…..I’m depressed, disconsolate,
disenchanted, dejected, despondent, dispirited, and devitalized. And you may
ask why this is so? Mark Twain was right when he said, “Lord save us from
old age and broken health, and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting
out blossoms.”. The fact is that I have lost the faculty of doing what
once I was able to do—to put out the blossoms of skills I owned from my own
Hope Tree. Life was at one time a joy,
but now I’m as dormant and helpless as a pebble on the bottom of the sea, where
once I was an Orca. No longer can I lift
a golf club from a bag and feel the power of its use. No longer can I run a marathon or walk a
mile; nor even walk at all without the help of a device which I loathe.
…..The problem with the
“friend” who failed me, I believe, is that he is not happy with my liberal political
leanings, and with my using this written means to express my beliefs. He apparently has also abandoned the First
Amendment as well. The Bard has said in one of his sonnets that ”…love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,” and that it “…looks on tempests
and is never shaken.” The fact is,
that being an 18-karat manic depressive and having lived a life of violent
emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as
elation.
…..And so it turns out, sadly,
that he is not a friend at all, and apparently never was. But despite of all that I have written here,
and the reason I nevertheless thrive and survive with elation, is the magnificent
wife with whom I have shared my life for the past 30 years. June19th, the date we married, looms shortly
ahead; a day which leads us on to our future together like a beacon lighting
our lives. And this it is that allows me to leave all pain behind me.