shape
carat
color
clarity

Please share a beautiful story.

Missy

Super_Ideal_Rock
Premium
Joined
Jun 8, 2008
Messages
56,758
I’ll start.


At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.
Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.
The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."
Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.
During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.
Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.
"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl.
Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "my travels have changed me." the little girl hugged the new doll and brought her happy home.
A year later Kafka died.
Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written:
"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

#kafka #thedoll

91306503-D1C8-4B62-90EE-132A4EF4E34F.jpeg
 
I’ll start.


At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.
Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.
The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."
Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.
During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.
Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.
"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl.
Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "my travels have changed me." the little girl hugged the new doll and brought her happy home.
A year later Kafka died.
Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written:
"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

#kafka #thedoll

91306503-D1C8-4B62-90EE-132A4EF4E34F.jpeg

Oh Missy,that was such a beautiful story.Full of love & human kindness.Thank you for sharing=)2
 
Wow, I love this.
 
Hi,

I want to share, but I don't know how to upload it. It is in Microsoft word, and is a short story. Chrono helped me upload once. Anyone here want to try.
Annette
 
As a starling owner myself, I found this story quite beautiful and I cry every time I read it :oops: My apologies as it's pretty lengthy...

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/nyregion/thecity/the-starling-chronicles.html

Why is there a wild bird in my apartment?
She fell, as a nestling, from the rain gutter on the roof of my country house. Since then, she has been dividing her time, as I do, between city and country -- taking taxis while in town, going to meetings, theater. She has spent quality time in my apartment on East 80th Street, gazing at the street scene and listening to WQXR. She responds to both classical and jazz, is attentive to Jonathan Schwartz.
At the start, there were two baby birds -- the one we took to calling Raven Starling and her sibling, a creature that was smaller and weaker from the get-go. The ousted nestlings lay stranded on the grass, looking less like birds than glands, fleshy globs with a suggestion of gray lint over raw red flesh.
The ugly little hatchlings had survived a three-story fall from a roof, and they had luck from the start; they fell at the feet of my 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine. "Oh, look!" she cried. "Baby birds!"
Ugh, I thought. But I dutifully went online to figure out what to do with these creatures, then called a wildlife rehabilitation phone number that I found under "Wild Baby Birds." After listening to my description, the fatigued woman on the other end snapped: "Sturnus vulgaris, a starling. Dog food on a chopstick, every hour."
I set the unappealing twosome on a warm hand towel in a basket in the bathroom. "They'll be dead in the morning," I thought, with some ambivalence.
In the morning, one was dead, but Raven Starling was very much alive.
"One didn't make it," Jasmine said, her voice reedy with grief. "Let's hope for Ravvie."

Thus began the grueling all-day feedings. In the wild, starlings are insectivores, but they can live as omnivores if someone is willing to shop and mash commercial food for them. Ravvie demanded more and more of the recommended meal, which we adapted to cat food, Nine Lives mixed with Mott's natural apple sauce (no sugar for starlings, only corn syrup or fruit sweeteners), ground Tums (for calcium) and mashed hard-boiled egg yolk to meet her "intense protein needs."
Why we were meeting this creature's intense protein needs was another matter. I did not give Raven Starling great odds. I believed that her daily meals were only staving off the inevitable. Every morning, I expected to find her dead in her basket, beak sealed forever.
But when I walked into the bathroom on the fourth day, she stood up and spread her featherless wings, looking like a mini oviraptor escaped from Jurassic Park, demanding to be fed. I did not find the sight appealing, but I was impressed. "She wants to live," I realized. From that moment forth, I found the image of the bird, alone, opening her mouth without anyone to hear, unbearable.

Which explains why I nearly died later that day, feeding her from her chopstick while navigating a turn off the West Side Highway into Greenwich Village, where a play of mine was in rehearsal. She later made it to several performances. With a drape over her head, Raven Starling knew to be still during performances, at least off Broadway. Raven Starling adapted to apartment life; she would even tolerate a car-sit for alternate-side-of-the street parking, or a quick run into the hot bagel place. Even an insectivore, I noted, was not immune to the charms of a warm sesame bagel.
Our doorman, Manuel Gonzalez, welcomed Raven Starling. With doormanly discretion, he ignored her unattractive appearance and gave her courteous rides, often on his uniformed arm.

In my apartment, two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she perched on a houseplant and looked out the window, studying the city pigeons and sparrows and the renovation of the Junior League building across the street. She splattered away, in a box in the powder room. What have I done? I wondered. I've brought the worst of the country; a fecal spray, a wild thing, into what was an oasis of urban civilization. But I did notice she seemed attentive when I turned on WQXR, the classical station, and she clutched a program from the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center.
I tried to ignore her odor, her cat-food-encrusted beak, and forced myself to share my daughter's deepening love. "Oh, she's so cute."
But she wasn't cute. Her face was foreshortened, and with her tiny beady eyes, bright with ruthless appetite, and a jaw that compressed when her beak closed, which was rare, she looked like Andy Gump.

I WENT to the Web site Starling Talk to check out the origins of starlings and discovered some surprising facts. The starling is a New York immigrant and, if not for Shakespeare, would never have entered our lives.
In March 1890, a New York drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin acted on his love for the playwright by vowing to release into Central Park all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare. Mr. Schieffelin loosed several species: thrushes, skylarks and starlings. Only the starlings survived. From the initial 100 birds released, flocks reproduced to the current hundreds of millions, making them among the nation's most abundant and ultimately most controversial birds. They are infamous as pests, accused of corroding buildings with their acid droppings, which is why the joy over their first observed roost, in the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, quickly hardened into disgust.

What did Shakespeare say regarding starlings that so inspired the 19th-century drug maker? It's a line in "Henry IV, Part 1," in which Hotspur threatens: "The king forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he is asleep. I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion."
The birds, I learn, are mimics, known in Elizabethan times as "the poor man's mynah." Oddly, they are unlikely to repeat a single word; they require a rhythmic phrase. So Shakespeare is now regarded as having made a mistake. But one billion birds later, with Raven Starling as my constant companion, I live with the result of one man's infatuation with Shakespeare's silver-tongued reference to songbirds. "She's making a mess," I kept saying, but I also kept feeding her, and she grew, not gradually but suddenly, into a midsize blackish bird. "Take a bath!" I ordered her, and she did, in a soup bowl filled with water in my formerly spotless city kitchen.

By this point, the history of the starling had me in its talons. Starlings may be the champion bird "talkers"; they can chorus in the wild by the thousands. Some experts have observed "a murmuration," as a flock of starlings is called, numbering a million or more.
Yet starlings are as despised as they are loved. In September, it was reported that the federal government had killed 2.3 million starlings in 2004 as part of a campaign to get rid of what it described as "nuisance animals." Starling eliminators insist that the birds damage crops, soil buildings, even cause planes to crash, and have resorted to Roman candles, hot wires and a poison called Starlicide to discourage or destroy the birds.
Is the killing justified? Starling supporters insist that it isn't, that the starling kills so many destructive insects; a murmuration should elicit a chorus of praise. Rachel Carson, the author of "Silent Spring," championed the starling: "In spite of his remarkable success as a pioneer, the starling probably has fewer friends than almost anyother creature that wears feathers. That fact, however, seems to be of very little importance to this cheerful bird with glossy plumage and stumpy tail." The starling, she continued, "hurries with jerky steps about the farms and gardens in the summer time, carrying more than 100 loads of destructive insects per day to his screaming offspring."

Another admirer was Mozart, who paid dearly for his pet starling, loved it and staged a funeral when it passed away, of unknown causes, at age 3. Some authorities think the starling's song became incorporated into Mozart's composition "A Musical Joke."
RAVEN STARLING also began to sing, but would she really be independent someday? Could I release her, perhaps back into Central Park?
No, I could not, I was told by Jackie Collins, who runs Starling Talk. An "imprint" bird like mine, raised from infancy, can never join a starling murmuration. Starling Talk is filled with descriptions of confused imprint birds that have been found injured and emaciated and are unable to join in a flock. Although Raven Starling would one day speak better than a parrot, live to be 20 and play with a whiffle ball, she would have to stay forever among her adopted species -- humans.

By then I had ascended into the skies of a cyberculture of starling-keepers, and joined the Chirp Room, where visitors signed off with phrases like "the whisper of wings" and quoted the famous line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "You are responsible forever for what you have tamed." I learned that there are thousands of starling-keepers, the beneficiaries of a legal loophole: Although keeping a native wild bird in your home is illegal, starlings are exempt because of their foreign origin.
Meanwhile, Raven Starling grew prettier. As she matured, she displayed a certain etiquette, wiping her beak after each gooey bite. We shared toast. I played her Mozart's starling song.
Now when I heard the deep chords of Mozart's "Requiem," and Raven Starling sang along, in full throat, I pondered why I had tried so hard to keep this bird alive. Was it simply to keep a promise to a child? Perhaps there was another reason. In my home, we are all foundlings. I was an orphaned child, and my little girl was left on a street in China. Was this why the fallen starling had to be rescued? Because in our family, abandonment is unthinkable?

Whatever my motivation, I was not alone in my demented devotions. At 3 one morning I tried to predict what would become of the three of us by checking on the bird's Web site, Starling Talk. There, I learned about other baby starling "parents" who were struggling with similar issues but also celebrating events such as "Stormy's Fifth Birthday." Tamed starlings were on display, rainbow-hued when loved and cleaned, aglow as they were videotaped: "Plant a kiss on me, liverlips," said a saveling named Techno.

I admit, I had become attached to Ravvie. She flew to me at a whistle, and she groomed my tousled hair. She sat on my head when I played piano. I never thought that I could love an insectivore. Maybe it's possible that someone can love anything.
How far would I go in catering to my insectivore? Could I be like those other starling people on the Web site, who order bags of dried bugs? There was a human murmuration on the Web, especially in the dead of night, composed of bird people like a man living in a city apartment with an adult male starling named Smarty who has learned to take sharp right turns.
But winter would change everything. Winter was when the true trial of caring indoors for a wild bird would begin. Raven Starling would be forced for long periods into apartment life in the city. I have learned that if she walked for much longer on even carpeted city floors, she would develop a deformity, "spraggle feet."

ONE dawn, I began to communicate with a woman upstate, who has four starlings and offered to adopt mine. And I begin to wonder, what is best, to maintain Raven Starling as a lone creature, becoming spraggle-footed, commuting to New York and riding elevators, or surrender her to another "mother" who maintains three rooms in her home just for her birds?
So it came to pass that one September Sunday, I found myself driving with my daughter and the bird, in her cage, strapped to the back car seat, to a town five hours north of New York that even on the warm golden day appeared flattened by the memory of blizzards. Fort Plain, just outside Canajoharie.
The town is blanched and beaten, an entire town with freezer burn. Nearly all the factories that once sustained the area closed long ago. Yet it is here I was assured that a warm and loving home with other starlings awaited Raven Starling.
Mary Ann, the "adoptive mother" who is known on the Web as Little Feathers, was sitting on the stoop of a house with a peaked roof when we arrived. At 52, in T-shirt and jeans, with long, flowing hair, she had a fatigued, youthful quality.
Inside her neat but crammed living room, there was a smell, not unpleasant but avian. I think it was the smell of warm feathers.

Mary Ann has three children: an 11-year-old daughter and a boy and girl who are 12. The older girl was robust; her handsome twin brother, who has cerebral palsy, looked five years younger, thin and frail. Mary Ann also had a dozen avian "babies." Her voice quickened as she described the antics of George. "He's just a baby. And Chirp, she was given to me. And Littlefeathers, he was the first. And Trouble, well, his name fits."
In addition to the starlings, there were three pigeons, four society finches, and, the pièce de résistance, a paralyzed sparrow presented in the palm of her hand. I could not help connecting the flightless bird to the child who sits so still on the couch.
How could Mary Ann care for all these needful beings? I was on the brink of saying, "We thank you, but I'll take the bird home." Instead, we recited the chorus of open adoption: I asked and she agreed, "You shall have visitation."
"We can see her again," I said, my voice climbing too high, as Jasmine and I drove back to the city.
I knew we were thinking the same thought. Someone left my daughter somewhere almost 13 years ago. "On Quon Dong Road," her papers report. I recited the rationale that Raven Starling was better off with other birds, with an at-home mother who knew avian medicine and had an avian vet. I had no doubt that was all true, but my hands tightened on the steering wheel.
"We're never coming back," my child said.

We drove along, and then somewhere along the Thruway, above a vast pasture, we saw them, a murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds. Through the open car window, I heard, or more accurately felt, a familiar sound, more vibration or audible breeze than a true noise; the flutter of thousands of wings in unison, combined with a muted mass voice.
Later at twilight in the city, walking through Central Park, my daughter and I caught sight of another flock, or was it the same one? This was the true murmuration, an entity unto itself, to which Raven Starling, had her fate not crossed with ours, would have belonged. I watched the birds dip, then rise and reverse again, an animate banner, starring the skies above the city.
My daughter and I stared upward. We would never see a flock of birds again without noticing and remembering: We knew one in a billion.
 
Last edited:
Thank you @xsouzie for sharing that beautiful story with us. I cried too.


Another story that I hope you find heartwarming.

"

AN 87 YEAR OLD COLLEGE STUDENT NAMED ROSE
The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn’t already know.

I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder. I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me
with a smile that lit up her entire being.

She said, “Hi handsome. My name is Rose. I’m eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?”

I laughed and enthusiastically responded, “Of course you may!” and she gave me a giant squeeze.

“Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?” I asked.

She jokingly replied, “I’m here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids…”

“No seriously,” I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.


“I always dreamed of having a college education and now I’m getting one!” she told me.

After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake. We became instant friends. Every day for the next three months, we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this “time machine” as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.

Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up.

At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet. I’ll never forget what she taught us. She was
introduced and stepped up to the podium.

As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor. Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, “I’m sorry I’m so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I’ll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell
you what I know.”

As we laughed she cleared her throat and began, “We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing. There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humor every day.

You’ve got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die.
We have so many people walking around who are dead and don’t even know it! There is a huge difference between growing older and growing up.

If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don’t do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old.


If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight.

Anybody can grow older. That doesn’t take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change.
Have no regrets.

The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those
with regrets.”

She concluded her speech by courageously singing “The Rose.”

She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives.

At the year’s end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago. One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep.

Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it’s
never too late to be all you can possibly be .When you finish reading this, please send this peaceful word of advice to your friends and family, they’ll really enjoy it!

These words have been passed along in loving memory of ROSE.

REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS
OPTIONAL.

"

rose.jpg
 
′′ He is 85 and insists on taking his wife hand in hand wherever they go.
When I asked why your wife is distracted, like she wasn't following anyone? He replied: She have Alzheimer's..
So I said, will your wife worry if you let her go? He replied, ′′ She doesn't remember... She doesn't know who I am anymore, she hasn't recognized me for years ".
Surprised, I said, ′′ and still you continue to guide on the way every day even though she doesn't recognize you ".
The elderly man smiled and looked into my eyes.
he said, ′′ She doesn't know who I am, but I know who she is ".

′′ SHE IS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE ′′!" ♥️

0D4DA7AA-C308-46C8-A594-B0C9ACE87F67.jpeg
 
 
 
Sharing another heartwarming story this wonderful day.


I love this story from Katharine Hepburn’s childhood; in her own words.

“Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus.

Finally, there was only one other family between us and the ticket counter. This family made a big impression on me.

There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. The way they were dressed, you could tell they didn't have a lot of money, but their clothes were neat and clean.

The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, animals, and all the acts they would be seeing that night. By their excitement you could sense they had never been to the circus before. It would be a highlight of their lives.

The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband's hand, looking up at him as if to say, "You're my knight in shining armor." He was smiling and enjoying seeing his family happy.

The ticket lady asked the man how many tickets he wanted. He proudly responded, "I'd like to buy eight children's tickets and two adult tickets, so I can take my family to the circus." The ticket lady stated the price.

The man's wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, the man's lip began to quiver. Then he leaned a little closer and asked, "How much did you say?" The ticket lady again stated the price.

The man didn't have enough money. How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn't have enough money to take them to the circus?

Seeing what was going on, my dad reached into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill, and then dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father bent down, picked up the $20 bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket."

The man understood what was going on. He wasn't begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking and embarrassing situation.

He looked straight into my dad's eyes, took my dad's hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied; "Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family."

My father and I went back to our car and drove home. The $20 that my dad gave away is what we were going to buy our own tickets with.

Although we didn't get to see the circus that night, we both felt a joy inside us that was far greater than seeing the circus could ever provide.

That day I learnt the value to Give.

The Giver is bigger than the Receiver. If you want to be large, larger than life, learn to Give. Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only with what you are expecting to give—which is everything.

The importance of giving, blessing others can never be over-emphasized because there's always joy in giving. Learn to make someone happy by acts of giving.”

—Katharine Hepburn


504F41A5-2A2D-490F-80DB-28803CA00F99.jpeg
 
So this one is a little different. Poignant. Bittersweet. Reflective. Beautiful in its own way.






A Man (and Meals) Worth Losing Sleep Over

The cook would arrive after midnight and whip up a Michelin-worthy spread. Which was great, until I could no longer keep my eyes open at work.


Credit...Brian Rea
By Rebecca Bohanan
Nov. 6, 2020

He called himself a cook, which seemed like such a casual title for someone staffed in the kitchen of a Michelin three-star restaurant. But cooking was what he did, preparing another chef’s recipes as a steppingstone on the path to his greater culinary dreams.

We met years ago in a Flatiron bar as Thursday evening drifted into Friday morning. He had just finished work. I was heading home for bed.

“You’re leaving?” he said. “It’s so early.”

He seemed invigorated, but I think it came more from the rush of having worked a great day in the kitchen than any energy I brought to the encounter. And that was enough for me to stay a little longer. When I could no longer keep my eyes open, I zipped up my coat and he asked for my number. A few days later, around 2 a.m., he used it.

Have you ever been texted in the middle of the night to say: “Yo! Got the goods 2 make charcoal-grilled Miyazaki Wagyu w/Welsh onions & jus gras”? I hadn’t either.

I pulled myself out of bed and waited by the door. When he arrived, his arms full of groceries, I wondered if I could still be dreaming — a late-night date ripped from some forgotten romantic comedy. A date of eating when I wasn’t hungry and talking when I should be sleeping, all for the whimsical hell of it. Plus, the food was good.

That’s how he courted me: only after the kitchen had closed. A few times a week he would come over between midnight and 2 a.m., usually a couple of hours after I had gone to bed, and would stay until before dawn, cooking, eating and laughing. Then he would take his long subway ride from my Upper East Side apartment back to Brooklyn.

Only a few hours later, it would be time for me to go to work, which I could barely manage. I was exhausted to the point of being nearly delusional.


A whole new activity had been added to my nights while my days’ activities remained the same. I would wake at my regular time (though there was no more need for breakfast), shower, dress and head to work, taking the subway from 82nd and York all the way to Chelsea Market, where I would sit at my desk from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., fact-checking Zagat guidebooks while dreaming about the restaurant-quality meals being made in my own apartment.
Though the city was filled with blogging foodies, I wasn’t one of them. I fell into my job at Zagat as a means to an end, a way to pay my bills so I could write the things I wanted to. Every day I logged on to my computer and scrolled past the username “achlumsky,” belonging to Anna Chlumsky, who had worked the same job as me for some months and whom I now watched every Sunday night on “Veep.”

“She had other dreams, too,” I’d think. “I’ll get where I’m meant to be eventually.”

That “eventually” was pushed further away the more time I spent with the cook. Being up with him at all hours made me too tired to do anything beyond work, sleep and eat. At the same time, seeing him was exhilarating as we invented ways to get to know each other while the rest of the world slept.

Soon he was teaching me how the meals were made. I stood in the warmth of my growing feelings and gaslit stove learning to heat my pan to a temperature the Michelin Guide deemed acceptable for a two-inch-thick cut of prime beef. None of my friends were dating like this. It was a rebellious engagement, like two children up past bedtime.

Whenever the cook visited, he would arrive with new abrasions on his arms — damage done by open flame, the greatest hazard of his job. One night, a particularly bad burn stretched all the way from wrist to elbow.

“You should put something on that,” I said.

“Nah.”

“But it’s going to scar.”

“Scars are good,” he said. “They’re reminders of what you’ve done.”

“Yours are a little misleading,” I said. “You look like you’ve seen hand-to-hand combat.”

“I have. Every night in that kitchen, I fight for what really matters to me.”
“A job?”

“No,” he said. “Not a job. I’m going to open my own restaurant. Where I’ll do my own menu. It’s going to be my place, my hang. I’ll stand in my own kitchen, tell some other dumb kid what to cook, then I’ll look at these scars and remember everything I did to get there. But maybe you don’t get that. Maybe you only understand jobs.”

It was a crushing blow. Of course I understood; I had dreams too. But I was sacrificing mine for a guy who wasn’t compromising on his. We were doing everything on his schedule, which left me too exhausted to do anything else. I didn’t think I had a choice.

I wondered if it all could flip if I were to insist. We could meet on my lunch breaks, in his off hours. He could be the exhausted one, staying up during his only opportunity to sleep. I could keep my free time by taking his.

A few times I tried to push for a change, but it never worked. After we had been dating on his schedule for months, he picked up a second job at another restaurant. With him working seven days a week, we tried going out during his break on a Saturday, but he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

“How’d you meet your last girlfriend?” I said.

“Work.”

“She was a cook, too?”

“Hostess.”

“Oh,” I said. “So you hung out when the restaurant closed?”

“When else?”

“Yeah, when else.”

I walked him to the subway as the sun rose over the East River. Stepping into the morning light, I saw him anew, and he must have seen me the same way.
“You’ve got a couple scars,” he said, pointing to my knee.

“Just from falling off my bike,” I said. “Not from pursuing my life’s quest.”

That night, I sat down to write. And when the cook texted to see if I was awake, I didn’t answer.

A few days later, I asked if he could meet before work instead of after, but he didn’t respond. As my schedule straightened out, our worlds untangled. I tried calling him one last time on some odd Tuesday afternoon, but there was no answer. And I felt relieved. I began to pour myself into my own dream again, as strait-laced as it was. I returned to going to bed at a normal hour and sleeping through the night.

My time with the cook had changed me, though. And in the restaurants, coffee shops and taco trucks I passed every day, I saw another world. Yes, the chefs were central, uncompromising in their visions and discipline as their loved ones adapted to their rules and schedules — no easy task. But that was only part of it.

Orbiting each chef is a universe of so many others. Some, like me, simply seek a means to an end in their particular industry. They sacrifice their potential for “normal” Friday night dates and weekends with their families in order to pay their bills. In order to feed the rest of us during our time off.

Last March, when restaurants closed their doors because of coronavirus, I thought of the cook (and the new hostess girlfriend I imagined for him) closing up an empty dining room. After, they would go home and make a 7 p.m. dinner for themselves for the first time in their lives together, before going to bed and falling asleep at a reasonable hour.

How suffocating to be forced from one schedule to another without any warning. Without making the choice. How hard to have the brakes slammed on the road that mattered most to him.
Every day I walk by restaurants in my neighborhood and see all the ways they are adapting for our benefit. I see the makeshift takeout windows, the tape on the ground showing customers how to line up six feet apart. I see the ingredients of their recipes being sold like groceries. I see chairs stacked on tables with signs that say “No Seating” and the gloved and masked employees who had been lucky enough to be kept on payroll.

All visible wounds from the battle we’re waging against this virus. Some will eventually heal, but not without scars — this time, an unwanted reminder.

I think of all the dreams that are ending and those that will never begin. I think of all the sacrifices being made and wonder if any of it will be enough. And I feel grateful for the cook, his dreams and even the sleep I lost for him.”

 
I’ll start.


At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.
Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.
The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."
Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.
During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.
Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.
"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl.
Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "my travels have changed me." the little girl hugged the new doll and brought her happy home.
A year later Kafka died.
Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written:
"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

#kafka #thedoll

91306503-D1C8-4B62-90EE-132A4EF4E34F.jpeg

Oh my.. that story made me cry. In a beautiful way. Thanks for sharing.
 
As a starling owner myself, I found this story quite beautiful and I cry every time I read it :oops: My apologies as it's pretty lengthy...

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/nyregion/thecity/the-starling-chronicles.html

Why is there a wild bird in my apartment?
She fell, as a nestling, from the rain gutter on the roof of my country house. Since then, she has been dividing her time, as I do, between city and country -- taking taxis while in town, going to meetings, theater. She has spent quality time in my apartment on East 80th Street, gazing at the street scene and listening to WQXR. She responds to both classical and jazz, is attentive to Jonathan Schwartz.
At the start, there were two baby birds -- the one we took to calling Raven Starling and her sibling, a creature that was smaller and weaker from the get-go. The ousted nestlings lay stranded on the grass, looking less like birds than glands, fleshy globs with a suggestion of gray lint over raw red flesh.
The ugly little hatchlings had survived a three-story fall from a roof, and they had luck from the start; they fell at the feet of my 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine. "Oh, look!" she cried. "Baby birds!"
Ugh, I thought. But I dutifully went online to figure out what to do with these creatures, then called a wildlife rehabilitation phone number that I found under "Wild Baby Birds." After listening to my description, the fatigued woman on the other end snapped: "Sturnus vulgaris, a starling. Dog food on a chopstick, every hour."
I set the unappealing twosome on a warm hand towel in a basket in the bathroom. "They'll be dead in the morning," I thought, with some ambivalence.
In the morning, one was dead, but Raven Starling was very much alive.
"One didn't make it," Jasmine said, her voice reedy with grief. "Let's hope for Ravvie."

Thus began the grueling all-day feedings. In the wild, starlings are insectivores, but they can live as omnivores if someone is willing to shop and mash commercial food for them. Ravvie demanded more and more of the recommended meal, which we adapted to cat food, Nine Lives mixed with Mott's natural apple sauce (no sugar for starlings, only corn syrup or fruit sweeteners), ground Tums (for calcium) and mashed hard-boiled egg yolk to meet her "intense protein needs."
Why we were meeting this creature's intense protein needs was another matter. I did not give Raven Starling great odds. I believed that her daily meals were only staving off the inevitable. Every morning, I expected to find her dead in her basket, beak sealed forever.
But when I walked into the bathroom on the fourth day, she stood up and spread her featherless wings, looking like a mini oviraptor escaped from Jurassic Park, demanding to be fed. I did not find the sight appealing, but I was impressed. "She wants to live," I realized. From that moment forth, I found the image of the bird, alone, opening her mouth without anyone to hear, unbearable.

Which explains why I nearly died later that day, feeding her from her chopstick while navigating a turn off the West Side Highway into Greenwich Village, where a play of mine was in rehearsal. She later made it to several performances. With a drape over her head, Raven Starling knew to be still during performances, at least off Broadway. Raven Starling adapted to apartment life; she would even tolerate a car-sit for alternate-side-of-the street parking, or a quick run into the hot bagel place. Even an insectivore, I noted, was not immune to the charms of a warm sesame bagel.
Our doorman, Manuel Gonzalez, welcomed Raven Starling. With doormanly discretion, he ignored her unattractive appearance and gave her courteous rides, often on his uniformed arm.

In my apartment, two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she perched on a houseplant and looked out the window, studying the city pigeons and sparrows and the renovation of the Junior League building across the street. She splattered away, in a box in the powder room. What have I done? I wondered. I've brought the worst of the country; a fecal spray, a wild thing, into what was an oasis of urban civilization. But I did notice she seemed attentive when I turned on WQXR, the classical station, and she clutched a program from the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center.
I tried to ignore her odor, her cat-food-encrusted beak, and forced myself to share my daughter's deepening love. "Oh, she's so cute."
But she wasn't cute. Her face was foreshortened, and with her tiny beady eyes, bright with ruthless appetite, and a jaw that compressed when her beak closed, which was rare, she looked like Andy Gump.

I WENT to the Web site Starling Talk to check out the origins of starlings and discovered some surprising facts. The starling is a New York immigrant and, if not for Shakespeare, would never have entered our lives.
In March 1890, a New York drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin acted on his love for the playwright by vowing to release into Central Park all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare. Mr. Schieffelin loosed several species: thrushes, skylarks and starlings. Only the starlings survived. From the initial 100 birds released, flocks reproduced to the current hundreds of millions, making them among the nation's most abundant and ultimately most controversial birds. They are infamous as pests, accused of corroding buildings with their acid droppings, which is why the joy over their first observed roost, in the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, quickly hardened into disgust.

What did Shakespeare say regarding starlings that so inspired the 19th-century drug maker? It's a line in "Henry IV, Part 1," in which Hotspur threatens: "The king forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he is asleep. I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion."
The birds, I learn, are mimics, known in Elizabethan times as "the poor man's mynah." Oddly, they are unlikely to repeat a single word; they require a rhythmic phrase. So Shakespeare is now regarded as having made a mistake. But one billion birds later, with Raven Starling as my constant companion, I live with the result of one man's infatuation with Shakespeare's silver-tongued reference to songbirds. "She's making a mess," I kept saying, but I also kept feeding her, and she grew, not gradually but suddenly, into a midsize blackish bird. "Take a bath!" I ordered her, and she did, in a soup bowl filled with water in my formerly spotless city kitchen.

By this point, the history of the starling had me in its talons. Starlings may be the champion bird "talkers"; they can chorus in the wild by the thousands. Some experts have observed "a murmuration," as a flock of starlings is called, numbering a million or more.
Yet starlings are as despised as they are loved. In September, it was reported that the federal government had killed 2.3 million starlings in 2004 as part of a campaign to get rid of what it described as "nuisance animals." Starling eliminators insist that the birds damage crops, soil buildings, even cause planes to crash, and have resorted to Roman candles, hot wires and a poison called Starlicide to discourage or destroy the birds.
Is the killing justified? Starling supporters insist that it isn't, that the starling kills so many destructive insects; a murmuration should elicit a chorus of praise. Rachel Carson, the author of "Silent Spring," championed the starling: "In spite of his remarkable success as a pioneer, the starling probably has fewer friends than almost anyother creature that wears feathers. That fact, however, seems to be of very little importance to this cheerful bird with glossy plumage and stumpy tail." The starling, she continued, "hurries with jerky steps about the farms and gardens in the summer time, carrying more than 100 loads of destructive insects per day to his screaming offspring."

Another admirer was Mozart, who paid dearly for his pet starling, loved it and staged a funeral when it passed away, of unknown causes, at age 3. Some authorities think the starling's song became incorporated into Mozart's composition "A Musical Joke."
RAVEN STARLING also began to sing, but would she really be independent someday? Could I release her, perhaps back into Central Park?
No, I could not, I was told by Jackie Collins, who runs Starling Talk. An "imprint" bird like mine, raised from infancy, can never join a starling murmuration. Starling Talk is filled with descriptions of confused imprint birds that have been found injured and emaciated and are unable to join in a flock. Although Raven Starling would one day speak better than a parrot, live to be 20 and play with a whiffle ball, she would have to stay forever among her adopted species -- humans.

By then I had ascended into the skies of a cyberculture of starling-keepers, and joined the Chirp Room, where visitors signed off with phrases like "the whisper of wings" and quoted the famous line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "You are responsible forever for what you have tamed." I learned that there are thousands of starling-keepers, the beneficiaries of a legal loophole: Although keeping a native wild bird in your home is illegal, starlings are exempt because of their foreign origin.
Meanwhile, Raven Starling grew prettier. As she matured, she displayed a certain etiquette, wiping her beak after each gooey bite. We shared toast. I played her Mozart's starling song.
Now when I heard the deep chords of Mozart's "Requiem," and Raven Starling sang along, in full throat, I pondered why I had tried so hard to keep this bird alive. Was it simply to keep a promise to a child? Perhaps there was another reason. In my home, we are all foundlings. I was an orphaned child, and my little girl was left on a street in China. Was this why the fallen starling had to be rescued? Because in our family, abandonment is unthinkable?

Whatever my motivation, I was not alone in my demented devotions. At 3 one morning I tried to predict what would become of the three of us by checking on the bird's Web site, Starling Talk. There, I learned about other baby starling "parents" who were struggling with similar issues but also celebrating events such as "Stormy's Fifth Birthday." Tamed starlings were on display, rainbow-hued when loved and cleaned, aglow as they were videotaped: "Plant a kiss on me, liverlips," said a saveling named Techno.

I admit, I had become attached to Ravvie. She flew to me at a whistle, and she groomed my tousled hair. She sat on my head when I played piano. I never thought that I could love an insectivore. Maybe it's possible that someone can love anything.
How far would I go in catering to my insectivore? Could I be like those other starling people on the Web site, who order bags of dried bugs? There was a human murmuration on the Web, especially in the dead of night, composed of bird people like a man living in a city apartment with an adult male starling named Smarty who has learned to take sharp right turns.
But winter would change everything. Winter was when the true trial of caring indoors for a wild bird would begin. Raven Starling would be forced for long periods into apartment life in the city. I have learned that if she walked for much longer on even carpeted city floors, she would develop a deformity, "spraggle feet."

ONE dawn, I began to communicate with a woman upstate, who has four starlings and offered to adopt mine. And I begin to wonder, what is best, to maintain Raven Starling as a lone creature, becoming spraggle-footed, commuting to New York and riding elevators, or surrender her to another "mother" who maintains three rooms in her home just for her birds?
So it came to pass that one September Sunday, I found myself driving with my daughter and the bird, in her cage, strapped to the back car seat, to a town five hours north of New York that even on the warm golden day appeared flattened by the memory of blizzards. Fort Plain, just outside Canajoharie.
The town is blanched and beaten, an entire town with freezer burn. Nearly all the factories that once sustained the area closed long ago. Yet it is here I was assured that a warm and loving home with other starlings awaited Raven Starling.
Mary Ann, the "adoptive mother" who is known on the Web as Little Feathers, was sitting on the stoop of a house with a peaked roof when we arrived. At 52, in T-shirt and jeans, with long, flowing hair, she had a fatigued, youthful quality.
Inside her neat but crammed living room, there was a smell, not unpleasant but avian. I think it was the smell of warm feathers.

Mary Ann has three children: an 11-year-old daughter and a boy and girl who are 12. The older girl was robust; her handsome twin brother, who has cerebral palsy, looked five years younger, thin and frail. Mary Ann also had a dozen avian "babies." Her voice quickened as she described the antics of George. "He's just a baby. And Chirp, she was given to me. And Littlefeathers, he was the first. And Trouble, well, his name fits."
In addition to the starlings, there were three pigeons, four society finches, and, the pièce de résistance, a paralyzed sparrow presented in the palm of her hand. I could not help connecting the flightless bird to the child who sits so still on the couch.
How could Mary Ann care for all these needful beings? I was on the brink of saying, "We thank you, but I'll take the bird home." Instead, we recited the chorus of open adoption: I asked and she agreed, "You shall have visitation."
"We can see her again," I said, my voice climbing too high, as Jasmine and I drove back to the city.
I knew we were thinking the same thought. Someone left my daughter somewhere almost 13 years ago. "On Quon Dong Road," her papers report. I recited the rationale that Raven Starling was better off with other birds, with an at-home mother who knew avian medicine and had an avian vet. I had no doubt that was all true, but my hands tightened on the steering wheel.
"We're never coming back," my child said.

We drove along, and then somewhere along the Thruway, above a vast pasture, we saw them, a murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds. Through the open car window, I heard, or more accurately felt, a familiar sound, more vibration or audible breeze than a true noise; the flutter of thousands of wings in unison, combined with a muted mass voice.
Later at twilight in the city, walking through Central Park, my daughter and I caught sight of another flock, or was it the same one? This was the true murmuration, an entity unto itself, to which Raven Starling, had her fate not crossed with ours, would have belonged. I watched the birds dip, then rise and reverse again, an animate banner, starring the skies above the city.
My daughter and I stared upward. We would never see a flock of birds again without noticing and remembering: We knew one in a billion.

truly beautiful.
 
What a great idea for a thread. Lately, it's too easy to get mired down in all the sad, disturbing news coupled with he lack of empathy and caring for our fellow humans that many people are exhibiting currently. This reminds me that there is truly limitless compassion, love and caring out there if you look for it.
 
I watched this and then read Takis story. true animal whisperer. Really heartwarming.
 
Last edited:

"​

One of the better stories I have read in a long time.

Dr. Frank Mayfield was touring Tewksbury Institute when, on his way out, he accidentally collided with an elderly floor maid. To cover the awkward moment Dr. May field started asking questions.
"How long have you worked here?"
"I've worked here almost since the place opened," the maid replied.
"What can you tell me about the history of this place?" he asked.

"I don't think I can tell you anything, but I could show you something."
With that, she took his hand and led him down to the basement under the oldest section of the building.

She pointed to one of what looked like small prison cells, their iron bars rusted with age, and said, "That's the cage where they used to keep Annie Sullivan."
"Who's Annie?" the doctor asked.

Annie was a young girl who was brought in here because she was incorrigible—nobody could do anything with her. She'd bite and scream and throw her food at people. The doctors and nurses couldn't even examine her or anything. I'd see them trying with her spitting and scratching at them.

"I was only a few years younger than her myself and I used to think, 'I sure would hate to be locked up in a cage like that.' I wanted to help her, but I didn't have any idea what I could do. I mean, if the doctors and nurses couldn't help her, what could someone like me do?

"I didn't know what else to do, so I just baked her some brownies one night after work. The next day I brought them in. I walked carefully to her cage and said, 'Annie, I baked these brownies just for you. I'll put them right here on the floor and you can come and get them if you want.'

"Then I got out of there just as fast as I could because I was afraid she might throw them at me. But she didn't. She actually took the brownies and ate them. After that, she was just a little bit nicer to me when I was around. And sometimes I'd talk to her. Once, I even got her laughing.

One of the nurses noticed this and she told the doctor. They asked me if I'd help them with Annie. I said I would if I could. So that's how it came about that. Every time they wanted to see Annie or examine her, I went into the cage first and explained and calmed her down and held her hand.

This is how they discovered that Annie was almost blind."
After they'd been working with her for about a year—and it was tough sledding with Annie—the Perkins institute for the Blind opened its doors. They were able to help her and she went on to study and she became a teacher herself.

Annie came back to the Tewksbury Institute to visit, and to see what she could do to help out. At first, the Director didn't say anything and then he thought about a letter he'd just received. A man had written to him about his daughter. She was absolutely unruly—almost like an animal. She was blind and deaf as well as 'deranged.'

He was at his wit's end, but he didn't want to put her in an asylum. So he wrote the Institute to ask if they knew of anyone who would come to his house and work with his daughter.

And that is how Annie Sullivan became the lifelong companion of Helen Keller.
When Helen Keller received the Nobel Prize, she was asked who had the greatest impact on her life and she said, "Annie Sullivan."

But Annie said, "No Helen. The woman who had the greatest influence on both our lives was a floor maid at the Tewksbury Institute."

"



annesullivan.jpg
 
This is a beautiful story to me as the parent of a child with autism.

Donald Grey Triplett: The first boy diagnosed as autistic

B88F2040-779A-464E-923F-C74AE446DE11.jpeg

After Rain Man, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the next great autism portrayal the stage or screen might want to consider taking on is the life of one Donald Grey Triplett, an 82-year-old man living today in a small town in the southern United States, who was there at the very beginning, when the story of autism began.

The scholarly paper which first put autism on the map as a recognisable diagnosis listed Donald as "Case 1" among 11 children who - studied by Baltimore psychiatrist Leo Kanner - crystallised for him the idea that he was seeing a kind of disorder not previously listed in the medical textbooks. He called it "infantile autism", which was later shortened to just autism.

Born in 1933 in Forest, Mississippi, to Beamon and Mary Triplett, a lawyer and a school teacher, Donald was a profoundly withdrawn child, who never met his mother's smile, or answered to her voice, but appeared at all times tuned into a separate world with its own logic, and its own way of using the English language.

Donald could speak and mimic words, but the mimicry appeared to overtake meaning. Most often, he merely echoed what he had heard someone else say. For a time, for example, he went about pronouncing the words "trumpet vine" and "chrysanthemum" over and over, as well as the phrase: "I could put a little comma."

His parents tried to break through to him, but got nowhere. Donald was not interested in the other children they brought to play with him, and he did not look up when a fully-costumed Santa Claus was brought to surprise him. And yet, they knew he was listening, and intelligent. Two-and-a-half years old at Christmas time, he sang back carols he had heard his mother sing only once, while performing with perfect pitch. His phenomenal memory let him recall the order of a set of beads his father had randomly laced on to a string.

But his intellectual gifts did not save him from being put in an institution. It was the doctors' order. It was always that way, in that era, for children who strayed as far from "normal" as Donald did. The routine prescription for parents was to try to forget the child, and move forward with their lives. In mid-1937, Beamon and Mary complied with the order. Donald, three years old, was sent away. But they did not forget him. They visited monthly, probably debating each time they began the long drive home to Forest whether they should just take him back with them after one of these visits.

In late 1938, that is what they did. And that is when they brought him to see Dr Kanner in Baltimore. Kanner was stymied at first. He was not sure what psychiatric "box" to fit Donald into, because none of the ready-made ones seemed to fit. But after several more visits from Donald, and seeing more children with overlapping presentations in behaviour, he published his groundbreaking paper establishing the terms for a new diagnosis.

From there, the history of autism would unfold across decades, playing out in many and varied dramatic episodes, bizarre twists, and star turns, both heroic and villainous, by researchers, educators, activists and autistic people themselves. Donald, however, had no part in this. Instead, after Baltimore, he had gone back to Mississippi, where he spent the rest of his life, unremarked upon.

Well, not exactly. Donald is still alive today, healthy at 82, and a major figure in our new book. When we first tracked him down, in 2007, we were astonished to learn how his life had turned out.
He lives in his own house (the house he grew up in) within a safe community, where everyone knows him, with friends he sees regularly, a Cadillac to get around in, and a hobby he pursues daily (golf). That's when he is not enjoying his other hobby, travel. Donald, on his own, has travelled all over the United States and to a few dozen countries abroad. He has a closet full of albums packed with photos taken during his journeys.

His is the picture of the perfectly content retiree - not the life sentence in an institution which was nearly his lot - where he surely would have wilted, and never done any of those things. For that, his mother deserves enormous credit. In addition to bringing her boy home, she worked tirelessly to help him connect to the world around him, to give him language, to help him learn to take care of himself.

3F7FA8FE-5318-46B8-AD15-D07901A21AA0.jpeg

Something took in all this, because, by the time he was a teenager, Donald was able to attend a regular high school, and then college, where he came out with passing grades in French and mathematics.

Credit for these outcomes must also go to Donald himself. It was, after all, his innate intelligence and his own capacity for learning which led to this blooming into full potential.

But we saw something else when we went to Forest - and this is where we think the movie of Donald's life would get interesting. The town itself played a part in Donald's excellent outcome - the roughly 3,000 people of Forest, Mississippi, who made a probably unconscious but clear decision in how they were going to treat this strange boy, then man, who lived among them. They decided, in short, to accept him - to count him as "one of their own" and to protect him.

We know this because when we first visited Forest and began asking questions about Donald, at least three people warned us they would track us down and get even if we did anything to hurt Donald. That certainly told us something about how they saw him.

In time, however, as we gained more people's trust, more details came out about how, throughout the years, Donald was embraced. His school yearbook is full of scribbled notes from classmates talking about what a great friend he is. A few of the girls even seemed a little sweet on him.
We learned that he got cheered for his part in a school play, that people regarded his obsessive interest in numbers not as odd, but as evidence that he must be some kind of genius. We met a man Donald knew in college, now an ordained minister, who tried to teach him to swim in a nearby river. When that failed, he tried to give Donald lessons in how to speak more fluidly, which was also something of a lost cause.

That is because Donald still has autism. It did not go away. Rather, its power to limit his life was gradually overcome, even though he still has obsessions, and talks rather mechanically, and cannot really hold a conversation beyond one or two rounds of exchanged pleasantries. Even with all that, though, he is a fully fledged personality, a pleasure to hang out with, and a friend.
 


The last thing I wanted to do was jump in the damn pool with my clothes on. I didn’t care about the pics or the photo op. Real talk, I couldn’t have cared any less about the pool jump.
.
But she did.
.
She wanted it.
.
My wife has been married before but never really had a proper wedding. It was down at the courthouse kinda shit.
.
And this time she had a dream. She wanted the gown and flowers and location and cake and photographers etc. she wanted the fairy tale when in reality I’d have been just fine down at the courthouse.
.
So I jumped in the pool.
.
Not cause she made me. Not cause she’d have been mad or held it over me (she ain’t like that), I did it because it was important to her.
.
And I’ve learned over the years that I have things that are important to me that she’d likely never give a damn about but I want her involved.
.
So I jumped in the pool.
.
Because I love her. And I love her dreams and her desires. I jumped in the pool not for the photo, I jumped in the pool for her.
.
Her dreams may not be my dreams, but I wanted my queen to know her dreams were important to me. Her desires I care about.
.
So I jumped in the pool.
.
Fellas, jump in the pool.
.
Don’t be an a**. Don’t be a stick in the mud. It ain’t a flex to push her down or roll your eyes at her dreams. It ain’t tough to mock her or call her your old lady. It ain’t a flex to keep her down, it’s a flex to push her out to fly! It’s KING sh** to empower your woman to LIVE HER OWN LIFE!
.
This is your f***ing queen.
.
You want her to treat you like a King? You want her by your side when you do your shit and live your life?
.
Than stand by her. Do the silly shit. Take the photos. Dance in the middle of the restaurant.
.
I want my baby to dream and I want her to know that I may not have the same dreams, but I support her and will take whatever pictures she wants.
.
So I jumped in the pool.
.
Love you baby.



CC244D35-C252-4AC4-9E73-E4CDA00C804E.jpeg
 
 
GET 3 FREE HCA RESULTS JOIN THE FORUM. ASK FOR HELP
Top