Hello Again from Rosseau:

I think it was Gladstone of whom someone once wrote “he was intoxicated with the exuberance of his own vociferousness”, and again, “he never said anything he could say in one word in less than ten”. Forgive me, but I relate  to William Ewart G. I am in love with words and sometimes I get lost more in the words than in what I am trying to say. It really is all terribly narcissistic and self-indulgent. 

Today is Victoria’s true birthday and I am lost in the woods, the rocks and the lakes. The winter has taken a terrible toll this year as I am only beginning to discover. My boathouse dock has been murdered by the ice, with even steel beams pushed around under water.  But today it is hard to feel too down, the sun is out, the lake is calm, and the weather very warm, circa 78 in the sun. It’s a good day to be alive.  The trees have awakened, and the forsythia is bright yellow. Tonight I am off to the Lake Jo Club and to Water’s Edge for dinner. My oldest is home for a few days from LA and I am in heaven. We just learned he graduated summa cum laude on the MBA, and I am mucho proud of him! Now law school in August, and hopefully it ends.

Jonathan is more digitally attuned than I am. He gave me my website www.whistpersfrombablyton.com a few years ago as a birthday present.  This morning he insisted I  watch a U-Tube video of his Uncle Don Brushett, who is  Janet Parker`s  husband, and I reflect now on  our contrasting worlds .  Don is a great guy, an excellent and caring Physician who practices family medicine  in Houlton, Maine, and the father of three really good and successful kids.   He also writes songs and plays the guitar, and there he was on U-Tube.  He is playing the guitar and singing, his daughter also a physician is playing the banjo, and another son is playing the harmonica.  Not bad I noted out loud, not bad at all. They are a family who do things together and enjoy each other. But given me, you know I will not stop there. I compare and contrast and reflect and analyse, not in a who`s  better than whom sense, that stage of my life was buried long ago. However the differences between us are so radical, so apparent and so very interesting. Don is retiring, and I won`t.  Don seems to want to be Jimmy Buffet and I still want to be Warren Buffet. Don loves the rural universe and I love the city. He is a humanist and I have turned into a capitalist. His father was a Methodist Minister and I was a Jesuit Priest, and both of us linked up with families with a  maternal grandfather who was an ordained Catholic Deacon and left that world when it was not an easy thing to do and became a physician, fathering a large family including our own Duncan Sharpe of fond memory.  Life is am an amazing pilgrimage to where one never knows.  Any one of you have a video up on U-Tube yet?