Childhood Dreams (by Timm)

Timm suffered midlife as we all do, painfully aware that not all mountains had been climbed, nor would be. According to friends, he complained about his age, about looking old. In his last couple of years he turned to a vegetarian diet and lost a good amount of weight. He struggled with a punch-drunk body -- Timm lived hard -- to get in shape, fighting with a bum foot (plantar fascia, I believe), sore neck and back and wrists as he cycled and ran. (The osteopath he was seeing in the months before his death addressed those physical ailments as well as what he perceived as allergies but missed the heart trouble that was surely brewing.)

Aging, as we know too well, is an uphill climb, yet Timm looked at it, typically, with the eyes of a child, as he tries to look back on the vision of his life from the vantage of the child laying in bed in moonlight. Surely midlife forces a reckoning which is melancholy, yet that brooding is fertile as one accounts what is achievable, what work there is left to do. From the testimony of so many who attended his memorial service, Timm achieved an astonishing output of real love and service in his community, and his photographic archives attest to so much that was in harvest condition -- ripened, mature, brimming with sweetness and nurture.

Childhood Dreams

April 1 2006

I still wonder what has brought me
To this point in life
What turn did I make that landed me
Where I am today?
Could it have been somehow different then
What I am finding
Is this the best tomorrow that I can have
In this today?
Or am I paying for the deeds I've done and
Those I've missed.

On summer nights when honeysuckle fills
The heavy night air
The moon sculpts her shapes on a
Transformed land
I still see myself laying in my
Childhood bed
Dreaming of this day and
Many others
And all I can wonder is
Was this what I envisioned?

"Hood Moon," Timm O'Cobhthaigh