Well, here goes another blog post without any plan or rhyme or reason. I think what I would really like to talk about is friendships. Sometimes in life you meet people that you connect with, people who mean a lot to you. For a long time I thought that old friends were the best friends, and they really can be, but I have also thought that, though it isn’t a good thing to play games with people to put their friendship to the test, sometimes life does throw tests at us that tell us who really matters. As many of you know, I was in Air Cadets from age 12 to 15 and it was extremely influential in my life. It ingrained a type of military discipline and way of accomplishing things that has never left me. But then there were also the buddies I made. One of the closest of them was a young man named Carl who seemed like kind of a funny character, but for a long time we were good friends and I had a lot of respect for him. His Dad was a mechanic and he knew an incredible amount of things regarding how to repair things, re-purpose them or clean or maintain them that I guess his Dad must have taught him. Later in life he had a lot of problems and had to live on his own in a lot of rough spots and didn’t have many friends to watch out for him. I would have him over as much as I could and we would spend long hours talking about our lives over coffee in the kitchen of my parents’ home. I had really hoped we could have been friends forever, but one day as an adult I called him up and was basically told that he no longer wanted to talk to me and didn’t want to give a reason. I went through a lot of emotions over that, hurt, anger, loss, but I was an adult and I got over it. One of the bad things that happened between him and I was that when I was 19 and I was mentally ill I borrowed about $350 from him and didn’t pay it back for a long time. I eventually paid him back with interest, but that could have been what did it. I have a number of good friendships that were ruined that way over money but I don’t have any simple advice. How can a person in good conscience refuse a friend’s need? I feel so fortunate now to have some financial stability and when friends or family members need money I try to give it to them without asking for anything in return. I don’t know how I would feel about all that money though if I didn’t have a good job and a stable pension.
For some odd reason I want to talk about some of the friends I have made through going to poetry nights. There is this one guy, Ahmed Knowmadic who is just an incredible person and oddly enough I worked for a time with his best friend Marlin. Ahmed is from Somalia and Marlin is from Jamaica. I am not very close friends with these guys, but I just think they are the salt of the Earth. People sometimes say that poetry is not popular, that it is on a decline, but Marlin and Ahmed are among the growing movement of slam poets who are making it an extremely viable force in this world, and I am really glad to know them.
I don’t really know for sure what got me started as a poet. I can recall that even in elementary school I had a knack for writing rhyming lines of verse but I did very little of it and never showed it to anyone. I can recall a good friend who used to write songs which were poetry but he did something I thought was a mistake-he had his Pastor go over it and correct it for him. I guess in a way right now I have put my religion in second place and really want to make some beautiful writing rather than write to glorify God and I don’t think I will go to hell for it. But back to how I started as a poet, I think a lot of it came from a very few famous poems that I really enjoyed, namely “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas, “If” By Rudyard Kipling, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service and “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. I loved Kipling as a young man, and used to watch the movie “The Man Who Would Be King” based on his short story of the same name and read what I could find from his books. I also read a little Edgar Allen Poe in high school but until I had my own apartment I didn’t get all that serious about writing. One funny thing I wanted to share about my young young days (elementary school) and writing, I used to make my own comic stories with simple drawings about spaceships and soldiers and take them to school and put them up on the bulletin board for people to read. I made so many that I was discouraged from making more and sometimes I wonder if that discouragement had to do with me being a bit of a late bloomer as a writer.
Regardless, I think I always loved books. It seems a bit nerdy now, but I remember loving playing football with other students in pick up games at recess and lunch and after school and one day walking the mile or so to our city library and getting a book about football and reading it. Even to this day I see books as the key to all knowledge. You can do research on the Internet about a particular topic but until you get a book or two under your belt I don’t think you really know much about it. I do of course read ebooks (just finished a wonderful one by a disabled journalist named Cam Tait which I loved) and I use amazon.ca a lot to find books I want that aren’t available anywhere else, but I stand firm on that. I don’t think books, if you count ebooks, will ever go away.
To get back to the poetry thing, when I first moved out I sought out a lot of books on poetry and really enjoyed both the poetry and music of Leonard Cohen and read a lot of Canadian poets. I also read some classics, which were loaned to me by a friend and sometimes I would even steal poetry books from a rarely used hospital library where I went for my clinic appointments (I feel so guilty about doing this, I have often wished I could turn back time and not have done that). But really I was doing things the hard way in the extreme. I just didn’t know about poetry events, perhaps there wasn’t even many of them then. But in my later years I have found that poetry has so much to offer. I have published three books of poetry and they are selling. I am starting to get a following here for my poems and on my Facebook page (Valhalla Books if you ever find the time to look it up and go through my years of archives of poetry). I think perhaps one of the greatest things about it though is that with poetry you really can let loose your emotions on the page in a beautiful way, and when you ramp it up and get into spoken word poetry and get on stage and perform, the feeling is pretty amazing. I owe so much to some of the poets that have encouraged me, and a lot to some who aren’t poets. Kiersten my cousin’s wife is one, Mira an old friend another, and then there is a long list of local poets I wish I could name. I hope that people who read this will be encouraged to go out and take in a poetry event, it is an incredibly democratic and inclusive movement, I have seen rich and poor, old and young come out and have a wonderful time and grow as writers and I hope as citizens of the world. That reminds me, I need to thank Elisa a great deal because she was reading my poetry and suggested I start attending the poetry event in the first place, and now in a few short weeks I am going to be teaching my very own class of writers! That’s all for today Dear Readers, don’t forget to drop me a line or a comment any time, viking3082000@yahoo.com
SCROLL DOWN PAST THE PHOTO FOR TODAY’S POEM
To A Friend Of Thirty-Two Years
Dear friend of my youth you are oft on my mind
So few old friends stayed so close by my side
Some saw life changed me as the years went by
But you were always like a brother I don’t really know why
I look back on our younger days of first love and first loss
It seems my dear friend we were cut from the same cloth
It meant so much to know later when I lived far away
That we would reunite some fine summer day
I was so proud to hear of it when you found a wife
And that soon you had made for yourself an enviable life
Then with your new partner had two wonderful boys
It filled up my heart as I listened to all of your joys
I will admit my own path was not quite as smooth
It was as though for myself I had something to prove
Both you and I competed, both hardworking and smart
Though you never gloated when life had torn me apart
My oldest dearest friend don’t ever forget
As long as I live I will owe you a huge debt
For all the great memories, through good times and bad
And the fact that through most of them you were all that I had
A close friend is something that is better than wealth
Something so critical for each person’s mental health
I will tell you a secret I want to share with your sons one day
Their father is an incredible man in his very own way
I won’t butter you up any more with my words of praise
Just wish you true love and warm, happy days
A person with one true friend can conquer all his or her dreams
You may live far away now but you are right here it seems
There was this one time I thought all was lost and gone
And you came to see me and helped me go on
I wish I could give you some gift of great price
But I think I will have to just give you some lame advice
Care for those close to you, speak always from your heart
Give of yourself and your time and rarely depart
Love your family dearly as you have cared for me
And never forget you deserve to be happy and free
Leif Gregersen
May 19. 2015
Mental Health coping skills blog by leif gregersen 