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Show Motherlunge a novel 211 31. On Not Giving Up Is it true that if you dare to dream it, you can become it? In the bedroom I shared with my sister as a child, I had a poster of a ballerina that bore this claim; it was tacked to the drywall, just above the grease rainbow left by my head on the pillow. Pavia's side of the room had the poster of the kitten hanging from a tree branch: Hang In There. Do good things come to those who wait and/or does slow and steady win the race? Is success 99% perspiration? What is the true power of positive thinking? If, for example, you face a fatal diagnosis bravely, visualizing good-cell warriors strafing the malignancy, never giving up, remaining surpassingly grateful for and attentive to friends, family, the Simple Pleasures of Every New Day-under these circumstances, whom do you blame when it becomes clear that you are going to die anyway and maybe very painfully? As you know, I took care of your cousin Xavier for a week by myself when he was a baby. Pavia was gone. And as I was dressing him one morning, pulling his big head through the neck-hole of his onesie, he suddenly jerked his arms such that his right hand-with its soft and half-frayed fingernails-slashed my left eye. I hadn't put my glasses on yet, you see. I screamed. My eye was on fire. I thought I would be blind, my eye just an X scratched over the O. |