At the Homer Farmers Market last weekend, I got into a conversation with an old friend I don’t see near often enough, which set me to walking down the road thinking about the coming and goings of our lives and of Sue Gibson’s recent passage. I went home and opened the “Reflections” of an old Roman who wrote these words nearly 2,000 years ago: “Do not act as if you’re going to live 10,000 years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it’s in your power, be a decent person.”

Certainly Sue Gibson rose to the occasion of being that — a decent person and, in Spirit, will always remain. My condolences and love to the family.

Anyway, my generation is entering the fall of life. As far as I’m concerned, anyone over 60 is getting to be a short-timer. We’ll all be, in whatever way it comes down, there with you, Sue, soon enough. There’s no escape. We are all mortal-morsels. 

Look how the World War II generation, no matter how tough, has faded. My parents are gone. 

Alas, the phenomenology of it all: what a trip, till one day, caught by the pull of the inevitable the rumbling of the fall ahead resounds. Eva Saulitis poignantly shared her reflections on being in time there, in the midst of that pull, a couple of Sundays ago in the Alaska Dispatch.

Reading it, local poet Wendy Erd’s poem, “Time Is Different Here,” swirled in my head. (Read it. It’s on one of the stations of reflection of hers along the Beluga Slough trail.) 

Anyway, sometimes how I wish I could play a trumpet — that some night I could stand atop Olson Mountain and wail away into the stars. 

Tim O’Leary