Author Archives: Stephen Montagna

I couldn’t have said it better…

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I was doing some spring cleaning today, thinning down my book collection (as much as I hate to get rid of books, I really need more empty space in my life at the moment), and I pulled Elia Kazan’s biography off the shelf for the first time in years; I found the following passage highlighted on a page, in the chapter talking about the first production of Death Of A Salesman:

“The Christian faith of this God-fearing civilization says we should love our brother as ourselves. [Arthur] Miller’s story tells us that actually – as we have to live –we live by an opposite law, by which the purpose of life is to get the better of your brother, destroying him if necessary, yes, by in effect killing him.”

Since I highlighted it, clearly it resonated with me back in ’93 during grad school, and sadly it resonates even more today, especially with the current economic crisis. When, one wonders, will this culture wake up to the poisonous nature of capitalism and what it does to our human nature? When will we be able to engender a true sense of cooperation amongst enough of us that the din of “get ahead”, “look out for #1”, “the one with the most toys wins” mentality will finally be drowned out I wonder… 

Just Good Friends…

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a little FISH (as in Derrick William Dick, that is) – I hadn’t heard this song in so long, and tonight on the way home from Aikido I heard it, and I had to replay my favorite verse three or four times:

So are we left to chance meetings,
Is that all we can depend on?
Resigned to raise glasses
in anonymous cafes.
Reciting our failures,
as if we really needed that proof of regret,
Over what we have and what should have been
Darlin’ are we just good friends?

chorus:
What would you do,
If I got down on my knees to you?
Would you hold it against me?
Would you stand me in line?
What would you do,
If I opened up my heart to you?
Would I just be another who’s wasting his time,
Darling are we just good friends?

the first flower [with apologies to Thurber]

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for Kathy, and David, and their yet-to-be munchkin…

 

One day, the first flower appeared on the Earth (perhaps the first in the entire Universe).

It was a mutation, of course. In today’s parlance, we would call it a misfit, an oddball; an outcast.

Mother Nature had grown plants before, short and tall, green, with flowing leaves of various sizes. But this one had a genetic “tic”, and some of its cells morphed into something new. A bud formed, and the cells took on color, a color different from the green of its stem and leaves.

The rain and sunshine fed it and the cells in the bud filled with color and grew and grew and grew until there were so many of them the gentle skin of the bud burst and the petals of the world’s first flower faned out into the air and caught the glint of the sun.

There was no one around. There were not yet animals of any kind on the planet. There was life, but it was plant life, and sea weeds, and moss. Humans were not even yet a possibility.

But there it was, the first flower. And though no one was watching it, though no one was around to applaud its arrival, though no human was there to water it, stroke its soft petals, pluck it, put it in a vase, place it in a lover’s hand, or lay it upon a loved one’s grave, there stood the first flower blooming, showing its new-found colors to the whole universe, soaking up the sun, drinking in the rain, and dancing in the wind.