Cicada Lesson

It has been a busy time here, as I imagine it has been for all of you.  A week ago Saturday, we held the interment service for my father.  The Deacon did a nice job and it was very nice to have my two aunts and a number of cousins from my father’s side join us.  More Birminghams than we’ve ever had in the house!  We talked a lot about family history – much of which was unknown to me before.  And, we discovered that my son David is the only boy of his generation in the rather large Birmingham clan.  So it is up to him to carry on the family name!

And so, we moved on to the busy holiday week, with Passover and Easter just days apart.  Robbie and David made a trip to Richmond, but since I had chemo on Tuesday, I stayed home and made the matzo ball soup and gefilte fish!  And then to round out a busy week, Vicki’s birthday was Monday (19!) so we trekked up to Morningside Heights for dinner with her.  She’s doing really well at school and, for me anyway, her freshman year seems to have just zoomed by.

I got a little reading in while the house was empty, finishing off a biography of J.D. Salinger.  It was quite interesting to get a sense of the man who wrote the quintessential 20^th Century American novel and then became the quintessential American recluse.  I did not know, for instance, that he was a war hero.  He landed at D-Day, fought through the Battle of the Bulge and liberated concentration camps.  In fact, one of his duties was interrogation of prisoners and locals in both France and Germany since he spoke both French and German.  The biographer theorizes that his traumatic war experiences, being so at odds with his elite Upper West Side upbringing, solidified his mission to write about the phoniness and pettiness of American culture.  In any event, a good read, if you like bios – it was just written last year (as you may know, Salinger died at age 91 in 2010). 

Another interesting tidbit I got from the book was that Salinger had a great interest in Zen and Yoga after the war and it quoted a Haiku he particularly liked by the poet Matsuo Basho.  it reads:

Nothing in the song

of the cicada anticipates
how soon it will die.

I like it very much myself.  It might strike one as a bit morbid, but I find it inspirational.  The Cicada sings long and loud for all its short life.  Living it to the fullest without recognition of its brevity.  That’s a good philosophy.  And so, I leave you with that thought – live loudly, fully and without hesitation!