This Old Man . . .: Forty-Fiveseminal Ballads

By James R. Cooley

This book of seminal ballads is inspired by the English nursery rhyme in the 1958 20th Century Fox motion picture Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490762449

James R. Cooley

The author is a veteran of the USAF and a graduate of Claremont McKenna College. He studied Sorbonne, Paris, and is a photo journalist. He has gone to North Africa, Greece, Spain, and Italy. He is part of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA in Hollywood.

Book preview

#  ONE

This old man in his mind

Is young.

       The ladder he climbs

        Rung by rung

Is a seeking thing

For those lost songs he sang.

          Up and up he goes into thinner air

           Where there was spring and love

                     And hair.

Oh, how that mind of his reaches

Where the images and melodies

              Were so much sweeter;

               A place old age can’t defeat,

Where nagging memories

               Hadn’t happened yet,

               And life was all ambition

                        And deliciously incomplete.

#  TWO

This old man once thought

He possessed stuff that made him content.

               But then he came to realize

                The stuff possessed him

                        And not vice-versa.

The stuff became his master and bullied him,

Made unreasonable demands on his time,

                   Harassed him, held him hostage,

                    Interfered with plans, spiked relationships,

Weighed him down, threw him into fits of jealousy and rage .

                    So he sought to replace his stuff with other stuff,

                    But that just made more stuff to fret and worry over.

The answer could only be to have nothing:

Is nothing something when something is nothing?

                      He pondered: is it possible to have nothing?

                       Is it possible of one’s ownership to demure?

Soon enough he will know

When the grand eternal divestiture of stuff

                  Shall occur.

#  THREE

This old man being old and a man

Has a secret among many he withholds,

                 He has lived and