First Love

Vulnerable alone.

So the mind casts back in time
And finds you.

But there is no face,
And no hand,
No heart.

What I would do
For a few moments together…
Just a few.

What would I say?
I miss you, oh, I miss you so – yes.

I miss the we that we were,
Once upon a time…
Stars in my eyes.

I would, yes I would,
Cling to those moments
Before they slip away.

But there are no moments,
Flown long ago…
Not even a whisper.

Vulnerable alone.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

Psst, between you and me,
I pretend the little white butterfly,
It’s really you!

Flutters about me in a protective way,
With the lightest of touch.

I know what it’s trying to say:
I love you still – forever — very much.

I know you cannot hear me true,
But I do too – you — oh so much.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

When you arrive in your 70’s and have a few dollars put away, what are you supposed to do with the rest of your life?  The obvious answer is dedicate yourself to the welfare of others — your immediate family certainly, but also your community, your state, your country, and humanity at large.  Use what resources you have left to benefit others, not just yourself.  The old adage is, “You can’t take it with you,” so why not use your assets and the time you have left for the benefit of your fellow man?

In her A Drama of Exile, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense of service which thou renderest.”  One is reminded of the transformation that takes place in the character and personality of Scrooge in Charles Dickins’s A Christmas Carol when Scrooge begins to live for the sake and benefit…

Have you ever done something and then subsequently found out it actually had a name?  It just happened to me in regard to my diet.  You see, I take advantage of an outdoor pool around midday to get in a half hour of swimming laps so that I get the 30-minute aerobic exercise that all the “experts” say keeps you healthy and spry.  But it takes me a half hour to walk there and another half hour to walk back to my digs, and I usually take another half hour dawdling around the pool, so in total it puts a pretty big dent, time wise, in the middle of my day.

It occurred to me last summer that with all this activity around noon, it would be pretty easy for me to just skip lunch.  It was a good idea since I had put on some weight and the nasty…

I stepped off the elevator on the 71^st floor of 1 World Trade Center only seconds before the first airplane hit.   There was one person, a young man, still on the elevator when the doors closed.

The airplane jolted the building in such a sharp fashion that I lost my balance.  I recall having the thought it was pointless to react to the lurch in the building because if the building went over, I was dead anyway.

Only a few feet from the elevator, I was standing near a stairwell entrance, which was situated next to the entrance to my department.  A consultant I knew ran out of the department entrance, dashed to the stairwell door, and opened it hastily.  As he did so, I asked him what he was doing, and he said he had been here in ’93 and was getting the hell out.   Still stunned, I…

Back in the 1950s when TV was still young, all you needed to get content was an antenna.  You put up your antenna and connected it to your TV set, and voila! TV shows appear on the channel you select.  It was magic, and the only cost for getting these TV shows was the cost of the antenna and the TV set.  The ads that accompanied the TV shows as well as the endorsements put out during the shows paid for the service.   One immediately thinks of Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, or Dinah Shore belting out: “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”  And you got it all for free — what a miracle!

Today, you don’t get TV content for free anymore, but the ads are still there.  Think about that for a moment.  In effect, you are paying to watch ads that you don’t really want to…