This thread is probably almost dead so I'll take this opportunity to post my vanity....since you gave me a lead- in........
.......Genius
My father had the mind of a genius…
The soul of a poet…
The call of the wild…
At twelve he was set upon the desert to tend the sheep - alone, over fifty miles from the nearest town with a puppy and Rudyard Kipling to occupy his mind. He memorized Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” as he gazed upon his herd and kept the coyotes at bay.
And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
'Ah wretch!' said they, 'the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!'
His grandmother paid him for verses he could recall by rote; verses of poetry, verses of the Bible, verses of song. He developed the voice of calm and reason as he recited tome to walls of rock, and forests of sage.
And now there came both mist and snow
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
At 18 he went far away to college where numbers filled his head and he engineered cities in his mind…and in his heart he was on the range. To still desire he drank and when he drank he sang the songs of the ancients, he told tales as old as the earth…he was the earth.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
He found himself aboard a ship, during the second time the world warred with itself. He was the Ancient Mariner left with the souls of his shipmates, haunted by his own survival. Adrift upon the swells of longing and emotion that only a bottle could soothe.
The souls did from their bodies fly, -
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross-bow!".
His survival was his destruction. The schools, the sea, the desert were left behind in a haze of alcohol. The longing remained and tore at his throat and rasped the voice of calm and reason, it stilled the recall of wonder and beauty, the words of the poets, and it left…the call of the wild.
An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is a curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.