Adversity is the mother of creativity, it seems, as it turned a normal farm boy into a world traveler and critic of all things. Journalism is not the most comfortable profession one might pursue. It not only seems, but is, a very long time since I looked upon the words of Longfellow, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, or Keats, Shelly, Leigh Hunt, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rilke, and Goethe, and turned my nose up at the modern hair shirts of Dylan Thomas, T.S Elliot, Robert Frost, Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac; just the ones I remember at a moment's notice. You will find few rhymes and meters and enjambments forsooth in what you are about to read...although a formal education left a small mark in terms of structure and continuity from time to time. Some are cerebral, more are emotional, as life molded this time traveler from one century into the next. The loves of my life, aside from my children, were two; the girl I married from high school, and a brown-eyed girl in Kentucky...both broke my heart.