuff? 

    Sting himself could do better, as a solo artist, which occurred officially on 17 June 1985, about the time I left my 8th grade. That summer was a transitional time for me. Perhaps I bought the album in downtown Bloomington at Karma's or Rosco's, or another music store. It was an LP, a long play, vinyl as they tend to call them in the last decades since record albums are no longer the main way to listen to our favorite songs. For most people. We listen to Artificial Intelligence and streaming devices on smart phones and devices and things from the cloud, or the WiFi, or the next data center over.

    This 1985 solo album. It became a part of me. Its words, its tunes, its messages. The dreams derived from it.

    I listened to the music and it spoke to me. There were songs about the Russians, and Chileans, and an Englishman in New York, and the best one, my favorite, was a deep, nostalgic song about walking over the battlements of yesteryear, which perhaps I had been doing for a couple of years. "If I Built a Fortress. Around your heart. Encircled you in trenches of barbed wire."

    Divorce in a family is rarely nice, rarely fun, rarely without its share of down times and punctures in normalcy, without some battles that are waged in the heart and the brain. I think that is something that my wife and I can agree on, both being children of divorce. How to fight the battles of the heart? Yell at a chair? Eat more ice cream? Watch comedy late at night to escape the doldrums of the house that no longer contains your mom? Or your dad. They have gone elsewhere.

    We all lose things and people in our life. Some losses come with more pain and regret. We move on and move along, parts of us changing and mending or mending over. I still kept my mom, but perhaps parts of me turned off, like for domestic chores. Maybe some of those things lost their importance to me, perhaps they soured in my head or heart. What good is a nicely cooked meal or a clean and pristine toilet, or carpet, or folded clothes if you cannot be with your mom and dad?

    What kind of life was that? Different, and sometimes sad, for sure. She was a few blocks away, and would be at work and church, and we would spend some days together weekly. Vacations. Food tastes good, but not quite as good as when we dined as a family. We would hang up the phone, say our family prayer and listen to the busy tone ring from the wall phone receiver. Together, as a family.

    That was the past. A different life. I am not asking for pity or some kind of magical pill to overcome that melancholy or wistfulness for the past. Just understanding. Some things do not motivate me. Sorry, some things become somewhat annoying. Cook it this way! Clean it this way. Sure, fine. Do that. Do all those things. Separate and move on. Let the child go. Let her move on, even though she is an innocent baby. Well, that was another past chapter...

    With time the time heals, and maybe the domestic chores seemed fine, innocuous, perhaps they did not contain poisonous barbs of spite and remorse. What have you done? I did this, said proudly and with hubris.

    I don't know. Perhaps I am just making this all up.

    Well, this is a funny turn! This write-up was supposed to be about my daughter and I, and the connection to turtles, the imaginary blue turtles of the younger me, and the real turtle that my daughter scooped up this morning to take far away to the Rocky Mountains. How we are connected by these funny animals, resilient and cute and lumpy. This is about her and me, and change and time passing, why we matter in ways that are hard to explain.

    Right? 

    About me and her. My first born, the one whom we carried to Los Angeles, where she crawled and walked and got lost at church, us parents scrambling the entire premises for her. The one we absconded down to Mexico with her vaccine records but no photo ID, so the Vietnamese border guard would reprimand us that our papers could be for a dog, not a little human. The little girl we brought to the Spanish branch at the Waterman building, who resisted the Spanish we had tried to speak to her her first two years, but we relented to speak English so that she would finally speak her little girl words. The little pre-schooler we took to Chile, pushing her about in a stroller with her baby sister, she pleading for ice cream at the corner neighborhood food shop. Pretty much every day.

    The little girl we placed in kindergarten in northern Virginia, going to the nearby bus stop in sun, snow, and rain, with the little playmates who lived in our apartment complex. The little girl who followed us, from coast to coast, who made up stories, took care of her younger siblings, singing, playing, creating, dreaming.

    Yes, and she and I dreamt of blue turtles, I am sure. She grew and grew, as we aged and matured. As parents, as kids, as a family, as a unit.

    I acquired a West African Mud turtle a few years back, thinking that this might appease the youngest daughter (not yet mentioned till now.) Then it grew on the oldest. Leaving today.

    They both went in tandem. A nice pair. The owner and the owned. Off to far away big grown up land.

    We celebrate her! Them! Us. We have made it thus far.

    We will be together, as another song of Sting proclaims from the same solo album. About love, family, togetherness.

    Together! "We'll be together tonight."

    Yes, this life is all about dreaming of the blue turtles.

    Long live them! And us. I still hope that the Russians love their children, too. That the women dancing alone can achieve some type of solace. I pray that the mines that we have laid may overcome the chasms of what we want, wish for, and dream of. May we bridge the chasms of life and death, separation and longing.

    I love the turtles. I love those that love them. It will never end, these dreams. 

    I will always love those dreams of yesteryear. Yesterday was far off, even within a few short years of when things were normal. Things change. We change. The songs come close to how we do, how we think, what we hope for and fear.

    All the songs. They all come back to me, you, us.

    My daughter. My daughters. All of them.

    With me, forever.