Furthermore…

I got to thinking of old photographic scenes of my family before I was born. I know how things worked out for us, in some ways good, in some disappointing. Certainly I provided my share of the disappointments. But I was wishing I could enter into the mind of my parents when all of life was ahead of them. What unformed but optimistic, inchoate but promising, unrealistic but assumed, pictures and inklings of their future drew them on. How beautiful those hints and half-seen visions of a life to be, but never actually to be, must have been! Like an enchanting picture puzzle, they must have watched piece after piece be snatched and tossed aside by some invisible vandal’s hand, and roughly, uncaringly replaced with some little faux piece of ugliness again and again, until the once enchanting vision was only a forgotten dream, replaced by a ragged reality.