May Fourth

Today was the kind of day that a normal person hopes for...it was normal. Well, maybe not all of it. But there were no unnecessary events, no extraordinary circumstances.

I had trouble waking, as I seem to often these days. I wonder as I prepare my face each morning if others notice the painstaking effort I make to hide each blemish. The habit I have developed up keeping my hair up and out of the way. I dismiss this thought as I swallow the synthroid I must take each morning because the lithium has decimated my thyroid and the effexor I must take to ward off the darkness that so nearly took my life not long ago.

It is easy to smile and mean it when I focus on the smaller faces. Children are so open, so willing to give others a clean slate. Not so with us older folks. Marc Antony was correct in his famous speech: "The evil men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones." I often wonder why we take such delight in the failings of others. Why we feel pride rather than shame when we glory in the humiliation of our peers. But the children smile.

The day is smooth, serene. Except for those infernal inanimate objects. Modern technology is a wonderful thing....providing it works. But then the day is ending, and I breathe a sigh of relief that I have not been privy to the thing which makes me less productive, less enthusiastic, less of who I want to be. I fully understand that I am not what I was three years ago, five years ago. That is the price of sanity, of health, of a family that is intact. It is a price I am willing to pay. But I am aware that others are not so generous.

And now supper sizzles, and I have a quiet moment to reflect on the day. I have it better than some, than many. The exchange, of course, is that whatever ill health I do have must be shrouded in the shame of misunderstanding. But perhaps it will not always be so.