New Horizons by Max Roy

  What’s On The Telly?   I remember the times when parents worried about the kids watching too much television. It seems like that was long ago in a past century. Things have gotten a lot more complicated since that time. Now it’s all about everybody being on their phone, even when they are walking (or driving, for God’s sake.) Or it’s about gaming! How about AV, living in some otherworldly place when you put on special glasses? What will happen to us when our SMART houses are smarter than we are? The truth is, it’s hard to get through life these days without counting on the proper functioning of some sort of electronic device for us grown-up folks. And often, we need the help of the youngsters just to get us through the day as these devices confound us with their temper tantrums. For myself, I am among the old-fashioned in enjoying the blessings of merely having a dear old television set. Oh yes, I have a computer, and my Bride has an Ipad. And we spend a lot of time doing all

                                                          ​ Coming To Attention!   Life comes at us from all directions. The nitty-gritty of daily living demands our primary attention, earning a wage, satisfying the boss, meeting a partner’s needs, raising the kids when it’s your turn to show up and be a parent. Then there is the job of keeping up to date with all you need to learn just to do all that. It’s a wonder we take the time to eat and sleep. When do we pay attention to what is going on all around us outside the narrow horizons of our lives? Shouldn’t that be an important element, what we do to impact the larger picture, in determining our fate even though our direct effect on events is often very small? And yet what is going on around us can have an impact on us that can be very large. I am in a very different place right now, having in many ways opted out of the typical “rat race” at this stage of my passage. Being retired allows me a perspective on the position most of

                                                     Coming To Terms With Evil We have lived through the year 2021. Will 2022 be better? It is eighty years since 1941. Eighty years ago we were in the midst of World War II. But at that time we were also in the midst of the Nazi effort to annihilate the Jewish race. In the years after 1933 the Nazi party succeeded in engineering a change in the world view of millions of people that some individuals that made up the human race were sub-human and did not deserve to be treated any differently than we treat the animals we consume for food. Such sub-humans could be tolerated only to the extent that they had some utility. Otherwise they did not deserve the least consideration. Indeed, they did not deserve to live. As the government of Germany and later Austria, they brought such a viewpoint to be the law of the land. They had a long list for inclusion, most particularly Jews. But they also included the old and sick and those born with infirm

  Time After Time   Each instant of our being alive is precious to us, but we spend them lavishly. Particularly so, when we are young, and our life stretches out before us, seemingly without end. We pay more attention when we are older, doling out our time with a greater sense of establishing priorities for its expenditure. I have reached an age when I am downright parsimonious. I finger each moment carefully, asking myself if I have squeezed out every bit of juice from the time slipping away from me with such speed. I may look as if I am sitting here doing nothing, but take my word for it, I am massaging each instant as I breathe in and out. I get a sense of how much time has already passed, multiplying my moments by all the human creatures that are alive around me now. And all the creatures who have gone out before, whose husks have been swept out with the trash. Each of our moments are exquisite to us, precious jewels, but placed on a scale which encompasses our vast universe

  A Time Past!   Sometimes when I think about our lives, the mysterious and the mundane, it makes my head spin. There are seasons in our lives, but we are impacted, at the same time, by the larger events in our world which sweep us in one direction or another. These can and do shape the context within which we exist. We, of our immediate generation, were spared the dislocation that wider events brought for the times of our parents. I am thinking about how very fortunate we were in that, and underlining that, I am tempted to tell tales out of school. Some Years ago, we used to flee the gloom of approaching winter that hangs over our hideaway on the shore of the western ocean during that season. Accustomed, even addicted, to sunny days, associated with our upbringing on the Canadian Prairies, we have gloried in the shining light peeking through the sheltering foliage that graces the fifth-floor aerie we have found and furnished in our new abode. Our joys in the new life we have fou

           TIME AND TIME AGAIN* Come with me as we travel through time! Not in the physical sense, of course, because we don’t know how to do that. But we can do that through memory and imagining, if we are so inclined; and if we have a built-up store of memories that we have the wit and wisdom to examine, to analyze, and to try to understand. I don’t know about you, but I think we can become, we are different people, as we thread through the different times of our lives. And even more important, I believe, when we do think about that, we can begin to better understand the behaviors of others wending their way forward in time along the paths of their lives that may parallel ours. I try to examine the past, to sort out the kind of person I was at different stages, stripped of wishful thinking. I may not remember all the whys and wherefores, but I think I can assess what I think the behaviors were, and how they might have impacted the people around me. That part we cannot really know

                            “Art Is Useless” Before we get exercised by this statement by Wilde, we have to understand the proposition he was putting forward. What he was saying is that “Art” has no utilitarian purpose. It exists for itself alone as an expression of beauty, thought, what have you. Art is not for digging ditches or building houses. And that may be very true, but who can deny that it can inspire men to do things, to take action, to change history. The statement is true and at the same time it is not true. It is not true for the same reason it illustrates another thesis advanced by Wilde. What you see in art, whatever form it takes, does not reflect what you are seeing, hearing, taking in with all your senses. The life it has is what you yourself bring to it with all the potentialities you have. If you see beauty, it is your own capacity to appreciate that, that is awakened in your viewing. If you see evil, it is that capacity in yourself that you recognize in viewing

            Cinnamon Buns Isn’t there a really an important parable to be drawn from this modest creation, yet it is one of the heights of human achievement. And the raisins, oh the raisins! Let’s have some fun! Back where we spend most of our time, when I go out shopping for bake-stuff, my buns are usually square, and if they are the type I like, they a goopy with cinnamony syrup. I don’t often indulge because these sorts of things are a no-no for a diabetic. I know I am taking my good times at this end and will pay for all my transgressions at the farther end. But now I am in a different place. Every Saturday there is a pop-up food fair. One of the things on offer are a variety bake goods created by this Central European man who used to own a bakery, and now only dabbles. Among his offerings are a cinnamon bun, featuring powdered sugar and raisins, raisins, raisins. They are light as a feather when eaten that very day, and mostly, they are. But some days valor overcomes discret

  Drinking The Elixir, Imbibing The Poison! Herewith the disclaimer of the writer, proceed with caution. Devoid of any professional instruction, without the benefit of any benevolent mentoring, I have the temerity, the daring, to share my untutored observations on the nature of the human animal I have experienced during my passage through our life together. We are issued through the cave of life into this world armed with the potentialities authored in the DNA we inherit from the partners who gave us life. Then there is the period during which we learn to care for ourselves among strangers we come to know. It seems to me that the persons we become are the product of the interplay between the potentialities we inherit and our early life experiences in the crucible of our upbringing. There can be no doubt that the final result can be affected by the events encountered during our further experiences. I believe that the mold is most profoundly shaped during our early life times when

          Stuck At Sea!   Looking around at our situation, doesn’t it seem like that to you? It does to me. We’re adrift on a sea of events, and try as we might, looking in every direction, we can’t see land.   We are looking for a safe harbor. Every day we get more reports of what this pandemic is doing to the every-days of our lives, people getting sick in droves, particularly the unvaccinated. In the less advanced countries without the vaccine supplies, the pandemic advances and creates new mutations which we will have to cope with tomorrow.   For we lucky few, scientific advances are bringing better and better means to cope, fourth boosters are improving resistance in the multiples and new pills are available to stop the disease dead. But billions out there don’t have a look-in and that’s where the mutations breed that may be much worse than what we have now.   And on the world scene we have a power-hungry China looming with every indication of malevolent intent. Iran i

        Holding Back Tears On My Sunny Days Why does sadness overwhelm me when life is so good? I remember too much about the casualties that I have left behind. Gratitude has to be a part of it, that against all odds I have been spared when so many of the worthy are no longer here. Survivors’ guilt has to be a part of it. Do you sometimes attempt to make your own accounting? How many are the children that I never got to see, that never got to see the sunny days that I enjoy so much. The children of my Bride that I never got to see, my grandson who gave up on the hope for a better life, these are a part of the past I dare to re-live. The nameless of the Holocaust, whose names were known to countless others of my co-religionists, (we seek to record them for posterity,) haunt my dreams. I know I am greedy beyond reason. My days are almost too beautiful to bear in their richness. I sing songs to myself, celebrating my small triumphs and the absence of pain. I hear the sounds

        The Devil Made Us Do It!      So what are Jews really like? Are we the rebellious Hebrews that required 12 Roman legions to pacify? Or are we the passive Jews of the diaspora, like the Jews of the Shtetl, and the ghetto, shunted from pillar to post according to the prevailing winds in the countries we sojourned? No simple answers. It seems clear that when efforts were made to separate us from the body of religious thought that define Jews at their core, that the reaction was explosive. That prompted reactions that united the whole body of the people. When we were dispersed and divided, the reaction by a Jewish public to adverse events was episodic. Then there is the history of individual diversions from the mean which extrapolates an entirely different pattern. Behaviors by individual Jews, sometimes in substantial numbers, but as individuals, and in small groups, tell us an entirely different story than one exhibited in the rules-bound religiously –focused community st

                 SUN TIMES Golden rays are widely streaming, astronomic, round the globe, Pulsing light and bands of dark, time and time, and yet again. Thoughtless humans, eons passing, sheltered safely fortune’s robe, Mid universe’s chaotic dance steps, planet’s ending who knows when. Why and wherefore this fierce existence, fighting always to the light, Species come and then they go, earth we seized and it we run, Ascended from a random cell, endlessly consuming as might is right, To what end we have no clue, ‘til our fateful story is fully spun. These are then our sun times, know we all will come some dark, Will we swallow all our assets and be forced to flee this place? Will some frantic being come to find this earth a glowing spark? Will some hungry virus flourish, erase us cruelly from this space? We should spend more time in leisure, hold our children by the hand, We should spend more time with others, to talk, and dance and laugh, We should spend

                              Smiling                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Tell me a story like my Mama used to tell,                                             With birds and flowers and many a honey bee,                                     Where good guys always rang the bell,                                                  And innocent prisoners all went free.                                                      Tell me stories of song and rhymes,                                                        Of winning through the toughest times,                                                 Of horses running free and wild,                                                              Of doctors saving every child,                           Of wishing how th

          Eventide In Zihua The light has faded from the sky, The sun has said its fond goodbye, The frantic time has had its day, The tropic heat retains its sway. Up to the roof to seek a breeze, And solitude with my Main Squeeze. Sparkling lights climb up the hill, Where freshest air is present still. Thinking, perhaps, a thought profound, Born of a dear one’s errant sound. Something good can come of this? An answer for what’s gone amiss? Something that can bolster pride, Can this occur this eventide? Even though we’re far in space The ties that bind are still in place. We’re ever there, a tiny piece Of something whole. We never cease To play a part in someone’s life To lessen pain, diminish strife, Bringing kindness to meet a need, To ever bless, this is our creed.      

         Life Has Danced Me Around   Our lives are convoluted without end, And the end does not always justify the means, But we soldier on. That’s what people do. Will my tomorrows teach me why? I wanted my life to be heroic, And I did extra-ordinary things that were heroic For the good they did for many Who have forgotten my name. I am content because I have children Who will remember. Life has danced me around Through unhappiness for fifty years, For myself and others, Unhappiness of my own making. Life has brought me to a time of delirium, Happiness of my own making. Life is convoluted.  

       Fortune Belongs To the Brave! You’ve heard the slogan! And it’s true, You can’t accomplish the impossible if you don’t at least try. But you and I both know that the trail is littered with the bodies, the dashed hopes and dreams of multitudes, who tried and failed. Even those who tried and tried and tried again. But the numbers of those who didn’t even try are much, much greater. My story is about Barry Davis, a Master Sergeant in the American Army. It is a story within a story. This story goes back to World War II, toward its end, when Allied troops were assaulting Germany itself, on what was called the Siegfried line in 1944. It was thought that the war was drawing to a close, when a surprise attack in the Ardennes Region of Belgium pushed Allied forces back about 60 miles. Some 250,000 German troops battered the 80,000 men facing them. The Allies lost 19,000 dead, and suffered 47,000 wounded. There were some 23,000 reported missing. The Germans suffered 100,000 killed, wo