Extracts.3.

November 17th, 1980

“Today, a woman touched my sleeve in the supermarket as I was trying to pick out good strawberries. She asked if I was the children’s doctor from Germany. I corrected her and explained that Sweden is much, much colder in some ways but not in others. She asked me if I had a moment, and I said of course, though I thought to myself, it is an interesting thing to say because one’s life is nothing more than a string of moments. Each life is like a string of pearls.

“This woman wanted to know why her four-year-old son, when she met him from school, had given his macaroni drawing to another boy’s mother and not to her. She said she didn’t speak to her son all the way home and even cried. Then she said he cried and locked himself in his bedroom. She was worried that her son didn’t love her—otherwise why would he give his drawing to some other child’s mother?

“I laughed a little and ate one of the strawberries I was holding. Is that all? I said. She nodded. Well, I explained, you are worrying about the wrong person. I explained the reason her son had given the drawing to another mother was because he loved her, his own mother with such blind, unprecedented devotion, that naturally he felt sorry for every other woman in the world, whom he did not love so vehemently.

“Then, of all things, the woman started to cry. She touched my sleeve again and said Thank you, Doctor. She said she was going to buy him a toy to make up for it—but I said to her, Perhaps, madame, instead of buying a toy, you should simply go home, find your son and remind him of the event and tell him that you love him with equal devotion, and that you will never again question his judgment when it comes to how he expresses his love for his mother.

“When I thought more about the encounter on the way home, I found myself getting depressed. So when I got home, I put my robe on and gave my strawberries to the birds. What a beautiful child that woman has, I thought. What a genius boy, and what a hard life he has ahead of him in this world, where beauty is categorized, and natural love is negated by flattery.”

Tiger, Tiger
By Simon Van Booy, Love Begins In Winter

***

Today I got lost again. Lost in my own neighborhood. It is a normal thing for Bridget to. It started when I became an adult.

When I was a child, the bike took me places and back again, because it knew its way. Then I became a teenager and those legs pretty much went their own way (many times without my permission), so I was never lost.

Adults should be allowed to live to a certain age, and then return to childhood again. I know some of you reading this will want to slap me already, because you are currently dealing with it at home. It is hard. But what if this ‘return’ happened to us all? Disease is not disease if we could get out of this ’self’. Isn’t that why we yearn for experiences? What we sometimes know is possible, when in those moments our ‘reality’ is interspersed between memory, history, and dream?

Ok. Bang. Bang! Bang,  bang!