The Sun

Each month the last page of my favorite magazine, The Sun, is entitled "Sunbeams" and contains quotes from famous and not-famous people on a particular topic. This morning, instead of hopping out of my car and onto a B-line to my desk, I sat on the low brick wall in front of "the house on Rippy" and read Sunbeams while I finished my coffee.

It was an odd morning: the sky wanted to rain but couldn't so the air was heavy with moisture beneath a bright gray cloud canopy. None of my "work clothes" suited me today so I dressed up. I looked like a black Barbie doll, in my low-cut, tight dress with high heels. I felt sexy and comfortably over-dressed and out of place.

I read

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did. --F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is our mammalian conflict--what to give to the others, and what to keep for yourself. Treading that line, keeping the others in check, and being kept in check by them, is what we call morality. --Ian McEwan

Love...is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. --Iris Murdoch

We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. --Mark Vonnegut

If those who owe us nothing gave us nothing, how poor we would be. --Antonio Porchia

Over the weekend, I saw Marvin Hamlisch in concert. I looked him up in Wikipedia later and discovered that when he was accepted to Juilliard at the age of 6, he was the youngest person ever to enroll. Later, riddled with anxiety, he switched from a performance major to a composition major. He didn't think he was good enough I guess. What does it take?

An assumption deeply integral to capitalism...[is that there's] not enough to go around: not enough love, not enough time, not enough appointments at the food-stamps office, not enough food stamps, not enough money, not enough seats on the subway. It's pervasive. We learn mistrust of each other, bone deep: everything is skin off somebody's nose. --Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Maybe it's so pervasive that we even learn mistrust of ourselves.