Walk With Me

 

Walk with me.

While I tell you of a life well spent.

You will see me as no other has,

through time, through travel, 

through experience, 

through gains and losses.

 

Walk with me

while we talk of transitions.

Urban parochial grammar school

to suburban public middle school

to rural central high school.

 

Walk with me

To college that offered experience outside books. 

That offered: social, sexual, musical adventures 

beyond my rural high school years.  

College populated by people:

 more urbane, more self-aware,

 more together than I. 

I’ll bring you to the blue school bus

 at the far end of campus,

 to the rehearsals:

 Ed, Bill, Harvey, and me, singing

 folk songs to Bill’s guitar and Harvey’s banjo.  

Singing to ourselves then to the girls we invited.

 

Walk with me 

while I tell you of the Air Force. 

Of seven years: growing, learning, traveling

 finding and losing love then finding it again.

 Of the magic of Istanbul’s Great Bazaar,

 where I never went out the same path

 I entered, no matter how hard I tried. 

 Of the Blue Mosque

 — not a tourist attraction like Hagia Sophia

 — an active place of worship.  

Of how I stopped there every time 

I came to the city, just to meditate

 in the courtyard.

 

Walk with me 

through life changes: 

marriage, a home in Lorton, Virginia, a son,

 a new assignment that disrupted all that.  

House sold, family moved to my hometown,

 house rented there; family settled there.  

A year in Peshawar Pakistan:

 building a new site,

 training the team in analysis,

 the burden and restriction of being

 “essential personnel” for the first six months.  

Called back early by wife’s pleas to congressman.  

Air Force career kaput.

 

Walk with me 

into civilian life: into lucrative computer jobs

 that landed the family in the Hudson Valley.

 A career as a programmer, instructor, manager.

 A marriage dissolved, another born.

 Two sons, two stepdaughters.  

Retiring into my own business.

Gaining daughters, losing one son to anger. 

Watching, helping the others grow

 into awesome successful adults.  

 

Walk with me

As I look at my life.

Five grandchildren. 

Two great-grandchildren. 

Retired from all jobs.  

Writing books, taking pictures, selling both.  

House/cars all paid. 

 

Walk with me

toward the end.  

Through aging and illness, 

with a body that no longer:

 climbs on a bike,

 walks long distances,

 builds things,

 steps on a ladder.  

A body that spends quiet time:

 writing, remembering,

 waiting — by not waiting —

for the last breath.