Blowin' in the wind makes for dirty dancing

This week's deaths of Patrick Swayze and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame both hit home.

Swayze has always been a favorite of mine. My husband says I drool over him when I watch Dirty Dancing. But it was really his type of cancer that cut me to the quick, because my mother also had pancreatic cancer.

And now my husband's aunt has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I am very sorry about that. I love Aunt Jenny and she deserves better. She is a good woman. I pray for her every night.

I knew Aunt Jenny almost before I knew my husband. Growing up around here, you kind of know everyone. While my husband and I rode the same bus, he was four years older and had nothing to do with some sissy little girl who did her homework and looked out the window. (I still can't believe I married him sometimes! Can it really be?) Aunt Jenny was a substitute teacher while I was in elementary school, and she sometimes taught the class I was in. I went to school with her middle son, Alan, and I can remember when she became pregnant with the youngest cousin, Anthony. So I have a long history with her and I really am hoping for a miracle.

While I had no real connection with Mary Travers, I do know an awful lot of Peter Paul and Mary songs. They were some of the first I learned on the guitar and they are the ones that still come to mind on the rare times I pick the instrument up. Those soothing and cool melodies sometimes sing through my brain at strange times and I find myself humming those tunes. While the group has made no new music in a very long time, and the past music certainly isn't dead, it is still one of those things that brings pause and reflection.

I once wrote a poem that used the Where Have All the Flowers Gone song (which of course would be a copyright violation, wouldn't it. Eek). I hadn't thought of that poem in years. A quick search of my computer and of my files has failed to turn it up, alas. I wrote it in 1985 and it dealt with the bombings in Beirut. Maybe it will turn back up one of these days.