Not a Day Goes By

It's been quite a week. Hard to write this week. Sad things have happened to good friends and while I'm taking it all in, it's hard to write it all out.

I saw "Merrily We Roll Along" the other week at Signature Theater. A wonderful production, and I was happy to see it for a number of reasons. First, it's a Sondheim show I've always wanted to see, know all the music, and had never had the chance to see. It's a show that never does well with reviewers because it goes backwards in time and has some basic flaws, but since I only knew the music and never saw it, I never could really understand why it continues to fail. The music is precious to me. The song "Old Friends" brings me back to my late teens, and to my old (oldest & bestest) friend Brad who introduced me to the show.

Jump to the present and there I am at the show with my husband and Brad and his partner and the joy & sadness, the successes and losses in the show rang true for me in a different, much deeper way now than they ever did when I was a teenager. So happy to be there with Brad, my old friend. How well I comprehend the grief that comes with changes, growth, and loss that life can bring you. It meant a lot to me to see the show with this particular group of people.

I have friends in such turmoil right now and my heart goes out to them. As a parent of a diabetic/celiac child, I understand the depths of anguish that any parent goes through when their child is somehow damaged. And while I have friends who look at what I'm going through and say to me "I don't know how you do it," I can turn around to another friend whose child has a different condition and also not know how she does it.

We all have crap to deal with. Somehow we have to get through every minute, every hour, every day. Some crap is much worse than others. I don't know how all of you out there do it, how you get through your five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes that make up each year. As for me, I rely on the strong shoulders of my husband, the joy of my kids, and the support of many wonderful friends. I disappear for a couple of hours into a story on a stage, and the truths revealed in that story resonate with me for days.