Just Thinking About a Great Memory

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This poem has awakened a memory that has been just below my consciousness for over fifty years. It is the memory of my best buddy, Bill Adams, and myself standing on the second floor landing of our fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin.

Bill and I are spending a few moments together, quietly talking about our day and the planned evening. Little did I know what these few minutes together would mean to me.We were just two great friends spending a few moments together, never realizing then that the memory would come back to me now. I can see it in my mind's eye, the two of us, the sounds of the fraternity guys, and the fading light coming in the windows...

How many of us have such sweet memories, hiding just beneath our consciousness, just waiting for a song, a poem, even a sound, to bring them back; all the vividness and light of the past.

They are truly a blessing and I hope you have such memories also...brought back to you by a poem such as this. I wish you well. 

Happiness
Raymond Carver

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

This relentless heat is too much.  I see some of the shrubs I just planted are wilting-even with daily watering. I guess that watering just doesn't cut it. We need rain, and badly. The weather forecast is for thundershowers, some of them severe.  I just need the olde fashioned summer rains that were around back in the day.
But  rain isn't that way now. It's always a storm or some far out bad weather.
Maybe my memory of rain when I was a kid is not accurate. Oye vey on distorting.

I was just thinking that if we wait for something to happen, we are wasting the time waiting.
Maybe, we can engage in our environment, our relationships, our culture enough that what we were waiting for, will actually happen, and we haven't wasted the precious commodity of time.
Time which is not a renewable resource.
We only have so much,
and no more...

Today was a day I said goodbye to a client who was the victim of adult bullying in the office he worked in.
He had made up his mind how he will respond to the bully, what his options were in doing so,and realized that the front office and HR were lackeys of the system and tried to make him feel he was "overly sensitive."
My client has explored his anxieties and  confronted them so that he is no longer afraid of them.
Have I done all I can in the time I had with him, had I been clear and precise in the conversations we had, what else could we have explored together?
He says he will get in touch with me when he is ready to share.
I wish him well.
How many others are victims of bullying suffer in silence?
I hope they do not perceive themselves as overly sensitive.