Everyone spoke in hushed voices. Someone blurted a ripple of laughter and someone else honked a nose-clearing bleat. People took turns staring into the long box where my father laid, hands joined across his stomach, eyes and mouth permanently closed.
All her life she battled bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia, and her greatest fear was suffocation. Over her open mouth, a BiPap breathing-machine mask forced air down her throat. The strong airflow pushed her lips off her teeth in a grotesque grin.
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When I placed our cat in the ground, wrapped in her favorite green blanket, the one she would knead and suckle on, white paws flexing, drool slipping off her muzzle to blot the tattered cloth, I found it was too final, too absolute and irrevocable, to cover her and fill the hole. Too much like forgetting.
When I was 6 years old, I would sit on my grandmother's lap, my legs swinging against the cascade of her fuchsia skirt. Mama dag enchanted her grandchildren with a perfume of lavender and jasmine, the familiar fragrance of security.
Her warm embrace was the fortress I ran to when I knew I'd been bad and nimbus clouds of parental discipline were about to downpour. She was my guardian and her coconut oil was the healer. From chapped lips to a headache, Mama dag coated her fingers with the oil and hummed Arabic songs in her rich alto voice while kneading the hurt away. Afterwards, she smiled to remind me how lucky I was to be alive. She was right.
But in reality, the truth was more serious. My mother gave birth prematurely to a boy who was blue. I was born with a lack of oxygen in my body and complications during my birth necessitated emergency procedures. I was either expected to not live very long, or suffer respiratory issues in adulthood. I fought my way into existence.
I was 7 years old when a close family friend took my innocence. I remember it was evening and I was wearing a Bugle Boy shirt and OshKosh jean shorts while watching Pokmon, my favorite show. I had laid out my new collection of trading cards as if the characters were there to watch it with me.
While my attention was fixated on the screen, he picked up my hands and slid them up his shorts. I froze; I was startled and confused. He pressed a finger against his lips, signalling me to be quiet. I felt his fingers on my inner thighs.
To make the most of our indoor confinement, my little sister and I crafted paper boats. We tip toed while our grandfather was asleep. With one hand on the door, we dropped the boats down streams of rain in the gutter. Our eyes, like lighthouses, searched for their destination. My sister and I made up tales of where the boats would drift and wondered if they saved other kids stuck in their towers. The crafts coupled with imagination took us somewhere else.
As soon as our feet kissed the Los Angeles shore, I felt like I was home. For me and my family, LA was a place where opportunities came in abundance. America was the home and the dream. We vacillated between the thorns that obstructed our path and the sweet scent of success that seduced us to work diligently.
In 2013, my family and I slept in a dilapidated van, embraced in darkness. At night, we would park on the streets and tried to sleep cushioned by our small material possessions. I looked up into lit windows to see families enjoying the comfort of their homes, while I took comfort in the warm presence of our chihuahua, Simba. I would quietly sing myself to sleep, hoping to wake up to reasons why our dice landed here.
It was a dance that never missed a beat. The choreography we religiously devoted ourselves to were prayers and actions of faith. Even when life continued to knock the air out of us, our hope was a pendulum that would eventually swing back up.
My gaze focuses on the steel frames, cranes and cinder blocks outside my apartment window. With all of its noise and clutter, truth still seems to shout its way across the street. As I look around my humble home, I think about what our family has built and how much further I can go.
However, looking forward entails facing your doubts and taking risks. I am grateful for my challenges that many would liken to failure. I am still alive despite the reality of my fears. Failure allowed me to develop my inner strength and the passion that fueled my will to survive. You might never fail as I did, but there will be detours and setbacks. Keep building. Failure should not burn the bridge between hope and success; it should strengthen it all the more.
"You are just not good enough!". "What! You can't cook?!". "You work such late hours, you are a horrid parent!". "You take help to run your own home, what a shame!". "You are not good enough for this role.".
That sums up the last 3 decades of my life. I allowed the world to dictate what I thought of myself. I accepted their version of me - the black sheep, the socially awkward, the good for nothing, the embarrassment of the family, the extended family, and the workplace.
On a particularly dark night, I stood at my home's balcony, having decided to end this story. A tug on my sleeve distracted me. The child stood there, rubbing her sleepy eyes. She wanted her lullaby. I walked away from that balcony.
On the 'Good' days, I jot down about the tiny things that made me smile - the bird outside my window pane, the tickle fight with the child, the sunset, every green signal on my drive, the fact that I finally caught up with the dog before she pounced on the cat! On the 'Bad' days, I jot down "Grateful that I am still breathing."
What about those jabs that I spoke of at the start of this article? Well, they haven't stopped coming - however, thanks to Gratitude, I have learned to stand up, speak up, walk away, and then do my own thing.
I have nothing to hide and I am proud of experiencing each of these 757 days. I see so many lives transformed through this practice and app, and I feel blessed and honored to have helped another lost soul.
an a hunky free-spirited street performer from San Antonio thaw the icy heart of a beautiful Los Angeles fine arts consultant who is so burned out on men that she fakes the symptoms of AIDS to drive suitors out of her house?
The answer is, of course, a foregone conclusion. It's the getting there that gives "Still Breathing," a gooey, swooning swatch of romantic hyperventilation, its queasy charms. And let it be said that surrendering to those charms could be as guilt-inducing as polishing off a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream before lunch.
If this movie, written, directed and produced by James F. Robinson, finds a wide audience, it could prove as hazardous to the romantic health of the country as that irresistible Rodgers and Hammerstein anthem "Some Enchanted Evening." That ballad, from "South Pacific," seduced an entire postwar generation into imagining that true love would mystically arrive in the person of a stranger glimpsed across a crowded room.
"Still Breathing" raises the ante much further. Its hero, Fletcher McBracken (Brendan Fraser), shares the family trait with his male ancestors of having romantic second sight. After having premonitory dreams of their one and onlys, the McBracken men will travel thousands of miles, if necessary, to find and wed these dream lovers.
Fletcher is one of those lucky individuals who seems to subsist quite comfortably on nothing. When not lolling around his comfortably messy San Antonio house listening to Verdi and making homemade collages from photographs of pretty models, he is out on the streets of San Antonio giving free puppet shows to adorable Chicano children.
While lying in bed one evening Fletcher has a vision of a gorgeous young woman narrowly avoiding a brutal rape and murder on the streets of Los Angeles. Instinctively realizing she is his true love, he sets out to find her. Once he discovers his dream, Roz Willoughby (Joanna Going), in a moody Los Angeles bar, he spends the rest of the movie persistently and charmingly wooing her.
Although Roz also senses something mystical in the air (the way he tends a knee scratch precipitates a flashback to a special childhood friendship), she resists giving in to the inevitable. Even after Fletcher brings Roz home to meet his kooky but warm-hearted friends and cuddly grandmother (Celeste Holm), who sympathizes with the special agonies suffered by women who are born both beautiful and smart, she refuses to swoon into her fate.
The movie's biggest problem is Roz, an intransigent sourpuss for no discernible reason. Good-looking and successful with a bevy of eligible men at her beck and call, Roz mopes around Los Angeles in an inexplicable funk. Aside from her obvious beauty and intelligence, the movie never shows us what Fletcher finally sees in her. The poor guy keeps reiterating that he senses the "real" Roz underneath her irritating sulk, but Ms. Going provides scarcely a hint of who that might be. It's not for lack of screen time. The movie gives her plenty of room to blossom into something adorable.
Thanks to the presence of Fraser, the movie is still much warmer than the recent "City of Angels," which it resembles. His portrayal of an impossibly wonderful, caring, intuitive, patient, handsome '90s-style hippie is so good-natured and easygoing he makes this dreamboat seem almost credible. If Fraser continues to take such roles, he could become the '90s answer to the Patrick Swayze of "Dirty Dancing." Hollywood could do with a few more a warm-blooded Romeos like Fletcher. Unfortunately their melting looks won't amount to much if the Juliets they thaw never warm up.
Directed and written by James F. Robinson; director of photography, John Thomas; edited by Sean Albertson; music by Paul Mills; production designer, Denise Pizzini; produced by Robinson and Marshall Persinger; released by October Films.
I'm so discouraged, frustrated and guess just mad that my breathing has seemed to get worse the longer I'm not smoking! I had such a COPD 'flair-up' on January 4th - I haven't had a cigarette since. Put on oxygen January 5th, which with the help of prednisone and oxygen, the flair-up finally settled down. However, now after 32 days, seems like breathing is harder and I'm having to use oxygen more and more....... question - do you ever regain lung function after quitting smoking? 152ee80cbc
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