Family Man Poem by gershon hepner

Family men cannot compete
with bad boys, who get all the girls
and throw themselves at bad boys’ feet,
though they are swine who get the pearls.
To be a bad boy you must have
panache, or else you will be tied
by family, and be its slave
until the time that you backslide,
relying on goodwill of bad,
bad girls, who’ll take you from your wife.
Protection is not ironclad,
so guard her as you guard your life.

Terry Teachout writes in the WSJ about the pianist William Kapell who died in a plane crash in 1953 at the age of 34 (“After the Good Die Young: Remembering the Pianist William Kapell, Too Long Forgotten”) :

Music was his ruling passion, and his playing, for all its explosive virtuosity, was self-effacing rather than self-indulgent. “The greatest moments people have are those at which time their identities become involved in someone or something else, ” he once remarked. “The only moments have when I play, that are worth anything to m, are when I can blissfully ignore the people I’m supposed to be entertaining and be able to lose all of myself in a slow movement…No me, no silly public to amuse; only the heart and the soul, the world, the birds, storms, dreams, sadness, heavenly serenity. Then I am an artist worthy of the name.” So he was—but the public at large has always had a way of preferring bad boys to family men.

5/27/08