I’m on that sinking ship as well. Covid preempted our 50th class reunion, but I don’t think there’s much enthusiasm for getting together again. Its difficult to witness the ravages of time in one’s mirror, but that’s just a reflection. Seeing your friends in similar decline makes it very real.
I feel that fear for our nation as well. I also feel a measure of guilt for leaving this nation in such a state of disrepair, physically and morally. I realize that we baby boomers did’t start the fire, but we didn’t really try to fight it. During the decades of our ascendancy we turned selfish and short-sighted. Our parents generation built interstate highways, thousands of schools, cleaned up polluted skies and rivers, saved species from extinction, landed on the moon and dealt acid rain and depleted ozone, passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and provided some measure of medical care for the elderly.
wonderful writing today! I just don't like these criticisms of you I read in your posts. Not one in a million could capture for all of us as you do the way we feel at being alive right now in our twilight years. Ignore them. Keep writing for us. We love your mind and heart.
I have just recently been introduced to GK & Friends. Reading your emails is very much like listening to News from Lake Wobegon on PHC, a show I miss always but most acutely every Saturday at 6:00 p.m. It is scary how easily I can hear your voice in my head, speaking the words of this email.
This resonated with me so much. Thank you for continuing to articulate for so many of us the sentiments from long ago and how they mesh with today’s world. It kinda blows my mind.
I hope more young people will step up and run for office. Fresh, forward-thinking leadership is needed. I’m a fan of Andrew Yang. Hope he keeps going. God Bless Joe Biden and his team. I think they’re doing well in spite of the frozen in time, archaic, mostly Republican members of Congress who are entrenched in the status quo and its payoffs. I’m a Progressive. For me, that means I believe we can do better and should strive to do better. There’s room for improvement. Thanks again.
Tam mui stretchem po rekoyu! When I came to Upstate New York, I was lonely for the companionship that I used to have with coworkers in California. One Friday afternoon I prayed for some sort of "community" - I assumed it would be a religious group, to have fellowship with. At one o'clock, the exact same time, a Ukrainian immigrant woman learned she had failed her US Citizenship exam. She prayed for an American who knew Russian to come to her church, and to help her pass her Citizenship exam retest.
In the grocery store on Saturday, I heard a mother speaking a Slavic language to her kids. I asked if she spoke Russian, and said that I missed hearing that language. Her husband, a deacon in the Slavic Full Gospel Church, found me and invited me to come to church on Sunday.
When I got there, they seated me next to the one church member who had studied English in the Ukraine. We quickly became best friends. That day, as I sat in the second row, I felt a sharp pecking on my shoulder. When I turned around, an extravagantly dressed woman in a real fur hat invited me to lunch after the service. At her house, she quickly outlined her predicament. I began helping her to understand about Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches that afternoon. Within six months, she successfully passed her test and received her Green Card.
That was the start of my decade-long connection with this Pentecostal immigrant church. I was readily included in weddings, birthday parties and funerals. At every funeral, we were sure to sing "Shall We Gather By the River" as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
It might seem strange to hear these Ukrainian immigrants singing distinctly "English language Protestant songs. There were several of them: Kak Tui Velik! = "How Great Thou Art;" "Ne Menai Mne Me Space" = "Do Not Pass Me By", "The Little Brown Church in the Dell" come to mind, too. There was a rational connection, though. In the early 1900s, a Ukrainian immigrant had been walking the streets of Chicago when a street-corner evangelist stopped him. He was so impressed that he began going to the Moody Bible Institute. Eventually he became a preacher and returned to the Ukraine. He translated and introduced the American hymns that he had loved the best from that epoch. And here I was, a century later, a born American singing American hymns in a foreign language in an immigrant church - because of one travelling man!
"It's a small world, after all!" For most of us, I think we envision Brazilians in the jungles of the Amazon, Swiss climbing the Matterhorn, and Hindus bathing in the Ganges. It helps us form clear, individual images to fill our mind banks with. But the reality is more complex than that. There are all these small, even one-person tendrils joining us internationally, like morning glory vines weaving among cedar trees. We are One World, and even one person can make a difference!
GK: I’m glad you cried. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be fully present to the autumn. I could look at that photograph of the river all day long. Is there attribution for it? Would I be free to paint it?
Most of us have days like that sometimes. It's part of the onus of being human. Listening to your old shows and reading your books help me to feel better when everything seems to be falling down around my head. I think the country is changing, not dying - I'm hoping with all I'm worth that the change will ultimately be good.
Beautiful. You are Legend, GK.
I’m on that sinking ship as well. Covid preempted our 50th class reunion, but I don’t think there’s much enthusiasm for getting together again. Its difficult to witness the ravages of time in one’s mirror, but that’s just a reflection. Seeing your friends in similar decline makes it very real.
I feel that fear for our nation as well. I also feel a measure of guilt for leaving this nation in such a state of disrepair, physically and morally. I realize that we baby boomers did’t start the fire, but we didn’t really try to fight it. During the decades of our ascendancy we turned selfish and short-sighted. Our parents generation built interstate highways, thousands of schools, cleaned up polluted skies and rivers, saved species from extinction, landed on the moon and dealt acid rain and depleted ozone, passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and provided some measure of medical care for the elderly.
Since we took over…not so much.
wonderful writing today! I just don't like these criticisms of you I read in your posts. Not one in a million could capture for all of us as you do the way we feel at being alive right now in our twilight years. Ignore them. Keep writing for us. We love your mind and heart.
I have just recently been introduced to GK & Friends. Reading your emails is very much like listening to News from Lake Wobegon on PHC, a show I miss always but most acutely every Saturday at 6:00 p.m. It is scary how easily I can hear your voice in my head, speaking the words of this email.
This resonated with me so much. Thank you for continuing to articulate for so many of us the sentiments from long ago and how they mesh with today’s world. It kinda blows my mind.
I hope more young people will step up and run for office. Fresh, forward-thinking leadership is needed. I’m a fan of Andrew Yang. Hope he keeps going. God Bless Joe Biden and his team. I think they’re doing well in spite of the frozen in time, archaic, mostly Republican members of Congress who are entrenched in the status quo and its payoffs. I’m a Progressive. For me, that means I believe we can do better and should strive to do better. There’s room for improvement. Thanks again.
Tam mui stretchem po rekoyu! When I came to Upstate New York, I was lonely for the companionship that I used to have with coworkers in California. One Friday afternoon I prayed for some sort of "community" - I assumed it would be a religious group, to have fellowship with. At one o'clock, the exact same time, a Ukrainian immigrant woman learned she had failed her US Citizenship exam. She prayed for an American who knew Russian to come to her church, and to help her pass her Citizenship exam retest.
In the grocery store on Saturday, I heard a mother speaking a Slavic language to her kids. I asked if she spoke Russian, and said that I missed hearing that language. Her husband, a deacon in the Slavic Full Gospel Church, found me and invited me to come to church on Sunday.
When I got there, they seated me next to the one church member who had studied English in the Ukraine. We quickly became best friends. That day, as I sat in the second row, I felt a sharp pecking on my shoulder. When I turned around, an extravagantly dressed woman in a real fur hat invited me to lunch after the service. At her house, she quickly outlined her predicament. I began helping her to understand about Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches that afternoon. Within six months, she successfully passed her test and received her Green Card.
That was the start of my decade-long connection with this Pentecostal immigrant church. I was readily included in weddings, birthday parties and funerals. At every funeral, we were sure to sing "Shall We Gather By the River" as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
It might seem strange to hear these Ukrainian immigrants singing distinctly "English language Protestant songs. There were several of them: Kak Tui Velik! = "How Great Thou Art;" "Ne Menai Mne Me Space" = "Do Not Pass Me By", "The Little Brown Church in the Dell" come to mind, too. There was a rational connection, though. In the early 1900s, a Ukrainian immigrant had been walking the streets of Chicago when a street-corner evangelist stopped him. He was so impressed that he began going to the Moody Bible Institute. Eventually he became a preacher and returned to the Ukraine. He translated and introduced the American hymns that he had loved the best from that epoch. And here I was, a century later, a born American singing American hymns in a foreign language in an immigrant church - because of one travelling man!
"It's a small world, after all!" For most of us, I think we envision Brazilians in the jungles of the Amazon, Swiss climbing the Matterhorn, and Hindus bathing in the Ganges. It helps us form clear, individual images to fill our mind banks with. But the reality is more complex than that. There are all these small, even one-person tendrils joining us internationally, like morning glory vines weaving among cedar trees. We are One World, and even one person can make a difference!
Simply beautiful. So beautiful.
Thanks for all.
GK: I’m glad you cried. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be fully present to the autumn. I could look at that photograph of the river all day long. Is there attribution for it? Would I be free to paint it?
Most of us have days like that sometimes. It's part of the onus of being human. Listening to your old shows and reading your books help me to feel better when everything seems to be falling down around my head. I think the country is changing, not dying - I'm hoping with all I'm worth that the change will ultimately be good.
War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing! This made me sad and then I smiled too. Hope and endless possibilities.