For a Friend

We recently had a wonderful visit with an old friend, Ted. We didn’t know it at the time, but that would be our last visit together. Ted died last week. We’ll treasure that visit, as well as the many conversations and great laughs we’ve had over the years.

At one point during our recent get-together, the conversation turned to children’s books, and Ted mentioned he recently reread The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. With thoughts of Ted this morning, here’s another bit of Silverstein, from the title poem of the collection Where the Sidewalk Ends:

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

You can read the full poem here.

And perhaps to wrap this post on a more Ted-like note, here’s another well-loved Silverstein poem (all the more appropriate given the character’s name):

Teddy said it was a hat,
So I put it on.
Now Dad is saying,
“Where the heck’s
the toilet plunger gone?”
—by Shel Silverstein

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

—Mary Oliver, in the essay “Of Power and Time,”
Blue Pastures, 1995, Harvest Books/Harcourt