When I was a kid, I used to think that sitting by the bedside of someone who was sick or suffering was something people only did in movies. Like in The Princess Bride , where the frame story is a grandfather reading an adventure novel to his grandson, who is home sick from school. Or maybe something that people used to do in Good Middle Class Homes, where Mother's "only" job was to keep the house and tend to the kids, but which had slowly died out under the pressures of modern life. Certainly, no one did it for me. I learned early on that it wasn't much good to ask my parents for comfort. I remember my mother running herself ragged when I had the chicken pox, but it stands out to me, because I can't remember her ever doing that before or since. The main result of pestering either parent for help was that they'd stand around being crabby, especially if I tried it in the middle of the night. When I was ten or so, I decided that I could just hold my own hair ba...
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Showing posts from July, 2014