It is September 2021 and hard to believe that I have no lesson plans to prepare and not classes to go to! (I retired from teaching June 9, 2021.

I wrote (true believe it or not) a 1200 page memoir for my children and grandchildren. I have a few recorded audo clips of my mother, father and grandfather but I wish I had many more! My father used to read poetry aloud to us in English, Scots, in Gaelic, in Latin, in French, In Russian, In Spanish, in Italian and ancient Greek. He was a notable language and literature enthusiast and he would modestly discribe himself as a dilettante or enthusiast though it would be unfair to say he never had any real commitment to scholarship and knowledge. In my entire life I never met a professor who was as well read as my father who could discuss and quote at length Homer, Vergil, Burns, Byron and Shakespeare, Whitman Garcia Lorca, Antonio Machado, Cervantes, Rodrigo Caro. He was well-read in history and biography but his true passions were opera, classical drama and the great authors of fiction.

So I have many of my fathers’s books with annotations and dates but I have few recordings. In my youth cameras and phones and recorders were not ubiquitous. So I met many famous people and artists but I have few photographs (though sometimes I have authorgraps of them such as E. G. Marshall, Bill Tabbbert, Kenneth McKellar, Rita Moreno, Pat Moynihan) . So my chief ambition is to make recordings of my favorite stories and poems to share with my children and grandchildren when I have left the land of the living. I have probably been intensely aware of man’s fate and man’s mortality for many years. I have been close to death at least on two occasions and I have seen the dead. Now as I pass 65 years I become aware of the shortness of my days. No man is master of the line of his life. So I have before me a dozen days (surely) or a hundred or a thousand but can I say ten thousand days of health and mental clarity? Perhaps if I am very lucky but the truth is somewhere between 100 and 10,000. I have term life insurance until I am 77 but I hope we never collect! But then again the insurance is not for me.

And so my YOUTUBE CHANNEL is really for others especially friends and family. I don’t expect many to show much interest in an old man’s poems and memories and stories but PERHAPS my children and grandchildren will find them of some intellectual -and sentimental interest.

GOLDEN HOURS ON ANGEL WINGS. I plan to do one or two 10-15 minute recordings a week. Here is the very first.