Timika Durol

“My Father, the Age I Am Now Time, which diminishes all things, increases understanding for the aging. —PLUTARCH My mother was the star: Smart and funny and warm, A patient listener and an easy laugher. My father was . . . an accountant: Not one to look up to, Ask advice from, Confide in. A man of few words. We faulted him—my mother, my sister, and I, For being this dutiful, uninspiring guy Who never missed a day of work, Or wondered what our dreams were. Just . . . an accountant. Decades later, My mother dead, my sister dead, My father, the age I am now, Planning ahead in his so-accountant way, Sent me, for my records, Copies of his will, his insurance policies, And assorted other documents, including The paid receipt for his cemetery plot, The paid receipt for his tombstone, And the words that he had chosen for his stone. And for the first time, shame on me, I saw my father: Our family’s prime provider, only provider. A barely-out-of-boyhood married man Working without a safety net through the Depression years That marked him forever, Terrified that maybe he wouldn’t make it, Terrified he would fall and drag us down with him, His only goal, his life-consuming goal, To put bread on our table, a roof over our head. With no time for anyone’s secrets, With no time for anyone’s dreams, He quietly earned the words that made me weep, The words that were carved, the following year, On his tombstone: HE TOOK CARE OF HIS FAMILY.”
― Judith Viorst, Nearing Ninety: And Other Comedies of Late Life

“One company can serve some of your needs all of the time, or all of your needs some of the time, but never both.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.”
― Walter Farley, The Black Stallion