Posts in "Thoughts" Category — Page 9
I read the news now. Every day.
There was a period when I covered my eyes with my hands, as a child hoping that the fright will vanish if she does not look. I put on the blindfold after Peter got sick and died. Peter told us that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer as if confessing to a crime. He said that he had been weak during his constant coverage of the September 11 attacks and had succumbed to smoking again. I wanted to say, “Peter, you are not weak. There is no shame in being sick. You are magnificent.”
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Baby Honey died yesterday. “Baby Honey,” an apparent misnomer, as she was the sovereign grown-up and her temperament was not an easy and recognizable sweet. Baby Honey was a strong, old-fashioned, hat-wearing, proper, church-going, God-loving woman. And yet, as I mine memory, I realize that her name is indeed fitting, for thoughts of Baby Honey are inseparable from the sweet, verdant scent of Easter Sunday.
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I am slow to tears. Of the scores of movies that I have watched, the hundreds of books that I have read, each medium has provoked but a single crying episode. The movie, I am embarrassed to name. The book, Great Expectations, during the scene in which Pip awakens to find that he has been nursed to health by the ever-loving, all-good Joe, the rustic brother-in-law whom Pip has discounted and discarded in typical social climber fashion.
Tonight, I add to the book count, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.
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While bibliophile tortoises shun the evil digital destroyer, I hippety-hopped aboard the e-book revolution sans reservation, having been an owner of Kindle 1st generation. I am not nostalgic for that earthy book scent, the graze of wafer sheets against my fingertips, the multi-colored mélange of rectangles stacked upon shelves. Though a romantic of the early nineteenth century sort, I am not a traditionalist and can easily forgo old conventions in favor of new conveniences.
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Disclosure: I have not read Les Miserables in its entirety. On page 434 out of 959, I sometimes find its talons dug too tightly into my shoulder. Dates and deaths and detailed histories and analyses, it gets too heavy to hold. So I perch it upon the shelf, where it sits content and well-behaved amid good company, often for several months—until it begins to sing, the nightingale’s tune, sweet testament to transformation. I forget past discomfort and begin again.
I am in transition. The scratched record of loss, grief, and remorse is spinning in my mind. I feel captive to this ragtime racket until I recall that oft overlooked B-side. I flip the record over and find a more promising melody—opportunity.
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