"Grab Life"

This morning I watched "Life With Chronic Disease" on the Today show and had to wipe the tears from my eyes as I watched a woman struggle with ALS (or Lou Gehrig's Disease) and it just broke my heart. She talked about being a prisoner in her own body. It was so sad. I said a quick prayer to thank God for my health. Sometimes I forget how truly lucky I am.

I've been thinking about friendship a lot lately, especially after I let mine down this past weekend. I haven't been thinking just about that, but about everything that has to do with friendship. I think what started it was when I was listening to the soundtrack from Grease on my lonely ride back from Brooke's house. :) Know the song they sing at the end "We Go Together" and it says "We'll always...be together, We'll always...be together." When you're in high school you think you WILL always be together with those best friends. You promise to never lose touch--heck, my yearbook says it all over the place. Those friends that you make in school, those first friends mean the world to you and then after high school you slowly lose touch. It's so sad, really.

I've made several efforts over the years to get in touch and stay in touch with some of my best friends. I'M the one that has always made the effort--me, not them. I don't know why. You know for the most part when you do get back in contact that things have changed and there's really not much you have in common anymore. I do have one friend from school and we talk just about every day---and I've known her since kindergarten (hi Dona!). But anyway, the point of all this is, is that sometimes I miss the closeness that I had with those girls. We told each other EVERYTHING. I don't really have a friend like that now. I have a few close friends who I love very much, but there's no one that I feel really comfortable telling EVERYTHING to.

Anyway, I don't know why I'm telling y'all all of this so I'll stop.

I'm sad today. I don't know why. I think it's the ZERO freakin' sleep I'm getting. If you think I exxagerate about the lack of sleep, please feel free to ask my daughter or my husband how bad it is. I'm going INSANE and I need some relief...I really do.

I'll leave you with this good story:

I got this editorial in an email from my SIL today. It's a story about the USA from a Romanian reporter, Cornel Nistorescu, for a Romanian newspaper. You may have already read it, but I've never seen it before. It's pro-USA, something that's apparently rare outside the US. It's a great story. Enjoy:

Why are Americans so united? They don't resemble one another even if you paint them! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations. Some of them are nearly extinct, others are incompatible with one another, and in matters of religious beliefs, not even God can count how many they are. Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, the secret services that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed on the streets nearby to gape about. The Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised the flag on the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colours of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a minister or the president was passing. On every occasion they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!".

Silent as a rock, I watched the charity concert broadcast on Saturday once, twice, three times, on different tv channels. There were Clint Eastwood, Willie Nelson, Robert de Niro, Julia Roberts, Cassius Clay, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Silvester Stalone, James Wood, and many others whom no film or producers could ever bring together. The American's solidarity spirit turned them into a choir. Actually, choir is not the word. What you could hear was the heavy artillery of the American soul. What neither George W. Bush, nor Bill Clinton, nor Colin Powell could say without facing the risk of stumbling over words and sounds, was being heard in a great and unmistakable way in this charity concert. I don't know how it happened that all this obsessive singing of America didn't sound croaky, nationalist, or ostentatious! It made you green with envy because you weren't able to sing for your country without running the risk of being considered chauvinist, ridiculous, or suspected of who-knows-what mean interests. I watched the live broadcast and the rerun of its rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who fought with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that would have killed other hundreds of thousands of people. How on earth were they able to bow before a fellow human? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit which nothing can buy.

What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases which risk of sounding like commonplaces. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion.

Only freedom can work such miracles!