I am a regular Danielle Steel heroine. Everyone in all of her books cries rivers, oceans, of tears.
Just now, I was at my computer, playing some games. For the sake of not hearing the next-door neighbor’s music in my apartment, I started listening to some Frank Sinatra’s songs that got recorded, heaven knows how, on my Real Player. One of these old, old songs is “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.” Well, not in the province of Quebec, they don’t. I was flabbergasted a couple of weeks ago when I read statistics. One third of the heterosexual couples living together are not married, and a staggering 60 percent of the children in the province are born out of wedlock. Lucky for these little ones, they are not called bastards, or even illegitimate anymore. And to prove that love and marriage don’t go together anymore, my own husband of twenty-two years left me and our sixteen- and twelve-year-old children for a woman nineteen years younger than himself, and fathered a child with her several years later, when he was fifty-five. But I digress …
I’m a sentimental slob. I can’t hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’s Ode to Joy, or Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture without crying. I cry for any and all reasons. The most beloved person in my life, my mother, died in January 2003. Every time I look at her portrait, I cry, because I miss her so much, and because she suffered so much—she died of cancer. I cry because only my daughter ever says: “I love you.” I know my sister, brother, and my son love me, but I don’t ever hear those words from them. I know my adored cat, Cleo, loves me. She shows it in a dozen ways. She has to be where I am—like right now, on my computer desk—but she can’t say: “I love you.” So I have myself a little crying jag once in a while, when I feel sorry for myself.
A few months ago, before I had surgery for a hip replacement, not yet knowing that I needed it, I had several hospital appointments. After one of them, I shuffled painfully to a nearby grocery store, then to a newspaper shop, with my cane in one hand and my heavy bag of groceries in the other. While in the shop, I put the bag down near the cash because I couldn’t carry it. As I was paying for my purchase I remarked to the young woman who was minding the store that day that it was too bad I had only $20 on me, it wouldn’t be enough for a taxi to go home. I hadn’t gone more than about twenty steps out of the store on my way to the bus stop when I felt someone tapping me on the shoulder. It was the young woman from the store. She handed me $20 and said, “Take a taxi.” I was so overwhelmed, I cried!
I could kill with my bare hands anyone who is cruel to a child or an animal. I cry when I see pictures of animals that have been abused. I donate money to children’s hospitals and animal shelters but that can’t eradicate the animals’ abuse, or cure the sick little children. Montreal has 2 children’s hospitals. One, Ste. Justine, +++++++++++++ - whoops, this is Cleo, putting her paw on the keyboard—gets a lot of donations because Ms Celine Dion sponsors it. The other, much older one, the Montreal’s Children Hospital, has to literally beg to get the necessary funds for research and just to go on. No government money for them. Two of my three grandchildren were treated at the Children’s, one for suspected cystic fibrosis and the other for encephalitis. The fund where my money goes is administered by my bank, and I guess goes to several hospitals, not only those two in Montreal.
