Call Me Ivan.

With apologies to Herman Melville, Call me Ivan.

When I retired last year, I did so with fears and misgivings that, I am told, often accompany a dramatic change in life.

I did, however, have hopes and dreams and the beginning of a plan to turn them into reality.

(c) 2017 Larry Pizzi

But new realities, all the more harsh because I could never have anticipated them, dashed those plans. Now I'm faced with grieving losses and accepting new realities.

I feel much like Ivan, the middle brother of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. His hopes and dreams were smashed. The pain of plans gone badly awry resulted in a kind of depression:

​He had often been depressed before....and there was nothing surprising at his feeling so at such a moment, when he had broken off with everything that had brought him here, and was preparing that day to make a new start and enter upon a new, unknown future. He would again be as solitary as ever, and though he had great hopes, and great—too great—expectations from life, he could not have given any definite account of his hopes, his expectations, or even his desires.
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(c) 2017 Larry Pizzi

To go on means kindling new hopes and dreaming new dreams. Given my grief, disappointment, and fear of the unknown, my self-confidence, not very strong to begin with, is shaky.

​But I find hope in, of all things, my fireplace:

The fire is noisy tonight.

Deep inside the old, dry logs
Long-dormant sap explodes
Again and again
Sending embers crashing into the screen
And sparks careening up the chimney.

The boiling sap entertains me
But it makes me think.

I wonder, Lord,
After more than sixty four years,
Is there any dormant sap in me,
Waiting for a fire?

God, I hope I have a few explosions left.

But I won't,
Without your fire.

Kindle me.

I take great comfort in the belief that the author and finisher of my faith also meets me in my hopes and dreams.

We meet. I learn. We move on.

(c) 2017 Larry Pizzi

(c) 2017 Larry Pizzi