False Prospects
The young are often credulous—open to chains of lies—
reaching out for the brass ring, desirous of the prize.
Hopeful, naive and buoyant, they flit from thing to thing,
desirous of the riches they hope that fate will bring.
With age their hopes are truncated as reason rears its head
and they discover the reality of what life gives instead.
Toil, sweat and labor and responsibility
supersede those youthful dreams of nobility.
Fuming with fate’s injustice, we are pulled into line,
as sour grapes replace youth’s hopeful dreams of honey wine.
This is a dreary little poem and not really reflective of my experience in life, but blame the prompt words and the fact that I have to be at art camp in an hour!!!!!
Prompt words for the day are buoyant, truncate, lie, credulous, chain and fuming.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
Oh Judy,
Actually to me, this is such a timely thought. It is a real fact that the down trodden and even the enslaved have always dreamed of a time when they would be free. Even the middle class dream of a higher and brighter future to look for. At times a beautiful trend that has brought to us great people and so much more freedom. I see it in the music and efforts of the black people of America who sing of “a better day” and “we shall over come”, of the harm faced by swimming the Rio Grande River by immigrants, just as our ancestors did so many years ago, in wind driven ships, hoping to grab their own “Brass Ring”.
But this has been a trend from the beginning of civilization. Just yesterday I read an article in the Smithsonian about discoveries in the middle class section of Pompeii where they found evidence of those people striving to grab their own “brass ring”. They found some homes in the “lower class section and slave quarters” that showed a desire of progress of even those people way back then.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-treasures-pompeii-180972829/
Judy this brought back old memories to me and I hope you don’t mind if I use your subject of “The Brass Ring” as a prompt in the next day or two. Though I will look at the positive side of looking to grab the “brass ring”, often we do catch one.
SAM
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I am honored when people are prompted by what I write, Sam. You are always welcome to use anything I write as a springboard!!!
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My sister and I visited Pompeii in 2019. A spectacular experience. https://judydykstrabrown.com/2019/08/19/day-2-pompeii/
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Your more recent narrative corrects some of the assertions in my account of three years ago…including the finding that the dates of the eruption were a few months later than they had always been thought to have been. Enjoyed reading the new evidence.
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I think it’s quite realistic
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If a bit pessimistic?
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Yes, life is sometimes a bit of a letdown.
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I don’t know how I missed that post of 2019~! Thanks for pointing me to it, beautiful photos~! Once you have been there your interest is perked at each chance to read about it as it changes each time.
This is another advantage we had by living in Algiers, a short hop across the Mediterranean. My work contract was written in such a way that time away from my office (and home) visiting the field crews built up time off for me, plus a week off for each three months in Algeria, which I arraigned so as to keep our visas always current, in case those people decided to make trouble for us, and we had to leave in a hurry. Otherwise it took at least two weeks to get an exit visa. That, with a month off between contracts.
So we would pick out a place in Europe then fly there, renting a car to see the world~! Though we often used Geneva Switzerland as a central “hub” due to both of us speaking French, Rome and Naples were also on our list, where we went several times, (My Italian or German is zero, but Shirley was good on the guttural languages, but I tend to mix my Spanish with Italian and Portuguese which I do not claim to know at all, (much to the ire of the people in Brazil, it gets them very angry).
A funny side note, we once landed in Spain and I tried to tell the driver where we wanted to go, but I had been used to speaking French, and it had been a while sense I had used Spanish, I started speaking Spanish, but must must have slipped a few French and maybe English words in, etc. The driver turned to me and said in perfect British English: “Sir, which language do you prefer to speak~?” What a put down~!!
But because you just can not see these places in only one trip we made several. We did not much like the people of Naples or most of Southern Italy, as we felt they were “rude and crude” (the crude bothered Shirley because she had her butt squeezed several times). We did like Italy from Rome North though.. Anyway we got to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum several times, but you must have been able to see much, much more than me, as the last time we were there was about 1972 and they are still digging those places out, and the history of that area grows so much as well.
PS: I did get to see that section of Pompeii where you need special permission to go, because of the “art” there being a bit risqué.
SAM
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Oh another new thing that WordPress just did. It removed all my CRLF’s between paragraphs. I think they have one person who just sits there all day thinking: Now what can we do next to piss them off~!
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What are CRLF’s, Sam?
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Oh come on Judy it has been too long for you: Carriage Return, Line Feed.
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I still don’t know what that means.
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While I do not know or care about WordPress or most the modern apps, toward the end of my work life I did write software, writing what I had done all my work life in physics using mostly FORTRAN C++ and other machine language but all the way down to simple “Basic”. In programming you have several much needed commands such as the common line feed, then you have other related ones and they have catch phrases that I thought you knew about. You can just hit return to get a line feed but in programming you need to tell the computer that is what you want it to do, the hexadecimal code of CRLF would be: 0x0D0A…..See WordPress and even a cell phone drive me crazy, but it came naturally to me back then, as it does today with both my sons that it rubbed off on. You must understand that this became second nature to me. But today I look dumb to my sons who followed it long after I left.
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I just looked again while reading your reply, and the paragraphs are back~!
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Maybe it depends on what life is throwing you at any one time?
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You are forgiven this momentary burst of negativity, Judy.
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