I read that somewhere recently…
Them’s words to live by.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Maybe you wonder how I can spend
so much time in this corner booth…
It’s easy, really, I have nowhere else I need to be,
this place is nicer than my place,
and I see people here,
years ago I met my friend here
almost every day,
I miss his cheerful contemplation
of so many things.
I’m alone now,
but not lonely,
I think about the times of my life
and the people I shared it with,
we shared good times in this booth,
and we shared the sadness we couldn’t avoid,
it’s a comfort being here,
the waitress knows my name, of course,
and she knows what I like to eat…
I didn’t think I would become
the old man in the corner booth.
You don’t think you’re going to be like me.
March 26, 2023
Inspired by “Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant”
by Billy Collins, as published in “Poem of the Day,” August 21, 2022,
by Poetry Foundation
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Temple Grandin (b1947)
Foreword by Oliver Sacks
New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 1995, 2nd ed. 2006
270 pages
Thinking in Pictures is a calmly important book.
Probably you don’t know much about autism. Temple Grandin knows a lot, and she can teach you about the people who live lives that are different from yours. Really.
“Different, but not less.” That’s what her science teacher said about her.
She writes in a reserved tone, offering a grand sweep of what was known about autism in the mid 1990s and again in the mid 2000s. She talks about the high points and the low points of the rocky road of her life.
Temple Grandin talks with precocious understanding about animals. You’ll learn from this element as well.
I re-learned this very sobering truth: nearly everyone doesn’t experience the world the same way I do.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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The Wannsee Conference in Hitler’s Germany, January 1942
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth (2001)
Here’s the short version: watching Conspiracy is like drinking molten lead.
Conspiracy is an almost flawless portrayal of naked evil being done by powerful men, each of whom has lost or abandoned his moral compass.
It is dry, withering, completely transparent, all too believable—not merely because we know it’s all true. We know that there are powerful men and women alive today who are willing to do blasphemously wrong things like killing 6 million Jews.
Conspiracy dramatizes the Wannsee Conference that first officially articulated the Final Solution for the Jews of Europe: the Holocaust.
Stanley Tucci as SS Major Adolph Eichmann, Kenneth Branagh as Hitler’s Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich, Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (a lawyer who wrote the racist Nuremberg Laws), and 12 others show how it was probably done—almost without passion—around a long conference table in a manor house outside Berlin. One of the participants failed to destroy his copy of the minutes. This surviving document was used in the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials.
Conspiracy is frightening, horrifying, and disgusting. It is a perfection of the evil that men can do.
The antidote for watching it is simple: do a good thing every day.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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I’ll keep moving, I know I will.
I know I can’t remember how to go back.
I’ll keep looking for the place
I want to turn to,
I know that I can go on.
I know I can’t foresee
the final bend in this road.
I’ll keep asking how to get there.
I know there’s a place
where I can be happy,
I know I’ll find it.
I know I will.
June 25, 2019
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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It’s not about the candles and the cake,
it’s not about singing
the same old song anymore,
it’s not about the date anymore,
not an event,
not a stopping place—
it’s another reminder that a year
is a long time to live,
and a short time to be in love,
it’s a marker on the trail,
and the trail is rising,
and the mountains are behind us,
and the oceans, yes, and many mysteries…
Just ahead, the path turns again, as always,
and we do not see much of the morrow,
and naught of the waiting tomorrows,
but we see the coming of our latter days,
and we can sing yesterday’s songs
at each new dawn,
and sing them again and again and again,
and add new words at each new sunset…
May 8, 2017
I confess, I didn’t forget to get a card—I couldn’t find a card that I wanted to give. You can guess whose birthday I was celebrating. I decided to write a birthday poem that doesn’t actually mention “birthday” and skips all the smarmy stuff and doesn’t bother with the “you’re only as old as you feel” stuff and the “omigawd, how many candles are on your cake?” stuff. A birthday is a day in our lives. We celebrated our lives together. Every day.
My poem “I forgot to get a card…” was published in my fifth collection of 53 poems, My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems. You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), or get it free in Kindle Unlimited (search for “Richard Carl Subber”).
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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