[Dialogue] Advise on Turning to the Future with Gallstones

[steve har]

With Benjamin Franklin
Carl Dennis

Though there’s no disputing the gloomy
odds
Against second chances, my favorite passage
In the book on Franklin that’s taken me weeks to read
Occurs near the end, on his voyage home,
His tours of duty in Europe finally behind him,
When he vows to give whatever time is left him
To the great love of his early manhood, science.

It’s not that he wants to go back to the fork
Left long ago behind him and take the turn
He didn’t take. It’s not that he would undo
His decades of public service, not even his failed efforts
To make an indifferent England cherish her colonies.
It’s just that now, having helped his country
Make its break from the past more than a daydream,
He’s free at last to proceed full time on the path
Of his deepest and purest pleasure.

No second chances for this eighty-year-old
With gout and GALLSTONES. But instead
Of contenting himself with reliving his history,
He’s hobbling from his cabin when the sea allows it,
And his legs aren’t too swollen, and his stones
Don’t make even sitting up a torment,
To measure the temperature of the Gulf Stream,
Water and air, hoping to map its boundaries.
And when he’s chair-bound, he’s writing a paper
On how to keep hawsers from breaking in sudden swells,
Or suggesting improvements in the paddle wheel.

To treat his fervor with irony feels unseemly,
To flaunt my godlike knowledge that only fifty pages
Remain to him out of seven hundred,
That in ten, when the voters of Pennsylvania
Elect him their president, he’ll break his vow.
Good for him, when they send him to the Convention
To help with the Constitution, if he drowses off
During the longer speeches to dream
Of the laboratory he’d planned to add to his house,
And the many experiments that would have proven
We needn’t content ourselves with one life only.



--
Steve Harrington