I wrote this post for www.thedebutanteball.com. Each week we write on a particular topic. This week was quotes we favor. I hope you'll mark The Deb Ball in your favorites.
I have many quotes I adore. Some poignant, others not so - like Lewis Carroll's gibberish poem Jabberwocky - "Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.." But one stanza of a certain poem sticks with me. My Dad is 88 years old. He was born in "nineteen hundred and twenty two," as he says, in his Boston accent. His memory is still keen. And although day to day he might forget something (don't we all) he recalls dozens of poems learned as a boy in school. Longfellow's "The Day is Done" is one of his favorites. And I know that one day in the future (distant or near) my sister or brother or I will recite it at his funeral. That will be a sad but fine tribute to a good father.
As a mother who struggles with the reality of having children with autism, whom one day I will have to leave behind in a world that may or may not care for them properly, this stanza has a sharper meaning. In fact, for me, it's really a prayer. Sure, I'm a Catholic and I have all the "proper" prayers at my disposal. But this stanza speaks to the yearning ache and daily hope for treatment, recovery, cure I feel every day when I look at my girls, and wonder how, how on earth (or in heaven), can I ever leave them? It speaks to a time of hope when I will not have to worry, and I love that.
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
4 comments:
Yes, Kim. Amen. We used the tent imagery at my mother's funeral. I too, am a mother of 3 autistic children (boys aged 12, 10, 7) so I know your drill pretty well. Looking forward to reading your book (and YES, I too am a Howard fan... boy did you hit the nail on the head on the Lisa G. report. Thank you for putting it so articulately!)
Hello! Hey, we're an autism Brady Bunch.... I get to be Carol though. Loved the poly pantsuits.
Are you on FB - there's a GREAT FB page for the show run by Joseph Mooski. Stern Facebook Superfans.
I didn't hear the re-run of the Lisa G report once. Oh well.
Hope your boys are doing well, check out our sponsors at Age of Autism - tons of love, help, hope, knowledge to really move our kids forward.
Happy New Year.
KIM
I love the poem too. I'm sure it is all light and music on the other side.
Another poem I like a lot is Yeats "Lake Isle of Inisfree". The Last Stanza goes like this:
"I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core."
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