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Synchronicity and Sadness
My friend William James Tychonievich writes frequently, eloquently, and in a lively manner about the synchronicity he observes in his daily life. Today I thought of WJT when I learned that a talented but erratic country singer named Luke Bell apparently killed himself yesterday, the same day I learned of the suicide of my childhood friend Len. Mr. Bell seems to have lived a life that could be accurately described as tortured, and the life-taking whispers that chased him for much of his life finally overtook him. You don’t have to listen to many of his songs to recognize his talent and his emotional depth. I thought I would post…
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Into The Void Before Sundown
The first time I met Len, he had just arrived at our elementary school, a transplant from California, which made him interesting and exotic to someone from Pig’s Knuckle Junction like myself. He was taller than me, Nordic blonde, and bore a resemblance to Glen Campbell. Len had a great line of patter and that flat, explosively-bitten-off accent that Californians flaunt. We became fast buddies and palled around together from the get-go. We both loved tetherball, which was the rage in the elementary schoolyards during that age. We would race to the poles when the recess bell rang and play furiously until time to return to class. Len had been…