If you were, perchance, to visit the home of my parents, walk up the stairs and enter the bedroom to the right, you would find a room with bright, yellow colored walls. These walls are bordered with quotes and poems scribbled in Crayola marker which to this day my mother still doesn't have the heart to paint over. (For Ma is and always has been, after all, my creative champion.)
Quotes like:
"LIVE YOUR DREAM OR DIE" -Jewel
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered" - R. W. Emerson
"Worrying is nothing more or less than the misuse of your imagination" -Uncle Jim
"Doubt, if you must...but persist!"
"When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive!"
"Forget regrets...or life is yours to miss... (RENT. OK, I'm a frigging theater geek, so sue me!!)
Over the years, as I came back to stay in this room, usually the quotes would inspire me; though more times than naught they would mock me in a manner most menacing. Was I ever really that idealistic or was I merely trying to convince myself? As my childhood dreams began to fade and morph, I sort of stopped looking up at my walls.
I'm not going to lie, I was embarrassed the first time Hubby saw my childhood bedroom and especially prayed that he'd overlook the sloppy poetry marking the wall behind the door. That poem I penned about everyone at Conservatory being a fake and a phony and how I wished I'd never laid eyes on them!!:
"But the sickest part of all this shit...is I am the fakest part of it!" (Yes, I dared to rhyme with the word "shit". Even performed it as a theatrical piece in movement class. Oh ya, I went there.)
So I was a passionate youth. But what I've been thinking of mostly this week, this monumental week in American history, is of a small sticker adhered to my closet door, bought from The Body Shop in the Pheasant Lane Mall about a million years ago. It's a bumper sticker with a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr., and on it are the words: Remember the Dream.
This week, as the magnitude of what has recently come to pass soaks in, my thoughts inevitably keep turning to Mr. King. As a rule, I generally
don't like to talk politics with anyone but Hubby and my sister; but I would like to simply
say this: Hooray America!! It's about bloody time.
xoxo









