Hi! I took a break for a couple of days. I’m back — and I hope — refreshed. We are having another heat wave, so I better try to get some postings done before the heat either wipes me out or I use it as an excuse to go and binge watch Game of Thrones or Lost. I’m a fan of Rhonda Byrne and The Secret, The Power, and I have done all the exercises The Magic. I started to feel a summer cold coming on so I went back and redid the “health” chapters in The Magic. In the chapter exercises the reader is asked to think of three times in your life when you felt on top of the world. So, I thought of three and did the rest of the exercises and this morning I felt a lot better! Hooray! A curious side effect of looking back and remembering wonderful times is unbeckoned memories.

Out of nowhere I recalled a trip of many many years ago when I went to see Etruscan ruins in Italy. These remains of a city were in the South and by the Mediterranean Sea which was visible from every vantage point. As I was walking around there was this older man in worker’s overalls sitting on an ancient stone — maybe it was once a column or part of a building — he had his pail lunch with him and a wicker flask of water or maybe it was something harder. He wore a beat-up hat to shade himself from the mid-day sun. He was smiling and just seemed to be totally content and right with the world. As we approached, he said to us, gesturing in the international finger to the lips sign of quiet, “Shh! una tomba!” In other words, “Quiet please, this is a tomb.” He wasn’t reproaching us; I think it was his job to let visitors know that this was an ancient burial place and we should give it the appropriate respect. I remember this marvelous man who seemed so proud of his charge. He too is probably gone or very aged. I think of the Etruscans who lived there so far in the past, and if they could imagine in 2,000 or more years that there would be this gentle man taking care of their resting place by the sea. And, I think of this lovely man, and if he has passed away that he too has someone come to visit him and that they come often and remind people where he rests, and where the dead rest is a quiet respected place. I know I will remember him and the added joy he gave to me in that beautiful place at that moment in time and that exists in memory with no constraint of past present or future.

Clare Irwin