Merry Christmas, Time to Reminisce

Merry Christmas
Time to Reminisce
By Jack Coll
12-21-16

Christmas season is a busy time of year for most of us, you have your shopping going on, family to deal with, decisions, should I get my neighbor a gift? Christmas dinner and so on. For a lot of us it’s also a time to reminisce, we catch a quiet moment, maybe in the car or just before going to bed.
Some of us think back over the past year while others reflect back on their life. As busy as I am it seems like every year at Christmas I seem to miss Jim Croce, the singer-songwriter who died in a plane crash back in 1973, and I also seem to miss John Denver a lot, also a singer-songwriter who lost his life while flying his own plane/glider back in the fall of 1997.
Every December I remember them by pulling out old concert footage I have of them and kickin-back in my third-floor office and watching them perform some of my favorite songs of all time. Certainly they weren’t the greatest musicians of all time but I think it has to do with taking me back to my youth which for most of us seemed to be a quiet-gentler time in our lives. It always cracked me up when John Denver would say “FAR OUT,” he was as far away from being “Hip” as one could imagine.
So while working a Sunday morning in the shop I decided to pull up a John Denver concert on the computer and sing-a-long while I worked. It was a concert recorded live at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London back in the fall of 1982.
He loved to talk in between his songs back then telling where the inspiration for certain songs came from or tell funny little antidotes about his travels or just talk about his beloved Colorado.
He stopped in the middle of this concert to recite a poem written back in 1895 by a guy named Joseph Malins, it was an intriguing poem that really got me thinking, it was a poem about prevention.
In my life I’ve lost some friends to drugs, I’ve lost a few more friends to car accidents and I lost some friends to sickness. Just this past year a of couple people Donna and I know, whom we went to school with lost their children to drugs, they spent nearly their life savings to get them help and yet the devil of the drug caught up with them anyway. The parents were by all accounts good parents, their kids by all accounts were good kids. We have another friend who also lost a family member to drugs this past year, we were all devastated about the murder that took place in Conshohocken just about a week ago, and the alleged killer may have had drug problems.
When we were young most of us had a tendency of saying, or believing that, “well it was their own fault” not realizing the power of the drug or the power of mental sickness. As we grew most of us realized that perhaps “Prevention” and education has a better shot at slowing down these senseless deaths. As I look out over the region we live in I see far too many young lives have been lost to drugs in recent years and I often ask myself, how do we stop this epidemic?
Getting back to the poem that John Denver recited on stage thirty four years ago written by Joseph Malins, it hit me pretty hard that prevention really is that easy, that sensible, and why-not prevention. There are several different versions of this poem, I like this one.
A little something to think about over the holidays, and may your families all be safe.

A Fence or an Ambulance
Twas a dangerous cliff, as they freely confessed,
Through to walk near its crest was so pleasant;
But over its terrible edge there had slipped
A duke and full many a peasant

So the people said something would have to be done,
But their projects did not at all tally;
Some said, “Put a fence ‘round the edge of the cliff,
Some, An ambulance down in the valley.

But the cry for the ambulance carried the day
For those who slipped over the dangerous cliff.

And the dwellers in highway and alley
Gave pounds and gave pence, not to put up a fence,
but an ambulance down in the valley.

“For the cliff is all right, if your carful,” they said,
And if folks even slip and are dropping,
It isn’t the slipping that hurts them so much
As the shock down below when they’re stopping.

So day after day, as these mishaps occurred,
Quick forth would those rescuers sally
To pick up the victims who fell off the cliff,
with their ambulance down in the valley.

Then an old sage remarked, “It’s a marvel to me
That people give far more attention
To repairing results than to stopping the cause,
When they’d much better aim at prevention.

Let us stop at its source all this mischief, “cried he,
Come neighbors and friends, let us rally;
If the cliff we will fence, we might almost dispense
With the ambulance down in the valley.

Poems are open to individual interpretation, I interpret this poem meaning to say that perhaps being proactive and educated should be the weapon of choice, or the action taken. A person doesn’t walk off a cliff because they don’t know any-better, they apparently got a little too close to the edge. A person doesn’t become a drug addict because that’s their life goal, they became addicted for many, many reasons, many of those reasons are unknown to us.
I wonder if we could ever live in a society where there is no one addicted to drugs, it’s possible, maybe not in our lifetime, but it’s possible.
Merry Christmas to our friends, neighbors, relatives and our extended Conshohocken family,
May the year 2017 be a good one for all of us.