i, in my old age frenzy, have replaced a great deal of writing with reading, which in my youth was my frenzy in addition to sports.

Strangely, i have selected several different types of reading: old ones off the shelf i’ve read several times from back when. New ones others have suggested, even loaned me. i read old man late after that beautiful woman has gone to bed until i too am tired, and the eyelids flutter and the head nods.

i read out of several books at a time, wishing i could stay awake all night and pore over the pages in a fever like i did back a long time ago under the sheets with a flashlight to prevent my folks from knowing i was violating the sleep rules.

Something from which i would have spurned until now i find…intriguing, i think is the word: Literary History of the United States by erudite scholars Spiller, Thorpe, Canby, and Ludwig. i’m sure it was one of my college course books. i never read it. Now, i learn when learning is not required. Yet loquacious, a term for talkative, prevails in the writing, almost pompous, and i marvel at myself reading with pleasure such an academic tome.

i also have returned to favorites: Faulkner, Warren, Greene, Doctorow. i currently am re-reading David Maraniss book on Vietnam, They Marched to Sunlight.

i read several at a time. In addition to the history tome, and Maraniss, i’m near the conclusions of Robert Penn Warren’s Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968-1971, and Al Nashashibi’s Gratefulness: Messages from the Heart to the Mind (I have written before of Ibrahim’s books and his restaurant Farouz in San Diego. He was born in Jerusalem, has a Jewish and Muslim background, and is an amazing gentleman).

Saturday night after all the football games had gone to bed, i read a poem of Ibrahim’s, “The Vessel and the Traveler.” Ibrahim discussed the relationship between the soul and the body. As usual, it was thoughful and produced some deep considerations for me.

Then i picked up Warren’s book and read “Interjection #7: Remarks of Soul to Body.” As usual, Warren captures me with power of his images.

The poems were different. But they expressed a relationship about ourselves i have often wondered. And here were these two men from amazingly different times, locales, and backgrounds addressing the same themes. i was struck by reading them randomly on the same night.

Oh, i wish they could have met and talked about those two poems.

Of course, i and my brother Joe, would have to be sitting in the back of the room listening.