Father & daughter pass by .... & curious me

Statistics often are boring, so I suppose it is boring to attempt to visualize the more than thirty-eight million individuals who passed through Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport during 2017. Whatever .... here are a few who were waiting to collect their luggage about five in the afternoon on Tuesday. Notice the blonde standing sort of in the center with her back to me? Me is Fram, who took the photograph. That blonde young lady is one of my two daughters. She is just as camera shy as I am, perhaps even more so, but there absolutely is no reason for her to be that way. She has her mother's looks and is an authentic doll. She was on her way from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. We met, we ate lunch, we talked, we hugged .... we went our separate ways.

Two songs today, with variations of one ....

Kerry Livgren & Kansas .... "Dust in the Wind"
Hans Zimmer & orchestra .... "Chevaliers de Sangreal"
Both are beautiful ....
Both are magical ....
Both are mystical ....
See if you do not agree ....

By the way .... winter is very reluctant to depart this year. Six to twelve inches of snow are predicted to fall between Friday evening and Sunday morning, with forty mile-per-hour winds driving it. Many spring storms come out of the southwest, and are notorious for heavy snowfall .... long live winter ....

That is all it was: Curiosity

Among my names should be the word "curious."

For whatever reason, I will be reading something or watching something and feel an insatiable desire to know more about it. That is exactly what happened to me a few days ago while watching a 1964 episode of the Western classic, "Gunsmoke," on television.

For one reason or another -- mostly because the television show was before my time -- I never saw the original broadcasts of "Gunsmoke."

For one reason or another -- mostly because of the dismal nature of most television programming today -- I have taken to watching occasional reruns of the show featuring James Arness as Matt Dillon, Amanda Blake as Kitty and Milburn Stone as Doc Adams.

In this particular episode entitled, "The Glory and the Mud," Matt is talking to Jack Dakota, an old, retired lawman who had just closed his Wild West show and come to Dodge City looking for a "lost love" from long ago.

There is a "retarded" man in the show who goes by the name Cloudy. I suppose in this age of political correctness, I should refer to him as a "mentally challenged" man .... but, I was taught as a journalist to write as briefly and as tightly as possible to save space, and the word retarded is considerably shorter than the words mentally challenged. Chalk it up to knowing which came first, the chicken or the egg.

Matt and Dakota and Cloudy have been talking. When Cloudy leaves, Dakota says: "You know, he's lucky in a way."

Matt: "How do you mean?"

Dakota: "He'll always be a child. Not like the rest of us. Man once, child twice."

The words, "man once; child twice," struck me. I recalled words to that effect in William Shakespeare's play,"Hamlet," but had no idea of their origin. Sure enough, in Act II, Scene II, Hamlet says: "Hark you, Guildenstern; and you too: at each ear a hearer: that great baby you see there is not yet out of his swaddling-clouts."

Rosencrantz: "Happily he's the second time come to them; for they say an old man is twice a child."

From there, a further look .... Biblical? I wondered.

Not really, I discovered.

There are references to the saying/concept among the Old Greeks, noteably Plato around 400 BC ("The old man then, as seems, will be twice a child.") and Sophocles around 450 BC (".... old as he is now, and train again, for the aged man is once again a child.").

It was at that point the search ended .... for now, anyway ....

I suppose I always will be wondering about the who, what, where, when, why and how of those words, although the only purpose in knowing the answers would be to satisfy my curiosity.

Those words:
"Man once; child twice ...."  

Something to ponder, I guess ....

But not something to look forward to, I think ....