My daughter awoke today to find her fish, Julia, dead. She was crushed. She cried, long and hard, grappling with the permanence of death.
This moment of tenderhearted sweetness struck me as in such great contrast to this video:
I found it on Google through the usual circuitous routing of blogs and newsfeeds.
How is it that at 8 years old we can cry over the death of a small fish but that by 38 we can go about our daily lives in a world so cold it allows children to be left huffing glue and living in sewers?
Sure, I realize we can’t survive if we perceive the full experience of the world as an 8 year old. We’d never get around to feeding ourselves as we sorted through the sadness. But still, to go from a child crying her heart out over a fish to an adult capable of walking passed children living in squalor with little more than a glance… There has to be a middle ground, right?
The saddest bit, I think, is my own realization that once I finish this post and my work email starts coming in and the phone starts ringing, I too will move on to other things.
Was up early this am out for a run. Only a half mile in I was cutting through a church parking lot full of Canada geese. I wasn’t going fast and figured the geese would move out of my way. Most did. One didn’t. He backed up a few feet, then stopped squarely in front of me. I reduced my pace a little. He hissed at me. I lunged forward to startle him. He backed up. Then HE lunged forward at me, hissing.
Well, I had to do it. I had to kill off an email address I’ve had since 1997 because the SPAM became so overwhelming I couldn’t handle it. Talk about a pain in the arse. I had to go back through all sorts of online accounts to update with new contact info. I had to alert friends. And no doubt, this ‘move’will continue to annoy me for months to come as I discover through error the numerous accounts I didn’t modify in advance of this change.
