When I was an Art Director roaming the halls of the Famous Barr department store in St Louis Missouri, I was in the habit of saying to everyone I met, “Peace. Love. Understanding.” Of course, I was known to have some eccentricities, such as spontaneous outbursts of singing, and mass e-mails in December of James Wright’s poem, “A Blessing.” One day, as I was sprinkling “peace. love. understanding” along a hallway, one of the people who received it replied to me, “What’s so funny ‘bout it?” It was then that I learned that my greeting came from a song that Elvis Costello and The Attractions sang. I don’t know how it got into my head, but I listen to all kinds of music. I also read (and write) poetry, and “A Blessing” is one of my favorites. I wrote a column centered around the poem and how I came to know of it. More recently, I gave my new next-door neighbor a copy of “A Blessing, Again,” which was published in the Eastside Voice (this publication’s former name) in December 2010. I’m still trying to sprinkle some joy.
In 2024, two of the co-owners of The Weekly View, Ethel Winslow and Paula Nicewanger, encouraged me to take my hallway bellowing to a more formal environment, and I joined the Harmony Collected Community Choir, sponsored by the Irvington Arts Collective. On Sunday, November 23, 2025, Dr. Webb Parker and the choir presented “The Resilience of Hope,” a series of songs that paid homage to that theme. I had suffered some medical setbacks and was unable to join in that concert but sat in the pews of the Irvington Presbyterian Church as the choir gave a world premiere presentation of Derek Larson’s song, “It All Will Come Out Right.” On December 4th, when a woman was shot and killed at a local Irvington business, Webb sent to all the members of the choir, the song we had practiced and sung: “Can We Sing The Darkness to Light.” I sang it silently, for Terri Lee Heady, and for the other employees and owners of Josephine’s and Black Sheep Gifts in Irvington.
There are a few people in this country that may say that 2025 was a good year, but I do not run in that circle; I do not hear Frank Sinatra’s voice singing “it was a very good year.” I can hear someone reciting William Wordsworth’s poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” and the lines “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; — / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Wordsworth’s sonnet, published in 1802, was a lament over “humanity’s disconnection from nature due to materialism and industrialization.”
We are in the holiday season, the Hanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa times that precede the advent of the new year. In her 1971 album, “Here Comes The Sun,” Nina Simone sang “There’s a new world comin’…” and though the text of the song tends to be nonsecular, the emotion conveyed is one of hope; in the album’s title song, she ends “Here Comes The Sun” by crying out that peace and love are “Coming in joy!”
I can but hope that those among us who can, have sprinkled enough “peace. love. understanding” onto the soil of our nation’s hearts and will have enough energy left so that we can all enjoy the blossoming of the joy foretold in Nina Simone’s delightful cry.
cjon3acd@att.net