TURNING EIGHTY

Today, the day of Saint John of Sahagún de Campos, the funny preacher (Aderita who is in heaven, pray for me) turns eighty years old. Te Deum laudamus. A gift from providence to have reached an advanced age.

I don't even know how I got here, I've eaten, I've drunk, I've smoked like a goat, I tried to be chaste as they taught me in the seminary, I don't know if I succeeded.

My Jesus, do not take into account my sins but the faith of your church. I go at my own pace and through the harvested land although I often got into swamps and gardens from which an excellent hand pulled me out.

Since I was a child of the Virgin Mary, enthusiastic and at the same time prone to depression.

Many ups and downs, walking in zigzags, but I managed, through sheer determination, to become a correspondent in London and New York, the dream of every journalist. I loved many women, others loved me or left me in the lurch, but I am a bird with only one nest, like the dove, the magpie or the stork, which rest in a single dovecote.

Books, articles, several novels, I beat the crap out of the typewriter, my country and sometimes I beat myself. I escaped prison because I am afraid of that saying that no one escapes going to prison and begging.

Of course, we all ended up in the hospital. I never knew the mental hospital either, always walking on the edge of the knife and my walking clogs were soaked in the mud of sidewalks and roads.

I am from the generation of 68, the hippie rebellion but now I wonder ubi sunt what happened to that Cohn Bendit, the Beatles Paul MacCarthy and Ringo Star are old men George Harrison and John Lennon have already died.

Today François Hardy died, the French girl we all fell in love with at the party. I think I am a winner for having gone it alone but sometimes I feel like a total disaster. The man who did not know how to love.

Suzi Hugh What happened to you? I carry your image on my way to the grave and reread your letters that my mother burned. Oh my Jesus, have mercy on me, I am nothing more than a poor old man, a memory of what I was.

Wednesday, June 12, 2024