Photos for January Stones and April PAD 2012 property of M J Dills (exception 1/16)







Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Marie Colvin 12 January 1956 - 22 February 2012





Marie Colvin was the kind of woman I wanted to be. Married three times, twice to the same man and once to a dashing Latino who was said to write like an angel in his native language, Marie Colvin was an Ivy League girl who jumped right into life shortly after she tossed her mortar board in the air at Yale. I loved her. She was tough, she was brave and she was immensely talented. Her writing, speeches and reporting were inspiring to the point of humility.

[She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents.] Roy Greenslade guardian.co.uk Marie Colvin obituary

When I read Helen Adams in the Lotus Eaters, it was easily Colvin who I imagined, without the eye patch. But Helen was fiction and Marie was not. Helen walked down a long road into the future. Marie is gone and remembered today.

I heard the news this morning while I was driving to work and it hit me like a piercing. The grief I experienced over journalism’s loss of Marie Colvin wasn’t something I could share; I kept it closed in my chest somewhere and felt it like a ball of heavy smoke all day.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

In Memory of Dad 17 January 1905 - February 11, 1985


Twenty-Seven years ago today
Dad slipped away
In a manner not to his custom…
Quietly, with little fanfare. We’d fluttered
in and out of the room
saying goodbyes and laying our cheeks
next to his
unwilling to let him go yet granting him
his leave
because it was the noble
thing to do.
When he was gone my brother
keened and I
gathered sheets
and made mom tea.


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