WORDS THAT MAKE YOU PAUSE

Like most of us, I had an ... interesting childhood:

I had double pneumonia thrice ( the last bout nearly did me in.)  

I was abandoned at six for 6 weeks on a street known as Skid Row in Detroit.  

My step-father tried to kill me twice ... once by drowning ... once by electrocution.  

You know  ...  interesting.

My isolation and ill health had me reading a lot ... like Saul Bellow, 

the Canadian-born American writer 

who won the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.

As a child growing up in Montreal, Bellow was seriously ill and hospitalized as was I for a prolonged period.

This accelerated his reading and shaped the outlook which inspired SEIZE THE DAY and many of his other novels.

The following is excerpted from a 1990 interview:


"Anyone who’s faced death as a child is likely to remember something of what I felt—

that it was a triumph, that I had gotten away with it. Not only was I ahead of the game. I was privileged. 

And there was some kind of bookkeeping going on. …I thought I owed something to some entity for the privilege of surviving. …

A duty that comes with survival. …

That I’d better make it worth the while of whoever it was that authorized all this.

I’ve always had some such feeling. Overjoyed. 

Full of welling vitality and perhaps that I’ve gotten away with something 

but that it had been by permission of some high authority."

What words have recently spoke to you or made you pause to reflect, 

to remember?