BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Oct 29, 2013.

Sent to me by LIZ  

Now if only we can all internalize this piece of wisdom.

A 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud man, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o'clock, with his hair fashionably combed and shaved perfectly, even though he is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today.

 

His wife of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, he smiled sweetly when told his room was ready.

 

As he maneuvered his walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of his tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on his window.

 

I love it,' he stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.

 

Mr. Jones, you haven't seen the room; just wait..'

 

'That doesn't have anything to do with it,' he replied.

 Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time.

 

Whether I like my room or not doesn't depend on how the furniture is arranged .. it's how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it.

 

'It's a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice;

 

I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do.

 

Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I'll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I've stored away.. Just for this time in my life..

 

Old age is like a bank account. You withdraw from what you've put in.

 

So, my advice to you would be to deposit a lot of happiness in the bank account of memories!

 

Thank you for your part in filling my Memory Bank.

 

I am still depositing.

'Remember the five simple rules to be happy:

1. Free your heart from hatred.

2. Free your mind from worries.

3. Live simply.

4. Give more.

5. Expect less.

 

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan 

No matter where you are in life, there's always more journey ahead.

Nelson Mandela

We must all care for one another--this is our fate in life. But we must also care for ourselves, which means we must be careful in our decisions, careful in our relationships, careful in what we say. We must manage our lives carefully, in order to avoid becoming victims of our own doing. 

Nelson Mandela.

The test of a first rate mind is to hold two opposed ideas in mind and still retain the ability to function. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

From "BUCK," a memoir  of growing up in the Philadelphia Ghetto by M K Asante. He is a major Hip-Hop artist. 

• "There's a war between two wolves inside everybody. One wolf is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego. The other wolf is good. It's love, peace beauty, happiness truth, joy, hope, humility, kindness, and empathy."

           The boy asks, 'In the story of the wolves inside everybody, who wins between              the two  wolves?'

       "The one you feed."  

• "At exactly what point do you start to realize  that life without knowledge is death in disguise?"  K.O.S. 
•  
• "He's a politician. It's like being a hooker,  You can't be a good one unless you can pretend to like people while you're fucking them." 
• 
  
• "Pain is weakness leaving the body."
• 
  
• Love is learning the song in someone's heart and singing it to them when they forget." 
• 
  
• "You got three things," he says. "Good, fast and cheap...but you can have only two at any given time. So, if it's fast and cheap, it ain't good. If it's good and cheap, it ain't fast." He hands me the work. "This right here: fast and good...not cheap."

Initials

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

E.M. Forster
T.S.  Eliot
D.H.  Lawrence
A.E.  Housman

J.M.  Synge
W.B. Yeats
W.H. Auden
J.B.  Priestley

W.C. Handy 
T.C.  Boyle
J.M. Coetzee 

W.E.B. Du Bois

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Man Ray   as a boy lived on Debevoise St Brooklyn, near Katz Drug Store.

 

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

There are several people who do not visit me in my dreams. My mother, for instance, never comes. My father lets me know the latest about her, but I'd like to ee her too. Danny Greenberg often visits, usually with Randelman.  An odd pair-- one strictly sports, the other still the Chief of Protocol. Randelman never mentions Mary. There are others who visit, some from very far back. Harold Ruderfer and Bob Berman, always together, always cheerful.Dick Goldstein, who I barely knew at HM.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com



Far away, a man on the beach
With a flashlight.
What does he think about?

'Whatever death is
Life is worth more.'

You who are tied to me by friendship's chain,
And with whom together we kept
Wide awake so many nights;
You may want to
Mourn over my corpse.

But I say to my friends
Do not mourn me;
You know that with us
It was mostly laughs;
And mourning would strike
Against our normal selves.

But, for sure, come out to me,
And as you stand over my grave,
Cheerfully tell the jokes
We told ourselves.


And laugh some more
And mention all the old names
And know that your blood ran in mine;



---------------------------
Inspired by Satantango, a Hungarian Film.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Considering my predicament a friend writes: 


"I had a cousin who took a cake to her boyfriend when he was in the big house – probably little house, as the family never amounted to that much." 

Thanks for the thought-- 

descriptive words for Suzie

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
this is only a partial list


betrayer

bully 

confabulator

deceiver


denouncer

distorter

exaggerator 

grandiose

liar

paranoid 

prevaricator 

plays the victim

rancorous

vengeful

victimizes

vilifying

vindictive

vituperative

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Que palabra dire

                                                             WHICH WORD SHOULD I USE

Para convencerte

                                                              TO CONVINCE YOU

Que toda mi dicha

                                                               THAT ALL MY HAPPINESS

Esta en quererte.

                                                               IS IN LOVING YOU?

Tuyo, es mi Corazon.

                                                               MY HEART IS YOURS.

El supura del amor

                                                                 HE OOZES OF LOVE

Es amargo como la hiel

                                                                 IT IS BITTER AS GALL

Pero en clertas canciones

                                                                 BUT IN CERTAIN SONGS

Endulza como la miel

                                                                 SWEETENS LIKE HONEY.

Recuerdas  cuando pusiste

                                                                  REMEMBER WHEN YOU PUT

Tus manos sobre las mias

                                                                  YOUR HANDS ON MINE

Y llorandoi me decias

                                                                 AND CRYING YOU WERE SAYING

Que nunco me olividarias.

                                                                THAT YOU’LL NEVER FORGET ME.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

A few words from Rainer Maria Rilke:

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

And this quote was the epigraph at the beginning of Chapter Five: Personality --

“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

 Rainer Maria Rilke

It's off.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

It's late, but I just found this:

Hal Randleman ’56, Award-Winning Television

Commercial Director and Producer

Hal Randelman ’56 whose noted career at Grey Advertising

earned him honors in the television commercial industry, passed

away on September 27, 2008 following a long and courageous

battle with cancer.

A graduate of Horace Mann School and the University of Michigan

Randelman began his professional life with the Ed Sullivan Show, then

moved on to Grey Advertising in New York City. In 1983 he formed his

own production company, Hal Randelman Productions. Relocating

to Naples, FL in 2001 and then to Los Angeles in 2005, in Florida he

directed and acted in a number of theater productions as part of the

Naples Players. He was the loving husband of Mary Urrutia Randel

-man, who passed away several weeks later, in November 2008. The

couple is survived by son Craig, daughter Nicole, and beloved dog, Boomer. 

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

A few words from Herman Melville

The Lee Shore, from Moby Dick

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God --so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing --straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

The Lee Shore, from Moby Dick

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God --so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing --straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

gee i like to think of dead
by e e cummings

gee i like to think of dead it means nearer because deeper
firmer since darker than little round water at one end of
the well       it's too cool to be crooked and it's too firm
to be hard but it's sharp and it's thick and it loves,      every
old thing falls in rosebugs and jackknives and kittens and
pennies they all sit there looking at each other having the
fastest time because they've never met before

dead's more even than how many ways of sitting on
your head your unnatural hair has in the morning

dead's clever too like POF goes the alarm off and the
little striker having the best time tickling away every-
body's brain so everybody just puts out their finger
and they stuff the poor thing all full of fingers

dead has a smile like the nicest man you've never met
who maybe winks at you in a streetcar and you pretend
you don't but really you do see and you are My how
glad he winked and hope he'll do it again

or if it talks about you somewhere behind your back it
makes your neck feel all pleasant and stoopid      and if
dead says may i have this one and was never intro-
duced you say Yes because you know you want it to
dance with you and it wants to and it can dance and
Whocares

dead's fine like hands do you see that water flowerpots
in windows but they live higher in their house than
you so that's all you see but you don't want to

dead's happy like the way underclothes All so differ-
ently solemn and inti and sitting on one string

dead never says my dear,Time for your musiclesson
and you like music and to have somebody play who
can but you know you never can and why have to?

dead's nice like a dance where you danced simple hours
and you take all your prickley-clothes off and squeeze-
into-largeness without one word      and you lie still as
anything      in largeness and this largeness begins to
give you,the dance all over again and you,feel all again
all over the way men you liked made you feel when they
touched you(but that's not all)because largeness tells
you so you can feel what you made,men feel when,you
touched,them

dead's sorry like a thistlefluff-thing which goes land-
ing away all by himself on somebody's roof or some-
thing where who-ever-heard-of-growing and nobody
expects you to anyway

dead says come with me he says(and why ever not)into
the round well and see the kitten and the penny and
the jackknife and the rosebug
                                and you say Sure you
say  (like that)  sure i'll come with you you say for i
like kittens i do and jackknives i do and pennies i do
and rosebugs i do 

e.e.cummings 

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
 

Wallace Stevens

 

Sent to me by John Schupf 

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

John Schupf

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be The scholar to whom his book is true,

to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning,

part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world.

In which there is no other meaning,

itself Is calm, itself is summer and night,

itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens"