"From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines, going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me."
Walt Whitman (1819-92)
"When I look back now over my life and call to mind what I might have had simply for taking and did not take, my heart is like to break."
Akhenaton (d. c.1354 BC)
And now, the current weather, from some random person we pulled off the street:
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Sunrise
blossom Function: intransitive verb
1 : BLOOM
2 a : to come into one's own : DEVELOP [a blossoming talent] b : to become evident : make an appearance
3 : what my friend is seeing her daughter do, against all odds
Tonight I saw what it looks like when a person gets their heart's desire.
A friend of mine has a child who is mentally ill. Not the kind of mental illness that comes from being abused or not well adjusted, but the type that comes from something chemically wrong that can take a little girl and make her into a raging terror one minute and a bundle of sobs the next, and then repeat the cycle over and over again.
At times, they have lived in their own private hell. Yet through it all, the mother has perservered, has remembered that somewhere in there is the little girl she loves.
A couple of weeks ago, the little girl got a new doctor. He put her on a small dosage of a new medicine.
The mother and father are divorced, and during the summer the daughter spends two weeks with one, two weeks with the other. This was the father's two weeks. Each night, the mother would call the little girl, and they would talk for about five minutes. Even though the mother wanted to talk more, that's all the little girl would be able to handle.
Then, the calls started to run longer.
Soon, in just a few days, they were talking for thirty minutes each night. And the mother was hearing something in her little girl's voice that she had sometimes despaired of hearing...
Happiness.
"Darling," the mother asked after several nights of thirty minute calls. "With your new medicine, how do you feel?"
"Momma, I feel like a completely new person. I am so happy."
My friend is counting the seconds until her little girl gets home from her father's. She fought back tears as she told me this story. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing on Earth more valuable than the gift she had just received.
A little girl, whole again, at least for now.
D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915
