Old So What

  This word sounds like just what it is:   sad, full of regret. Poignant! It stands for words from the heart, such as:   moving, pathetic, and touching. The word “poignant” itself touches us, it gets through our crusty exteriors and binds to our souls, if we let it. A politician, of whom I did not approve, just recently retired, and the look on his face (his sadness so evident, no matter what he did while in office), was poignant!

  For all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’                     John Greenleaf Whittier

  When you live in a house with lots of people and pets, and you walk into a room that’s a total mess, you might ask the question: “What happened here?”   I was strolling through a cable channel video with no particular place to go. The subject was ghost or near-ghost towns, based on stories without happy endings. The town I zeroed in on was literally being swallowed up by its own vegetation. Sometimes a porch or a roof would stick out in protest. (You could look at a clump and think: Is there a “there” there under all that ugly, non-specific greenery?) Sometimes someone had seemed to sneak back into town to plant a few flowers or mow a lawn (showing that relatives of the original residents, or more than likely, other residents were still around), but you could see that this was a very sad place in a very sad situation, in the aftermath of some unhappy happenings.   Some place you don’t want to think about. Some place you don’t want to be.   A place you don’t e...