Friend, Partner, Mentor:
All these and more, you have been to me,
and hopefully I have been to you.
To know you is to understand
that at the core of your being
to be “your friend”
encompasses a life-long compact,
a commitment and a loyalty
quite rarer now
than in supposedly simpler times past
When a man's word and his good name
counted for everything.
These things I have come to know,
because of your teachings,
You have lived them, by your steadfast examples;
by your consistency, and by your constancy.
Your highest compliment, you have said,
was given to you in a moment that would have
hurt and broken many not so given
to understand, that to “lose” a job
for having “too much imagination to be an
insurance executive” was neither a set back nor a defeat,
but an Affirmation of the things which you
most Value and cherish.
The simple things: Family, Friends, Food, Laughter,
Music, Song, Beauty, Faith, Hope and Charity.
And the greatest of these,
the tie that binds,
the leitmotif which weaves its way
through the fabric of our beings;
The greatest of these, my Friend,
my Partner,
my Mentor,
The greatest of these, is Love,
Your Gift to us all.
All these and more, you have been to me,
and hopefully I have been to you.
To know you is to understand
that at the core of your being
to be “your friend”
encompasses a life-long compact,
a commitment and a loyalty
quite rarer now
than in supposedly simpler times past
When a man's word and his good name
counted for everything.
These things I have come to know,
because of your teachings,
You have lived them, by your steadfast examples;
by your consistency, and by your constancy.
Your highest compliment, you have said,
was given to you in a moment that would have
hurt and broken many not so given
to understand, that to “lose” a job
for having “too much imagination to be an
insurance executive” was neither a set back nor a defeat,
but an Affirmation of the things which you
most Value and cherish.
The simple things: Family, Friends, Food, Laughter,
Music, Song, Beauty, Faith, Hope and Charity.
And the greatest of these,
the tie that binds,
the leitmotif which weaves its way
through the fabric of our beings;
The greatest of these, my Friend,
my Partner,
my Mentor,
The greatest of these, is Love,
Your Gift to us all.
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicit is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be ahsam'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come
round right.
