Stop the Blasphemy!

WARNING: The following may be offensive to some. My use of pro-life arguments is not meant to demean their original intent - only to show how they apply equally to argue against adoption and for family preservation.

I found this while shopping for an Adoption Sucks tee - which I didn't find!
It says: "Childbirth is an act of nature.
Adoption is an act of God"

To thee I sayeth:

You formed my inmost being;
You knit me in my mother's womb.
I praise you, so wonderfully you made me;
Wonderful are your works!
Psalms 139:13-16 [New American]

YOU, God, knit me in my mother's womb! What do those words mean? How can anyone who believes in God, or who claims to, not believe that very creation of life and its coimng to fruition at birth are not within His domain? This "nature" and outside the realm of the Almighty? HUH? What bible are these people reading? The Gospel of NCFA?

To thee I sayeth:

• They claim to know God, but they deny him by their actions. They are detestable, disobedient, and disqualified to do anything good. Titus 1:16

• The promises of God are not for us to claim rashly, to protect us while we rush on recklessly into danger, violating the laws of nature or disregarding prudence and the judgment God has given us to use. This would not be genuine faith but presumption. . . . 1MCP 25.1

• God loves His creatures with a love that is both tender ans strong. He has established the laws of mature, but His are not arbitrary extractions. 2MCP 411.1

• "It is I who bring both death and life." Deuteronomy 32:39

• "Did not He who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?" Job 31:15

Do Not Take God's Name in Vain!

If you believe in God, then you generally accept God as Omnipotent and Omniscient ruler of the universe, He therefore extends His providence to all things, overseeing them and maintaining them in a condition to fulfill His ultimate purpose. God therefore created the present world as a perfect place to fulfill His purpose, with all nature under His command. Nature is simply the law God established at the time of creation, which regulates the processes of this world in accordance with the principle of cause and effect.

Is not every flower, every rainbow, every baby not proof of God's existence, for those who believe n God? Are WE not all God's creations? Mad in his image? Or does that happen to babies only after they are adopted? If so...why aren't ALL babies adopted?

Adoption is purely LEGAL construct, folks! If God created adoption then he also created divorce, and executions.

Stop this blasphemy! Next you'll be followers of the church of blasphemous Rosie O'Donnell who tells her adopted kid they were born in the "wrong tummy" but God saw his "mistake" and fixed it!

"Yahweh called me when I was in the womb, before my birth he had pronounced my name." Isaiah 49:1

Yet those who separate babies from their mothers and take away their names, have the audacity to call it God's plan!

We need to get back to basics and reality folks and remember the biblical references to adoption are all about maintaining family ties. Read up on Moses before ye use the word of God to justify BUYING BABIES!!

Clearly the Christian pro-life position is that life begins at conception. If all life is scared and it begins at conception - what then is the mother in who's womb it has been planted and grows? A mistake? Interestingly, some Christian pro-life arguments contain the belief that "We can compare the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us to the umbilical cord which connects the unborn baby to its mother. All the nutrients including oxygen to sustain life is furnished to the unborn child through the umbilical cord." How can anyone who believes and preaches this, stand in witness or support those who and physically take a child virtually form its mother's womb without recognizing that they are violating the intent and word of God.

A Catholic pro-life argument proclaims: "our nation has all but lost any claims we could have ever made on 'compassion' because we have allowed lies, innuendo and insanity to circumscribe the parameters of this so-called debate." Indeed we have when we justify baby selling as the will of God. "Denying the fact that life begins the moment a female egg is fertilized is sheer lunacy — or, worse, intentionally misleading....It is patently arrogant that we, as adults, get to decide for the most vulnerable of our society — our unborn children, who cannot speak for themselves..."

We need to press pro-lifers who promote adoption with this question:

If Killing an Unborn Baby is NOT a "Choice" - why is separating it from it's mother not just a choice - but a justified holier-than-thou preference for those who proudly wear their Christianity on their sleeve, and the Christian Coalition which promotes adoption and bemoans the decrease in the number of adoptions?

In Genesis (1:27-28), when God blessed man and woman and called them to "be fruitful and multiply" he did not stipulate that they needed to complete their education first, or be married or employed, or own their own home.

Let us not forget, and please let's revise, this oldie but goodie:

It reminds us that The Virgin Mary was an Unwed Teenage Mother!

And it was said to Mary: blessed is the fruit of your womb! Luke 1:39-44

So, just to keep things in proper perspective...I've decided to bring it back on a tee shirt:

Available at Cafe Press.

More Nebraska Abandonment

Nebraskan, Gary Staton, Gives Up 9 of His Kids for Adoption

In another example of the harm of legalized abandonment, a man in Nebraska abandoned 9 of his 10 children because he was unemployed and his wife had died! How more obvious can it be that this legislation short-changes families in crisis from receiving the help they need - emotional and other forms of support and resources.

"I was with her [his wife] for 17 years, and then she was gone. What was I going to do?...We raised them together. I didn't think I could do it alone. I fell apart. I couldn't take care of them," Staton said to Omaha TV Station KETV.

No word on the age of the tenth one or whether that child is still living with Staton.

This brings the total in Nebraska, so far, to 16 since the law was enacted in July! And, none of the 16 were in danger of being abused, let alone had been, according to the Associated Press reports today.

Nebraska lawmakers reaction: "If we see another family being left off, then we're going to have to do something immediately," said state Sen. Arnie Stuthman, according to the source.

As for Staton's children, some families have volunteered to take care of them but a judge has yet to decide on permanent custody, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Human Services said.

Dumping Teens: Is There A Silver Lining?

A 13-year-old girl, and two boys ages 11 and 15 have been abandoned at hospitals, and a 12-year-old boy was dropped at a police station.

Their parents were not charged with child abandonment.

It's Nebraska, folks!

A clear message has bee sent to all parents dealing with snotty, sarcastic, rebellious, "impossible" teens: Go to Nebraska, drive past a hospital or police station - open the car door, and dump the kid! Then walk away scott free!

No need to spend one more red cent on psychologist, or psychiatrists or treatment centers...or even feeding the ungrateful brat! It's a great solution to put an end to child support, too!

This is of special value to those who "bought" a kid and are dissatisfied! The 11-year-old - by his adoptive mother!!!

Nebraska, the last state to enact legalized abandonment, went far further than all states allowing abandnmet of children up to 19 years of age.

Neb. State Sen. Brad Ashford says, "if the stress level gets to the point where something bad could happen, I'd rather have that child, whether it be ten years old four years old, (or even 15)... to me, the child is safe [being abandoned]."

The Silver Lining?

That it will prevent child abuse? I think not. I think - OK, I hope - that the silver lining will be that this will bring the absurdity of all such alleged "safe haven" laws to the forefront.

The media is having a field day - as well they should.

Let's face one reality: What parent of a teen has NOT felt like just dropping them off somewhere - at least for a moment? Yet what family therapist or child advcoate would encourage acting on that momentary thought without extensive work with the family to try to resolve the issues, or find a suitable, safe TEMPORARY place for either the child or the parent?

The silver lining is that this plan - taken to this ridiculous extreme points out very clearly what is wrong with all such alleged "safe haven" laws:

1. Anyone can dump a child, it might not be the parent - and certainly not BOTH. In fact, the 15-year-old boy was dropped off by his aunt!
2. It prevents any offer of help or resourc s being offered
3. It provides a permanent - irrevocable - solution to a temporary problem that one might regret the very next day!

Nebraska is allowing parents who dump teens to regain custody in court - an option of course not allowed parents who dump infants. It is not clear what the cutoff is on that Hail Mary.

Talk about a disposable culture!! Kids - they're cute and highly sought when they're little, after that - not so much! Dump and run!!

An Honor!!

On Sunday, Sept. 14, an article appeared in my local central jersey newspaper about The Stork Market and my work with Origins-USA.org.

As a result...I am very pleased to announce that I am being nominated for The Citizen of the Year awarded by the National Association of Social Workers, Inc., Washington, D.C. and by its State affiliate, NASW/New Jersey Chapter.

Public Citizen of the Year

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the largest membership organization of professional social workers, established the Public Citizen of the Year Award to honor an outstanding member of the community whose accomplishments exemplify the values and mission of professional social work. The award recipient is not a social worker.

The NASW-NJ Executive Committee will review all nominations and determine the recipients of the awards. The recipients of the three awards will be personally notified and an announcement of their selection will be published in FOCUS. The awards will be presented at the NASW-NJ Annual Conference.

Last year's recipient was Dr. Daniel Gottlieb.

Dr. Gottlieb, a practicing psychologist and family therapist for more than 35 years, is well known to many through his weekly National Public Radio (NPR) “Voices in the Family” broadcast, which has aired in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey since 1985. His radio show, and his Philadelphia Inquirer “On Healing” column, cover an exhaustive array of topics, including depression, marital conflict, transgendered youth, multi-racial families, and many others.

His most recent book, Learning From the Heart: Lessons in Living, Loving, and Listening, was published in March 2008.

Dear Joni Mitchell

Dear Joni Mitchell,

I write to implore you to use your position to give back. Give back as only you can.

Cancer has Lance Armstrong and Katie Couric, Sheryl Crow, Melissa Ethridge, and so many, many more spokespersons who - out of personal loss - have become heroes; who because of their own pain, work to help reduce the numbers of people who will suffer similar pain and loss of a loved one.

We need you, Joni, because no one speaks for us. Like you, we all suffered alone and in silence. Help us break that silence: speak up and speak out for us. Be the voice of your sisters.

Come full circle Joni. You've suffered the loss, and the years of not knowing. You dealt with being "outed" by the media. You then courageously stepped into the limelight and used that same media power to seek and find your daughter. Now, the scared young women who couldn't afford to raise a child sends a limo to pick her up from her first class flight! You've come a long way, baby.

You and Kilauren could speak for all of us who suffered the same indignities: the fear, the hiding, the not knowing. The worry about who would know and who we should tell; the seeing our counterpart in the crowds; not fitting in; the shock of discovering at 26 that your whole life is a lie...the not knowing.

Sheila Weller who wrote your biography in a trilogy with Carole King and Carly Simon writes of approximately 1.4 million American women who lost their children in maternity homes between 1945 and 1972 and more in Canada. (And that doesn't count the ones like you and I who toughed it out without a maternity home, and the others who stayed hidden in their own homes or their "aunt's" house. Other statisticians quote figures as high as up to four million mothers in the United States surrendered newborn babies to adoption between 1945 and 1970; two million during the 1960s alone.)

Weller quotes Sandra Jarvis of Canadian Birth Mothers: about how social workers "were just promoting adoption...in the hospitals, counseling girls that it 'wasn't really your baby', that it was in the /best interest of th baby., to have it adopted, and that 'of you love your baby', you'll give it up; the baby will be 'illegitimate' if you keep it." Like all of us, you were traumatized . It caused you, you've said to identify with the women of the Magdelene Laundries, of whom you sang on your 1994 Turbulent Indigo album.

I was an unmarried girl I'd just turned twenty-seven When they sent me to the sisters For the way men looked at me Branded as a jezebel I knew I was not bound for Heaven I'd be cast in shame Into the Magdalene laundries

Most girls come here pregnant Some by their own fathers Bridget got that belly By her parish priest We're trying to get things white as snow All of us woe-begotten-daughters In the steaming stains Of the Magdalene laundries

Prostitutes and destitutes And temptresses like me-- Fallen women-- Sentenced into dreamless drudgery ... Why do they call this heartless place Our Lady of Charity? Oh charity!

These bloodless brides of Jesus If they had just once glimpsed their groom Then they'd know, and they'd drop the stones Concealed behind their rosaries They wilt the grass they walk upon They leech the light out of a room They'd like to drive us down the drain At the Magdalene laundries
Peg O'Connell died today She was a cheeky girl A flirt They just stuffed her in a hole! Surely to God you'd think at least some bells should ring! One day I'm going to die here too And they'll plant me in the dirt Like some lame bulb That never blooms come any spring Not any spring
No, not any spring Not any spring

Sing out for ALL of us, Joni! We've been fans of yours since hearing "Little Green" and knowing - really KNOWING - it's meaning! It didn't end when the laundries closed. It didn't end in Canada or the US. Adoption today is a multi-billion dollar a year business worldwide. Every day women are suffering the pressure and coercion you and I suffered...and worse!

Globally, chidlren are being stolen off the streets, kidnapped, or their mothers duped into believing their children are coming to the US or England for an education. Papers are forged and chidlren are being SOLD onto orphanages where orphanage directors turn a blind eye to the corrupt child trafficking in adoption because the fees to obtain a child internationally are enormous.

Sing out for us all, Joni. Help us to help mothers and their chidlren stay together! No one speaks up for them. We are a candle in the wind and we need you, Joni. We are David fighting a huge moneyed baby-brokering industry and we need you Joni. We need your voice, your power and your sense of righteousness, Joni.

All over the world mothers and their babies need you to save them from lives of agony - wondering...from unnecessary and unwarranted separations. Marital status, financial problems, age are all temporary problems that can be fixed and need not be exploited, except for the fact that babies are an in-demand commodity. Help us to stop the carnage, Joni.

You and Kilaruren are two of the lucky ones. You have each other back on your lives. I, and others, are not so lucky. Some of us don't survivie the loss, Joni.

Origins-USA needs you to help us fulfill our mission of advocating for mothers' rights and keeping natural families together. Be the spokeswoman for every young woman still afraid to tell her mother...or being pressured by her mother. Be a spokeswoman for all the babies who suffer a life of not fitting in and/or not knowing they are adopted. For all the adoption separated families who are denied the same human rights as non-adoption separated families to have a copy of their own original birth certificate! read the stories of mothers spanning decades from 1956 right up until 2004, of pressure to permanently surrender their rights to the children they bore. See them and hear them tell their stories.

Or, just donate quietly, without fanfare, as Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam has done, in honor of the sister he lost to adoption when his mother was young and alone...

Yes, listen again to Eddie's "daughter" - written for his sister:

Don't call me daughter, not fit to The picture kept will remind me Don't call me daughter, not fit to The picture kept will remind me Don't call me...

and listen to the live version of "Daughter" he does as a medley with "Rockin' in the Free World":

I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away,
and she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life,
and what she's done to it
There's one more kid
that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love,
never get to be cool.

You, too, have sang it out...but now raise your voice publicly for all of us, Joni. Those who have already lost, need you. The mothers of the world need you! The strruggling expectant mothers; new others...they need you.

Cancer has a multitude of star. Flesh peddlers are spreading adoption spreading like a cancer across the globe, seeking out poverty, war, unrest and strife - any weakness it find - even natural disasters - to exploit for profit! Children are redistributed around the globe in reverse Robinhoddism - taken for the poor and sold to the wealthy! It is happening in South America (particularly Guatemala), Asia (Vietnam and India, are current hot spots), and eastern Europe (Russia and the former Soviet Union) and now Africa (particularly Ethiopia) is the new go-to hot spot for those clamoring for babies - other people's babies..at any price!

Here at home women are promised "openness" - more often than not an unfulfilled promise. Help us start a legal fund for mothers fighting to regain custody of chidlren that were taken from them fraudulently with broken promises.

Help us in any way you can....I am begging you!

Girls Like Us: Part II The Aftermath and Reunion

(Part I appeared yesterday.)

Girls Like Us, a 539 page hard cover three-in-one biography, is not just about Carly, Carole and Joni. It's about an era, and about the music. It's about the men in the "girls" lives: James Taylor, Neil Young, David Crosby, Bob Dylan and Graham Nash were all in Joni's life in one capacity or another. Graham Nash wrote "Our House" about his life with Joni. Both had been divorced and gun-shy when they met and Joni was afraid to tell him that she had a daughter who she lost to adoption. When she told him: "she poke of the 'shame and guilt and wanting a life' and of the 'rejection' she knew she would have faced from her parents had they known"...She said it was "devastating for her. It had a tremendous effect on her emotional growth." One of the most goose-bumpy are the two descriptions of her meeting two little girls at her shows. One who little girl said her name was Joni; the other said her name was Kelly. At one point Joni says: "Soon after I'd given up my daughter for adoption, I had a house and a car and I had the means, and I'd become a public figure; the combination of those situations did not sit well. So...I began to go inside, and question who I was. And out of that [the title song of Blue] evolved."

Blue, songs are like tattoos
You know Ive been to sea before
Crown and anchor me
Or let me sail away
Hey blue, here is a song for you
Ink on a pin
Underneath the skin
An empty space to fill in
Well there're so many sinking now
You've got to keep thinking
You can make it thru these waves
Acid, booze, and ass
Needles, guns, and grass
Lots of laughs, lots of laughs
Everybody's saying that hells the hippest way to go
Well I don't think so
But I'm gonna take a look around it though
Blue, I love you

Blue, here is a shell for you
Inside you'll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me

Girls Like Us is not just about Joni's loss of her daughter, but also about her daughter's adoptive family and their reunification. Joni's daughter, Kelly Dale born Feb. 1965, she was adopted and renamed Kilauren Gibb. She was placed into a family with a biological son and her adoption was kept a secret, though she was a odd fit: The Gibbs were "timid and uncharismatic... bookish...prim and dour" and not especailly attractive. Kilauren was "headstrong and self-possessed...artistic." Friends describe her as "a renegade spirit, a girl who hung out with the band" and "unapproachably beautiful" enough to have been a Ford model. Hanging our with the band had its consequences. In 1991 Kilauren, at 26, became pregnant -- her boyfriend "a local rock-group drummer." Upon telling her parents about her pregnancy, they decide that this is the perfect moment to reveal the truth: that she's adopted! She almost immediately begins to search. Her search is involves the oddest of coincidences that truly make this a small world with six degrees of separation! 1996 Like me, Joni obtains her first photos of her daughter from the foster mother who had her daughter for seven months. Shortly, after Joni went public with the news that she was searching for her daughter. That same year, her daughter, Kilauren - after five years - gets the final piece to her puzzle that began with non-identifying information. Soon Kilauren and her son marlin are flying to meet Joni. Their reunion is what those of us who understand not just mother/adult-daughter relationships, but also reunited ones, is understandably a roller coaster. But they seem to have navigated it well. In her 40's Joni experiences a miscarriage of a much wanted child. Joni dedicated her last album to her two grandchildren, Marlin and Daisy, both Kilauren's. Sheila Weller is tender and kind in relating all of this. Girls Like Us is a reminiscent "trip" into those lazy, crazy days that makes really goo dreading...and also and has an opportunity to get a true life story of loss in the hands of those who would never read a book about adoption.

My thanks to Weller...and my heart goes out to Joni as one mother to another! We love you Joni, we always have! You're one of us... and you have sung for us. You've sung of your loss and your pain, and not with shame! You go girl!

© Mirah Riben, Sept 14, 2008

More again tomorrow...

Girls Like Us

"I do and I don't. Maybe I do. Maybe I know a little. Maybe I don't know anything. I'll tell you by that I think I've done my - people are too possessive about their children, too ego-centric with their children, anyway. I reproduced myself. I made a beautiful child, a girl. When-but at the time I was penniless. There was no way I could take-she would have been - I was not the right person to raise this child. There was no indication that I would-I don't have a good education, I couldn't keep her. It was impossible under the circumstance. I had no money when she was born, none. Imagine, I mean .... We would just have been - I would have been waitressing or something. It wouldn't have been - fate did not design this to occur."

Who said this?

Yes, a mother who lost her only child to adoption. But who?

The answer is revealed in a book you will want to read: Girls Like Us.

Want a hint?

Omitted and replaced with ... is the following: "none of the music could have come out."

YES! It was Joni Mitchell's response to being totally taken off guard and "outed" by an interviewer for Greater London Radio in 1990.

"Do you miss having a close-knit family?" he asked.

"Well, we have cats and also I have lost of godchildren I haven't had children by choice, really," Joni replied.

After falling right into his evil plot, he then pounced and said: "You did have a child, didn't you, when you were very young? Do you know what happened to him or her?"...it was then Joni, totally stunned, began stammer out the above quotation.

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the journey of a generation by New York Times bestselling author, Sheila Weller, does much justice to our "cause." In a very different way than The Girls Who Went Away it places an "out-of wedlock" pregnancy and subsequent surrender into a person's life and the life of every woman who came of age in the 60's, and is far more readable and less academic than Wake up Little Suzie. If, like me, you too are a child of the sixties - a bit of a flower-child, a "folkie" or fan of any of these iconic singers - you would enjoy this book even without this highlight - that I, of course, IMMEDIATELY turned to!

Weller details Joni's pregnancy ("I lost my virginity and got pregnant all in the same act" Joni told a reporter in 2001) and what followed with exquisite sensitivity warmth and caring, interspersed with insights from Sandra Jarvies, president of Canadian Birth Mothers United (though I find no internet presence of this person or such a group) about the multitude of Canadian girls sent 3,000 miles from home to protect their parents' reputations. (She also quotes Gone to Aunt's: Remembering Canada's home for unwed mothers by Anne Petrie, a 1967 alumna, and mentions the millions of US mothers who lost our children during the same time period in a a footnote.)

I found lots to identify with, beginning with the fact that Carole King's "real" name is the same as my maiden name! I totally relate to the author's description of Joni floating back and forth between the "good girl" we all felt we should be and our wilder side.

But, most of all I identified with Joni who was making a name for herself in the Canadian "hootenanny" folk scene in the 60's, while I was a folk "groupie" in Greenwich Village...waiting tables while guitarist Jose Feliciano and such passed the basket at the Cafe Wha, The Why Not?, and the Village Gate. Bob Dylan had just graduated from the village coffee house scene, but it was there I met and hung out with my (still) dear friend Richie Havens. Ironically, Joni - who wrote the song, Woodstock - was slated to perform at Woodstock in 1969 - which Richie Havens opened. Her agent canceled her performance.

Weller reveals how Joni went through her pregnancy and surrender alone - with no help from her family and no maternity home (as did I). Joni kept playing music until her belly became too big, and neither she, nor anyone around her, spoke about it.

Like me, Joni - 21 (I was 22) put her daughter (born in 1965) in foster care and is described as feeling "sort of numb and half-awake". I identify with the fact that Joni was impregnated by one and then let down by another she hoped would help "rescue" her and help her keep and raise her daughter - though she married the second and I was married to the first!

She named her daughter Kelly, and in private Joni sang "Kelly Green" instead of "Little Green" (a song mothers who lost children "knew" the meaning of, long before the truth was revealed - lyrics so telling).

Born with the moon in cancer
Choose her a name she will answer to
Call her green and the winters cannot fade her
Call her green for the children who've made her
Little green, be a gypsy dancer

He went to California
Hearing that everything's warmer there
So you write him a letter and say, her eyes are blue.
He sends you a poem and shes lost to you
Little green, hes a non-conformer

Ch0rus:

Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
There'll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
Like the nights when the northern lights perform
There'll be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there'll be sorrow

Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed
Little green, have a happy ending

Weller also sees baby hints in "The Circle Game" as well as "Both Sides Now" which speaks to her indecisiveness.

The book is deliciously seasoned with photos, including Joni's reunion.

"The unwanted pregnancy" says Weller, "seems to have spurred Joni to take new creative risks - to write her own songs; she wrote her first, what she called a feeling-sorry-for-myself-song, 'Day by Day,' on the train [leaving to hide her pregnancy]. The closer she got to delivering her baby (in increasingly desperate circumstances), the more her work - singing and startig to write - seemed to preoccupy her...
"In the months after she had her baby...Joni would write a flood of songs so beautiful and original..."

In 1982, while her baby was a still a secret to her own parents, Joni released Wild Things Run Fast which includes "Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody:"

Caught in the middle
Carol, we're middle class
We're middle aged
We were wild in the old days
Birth of rock 'n roll days
Now your kids are coming up straight
And my child's a stranger
I bore her
But, I could not raise her
Nothing lasts for long--
Nothing lasts for long--
Nothing lasts for long--
Down at the Chinese Cafe
We'd be dreaming on our dimes
We'd be playing--
"Oh my love, my darling"
One more time
...
Nothing lasts for long--
Nothing lasts for long--
Down at the Chinese Cafe
We'd be dreaming on our dimes
We'd be playing--
"You give your love, so sweetly"
One more time..
This girl of my childhood games
With kids nearly grown and gone
Grown so fast
Like the turn of a page
We look like our mothers did now
When we were those kids' age
Nothing lasts for long--
Nothing lasts for long--
Nothing lasts for long--
Down at the Chinese Cafe
We'd be dreaming on our dimes
We'd be playing--
"Oh my love, my darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long lonely time
And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me."
(Time goes--where does the time go--
I wonder where the time goes. . .)

© Mirah Riben, Sept 13, 2008

See Part II: The Aftermath and Reunion, tomorrow