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Sentimental Fool
On March 14, 2015 by Speranza
I’m a very sentimental person.
All manner of things both happy and profoundly sad can reduce me to tears at a moment’s notice from a song (“Over the Rainbow” should come with a warning, there I said it) to the open, earnest expression on a dog’s woolly face as he waits outside a café for his master. I can only do news in eyedropper amounts because how else can we tolerate another day trying to make sense of anything unless we are once again seduced by denial? (Thank you Ernest Becker). Sometimes life feels so overwhelming I feel the weight crushing my heart down as though someone has their boot upon it.
And I absolutely don’t consider this a need for help or a neurosis – it’s natural to feel this way when one really, truly sees the big picture and acknowledges the absolute anguish that is all around us.
When ‘Frasier’ was very young, we would often take long walks – specifically designed to tire him out if he only knew – and on one such occasion I happened to stoop and admire the pink granite in someone’s driveway, showing him how the veins of grey and silver sparkled as I turned the stone back and forth in my fingers. From that moment on, each and every time we went walking, Frasier made it his duty to seek out a nugget of pale, pink granite, charging back to present it to me with proud, excited eyes. (Which explains why, twenty four years later I still have a spaghetti jar filled to the top with thumb nail sized nuggets of pink granite.)