Tuesday, March 27, 2007
WHAT'S ON YOUR FACE?
In reading John’s blog this morning, it set me to thinking. He said what we are eventually shows on our face and in our hearts. I remember an old Alfred Hitchcock program where a family was bickering over a fortune left by a deceased family member. The story is in Europe at the time when masquerade balls were very popular.
Knowing they would act on greed and hatred towards one another his will stated they had to choose a mask and wear it for a certain period of time. There was a large box to choose from and they each selected one and put it on. The rest of the story was full of malicious treatment of one another and at the end of the program they were to remove the masks and have the money.
To their horror, as they took their masks off, their faces were contorted into the hideous replicas of the masks they had worn. They were doomed to live their lives out in hiding and alas….the fortune they fought for was useless.
I for one would fight anyone who wanted to lift my face back to the way it was in my “hay day.” I was raised in a family where we respected our elders and the lines they wore on their faces told the story of their lives. Faces that had worked hard in the sun before SPF was ever thought of, soap and water was the beauty treatment and the hard times were faced without a psychiatrist. The women before me in the family line didn’t worry about brown spots on their hands…..they used them. My, how they used them!
No trips to the gym to work out, they got enough work at home. No sleeping pills to sleep, it came the minute their heads hit the pillow. My own parents experienced the first automobiles made…. to the moon flights……there was a lot of hard living in between those national accomplishments. They lived through the depression and ended up being some of the first homeless, living in an old car parked in an alley with a little baby.
Dad tried everywhere to get work and was overjoyed when he could earn enough to get an apartment and feed the three of them. Believe me, it wasn’t up to the minimum wage and the work was 12 hours a day. They didn’t end up on drugs to escape their hard circumstances, they lived through them.
Knowing the hard times my family had before me, I can find no ground on which to complain. I am deeply grateful for my blessings and there are many. I look to my children and my grandchildren to carry on with the strength and pride we’ve passed to them. The inheritance we leave is so much more than money.
It’s in the genes………….
Until tomorrow, I am,
Essentially Esther
Knowing they would act on greed and hatred towards one another his will stated they had to choose a mask and wear it for a certain period of time. There was a large box to choose from and they each selected one and put it on. The rest of the story was full of malicious treatment of one another and at the end of the program they were to remove the masks and have the money.
To their horror, as they took their masks off, their faces were contorted into the hideous replicas of the masks they had worn. They were doomed to live their lives out in hiding and alas….the fortune they fought for was useless.
I for one would fight anyone who wanted to lift my face back to the way it was in my “hay day.” I was raised in a family where we respected our elders and the lines they wore on their faces told the story of their lives. Faces that had worked hard in the sun before SPF was ever thought of, soap and water was the beauty treatment and the hard times were faced without a psychiatrist. The women before me in the family line didn’t worry about brown spots on their hands…..they used them. My, how they used them!
No trips to the gym to work out, they got enough work at home. No sleeping pills to sleep, it came the minute their heads hit the pillow. My own parents experienced the first automobiles made…. to the moon flights……there was a lot of hard living in between those national accomplishments. They lived through the depression and ended up being some of the first homeless, living in an old car parked in an alley with a little baby.
Dad tried everywhere to get work and was overjoyed when he could earn enough to get an apartment and feed the three of them. Believe me, it wasn’t up to the minimum wage and the work was 12 hours a day. They didn’t end up on drugs to escape their hard circumstances, they lived through them.
Knowing the hard times my family had before me, I can find no ground on which to complain. I am deeply grateful for my blessings and there are many. I look to my children and my grandchildren to carry on with the strength and pride we’ve passed to them. The inheritance we leave is so much more than money.
It’s in the genes………….
Until tomorrow, I am,
Essentially Esther
