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“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less..."
(CALGARY, Alberta) - Amy Winehouse died last July 23. She was 27, the same age as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, the rock icons of my generation were, when they died. Coincidence? I think not.
At birth we join society (in progress) as a nascent thread; when we exit society, we leave a rip in the social fabric.
John Steinbeck observed in one of his novels: “When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so, you’ve got two new people.” Society is created and sustained by these ongoing interactions of its members—a non-stop fluxion of interrelationships.
Nobel economist Milton Friedman, for example, described Henry Simons as
“...my teacher and my friend—and above all, a shaper of my ideas. No man can say precisely whence his beliefs and his values come—but there is no doubt that mine would be very different than they are if I had not had the good fortune to be exposed to Henry Simons”.
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On February 18, 2006. Billy Cowsill died here in Calgary. I didn’t even know he was living here! Newly drug-free and sober he had been estranged from his family who only learned of his death while holding a memorial for his brother, Barry, a victim of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and whose body had not been found and identified until the month before Billy died
My connection to him is The Cowsills (family group) hit of the late 1960s, “The Rain, the Park and Other Things”. That song is on one my nostalgia play lists that I put on from time to time when the world gets a little too heavy. Those were golden years—but only in retrospect. (The Cowsills were the inspiration for the TV show, “The Partridge Family”.)
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