The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss

The rainbow comes and goes. Enjoy it while it lasts. Don't be surprised by its departure, and rejoice when it returns.

I've never let myself dwell on what other people think of me......You can never change their minds so why waste time trying? Why agonize over it? better to concentrate on more important things.

The rainbow comes and goes. Enjoy it while it lasts. Don’t be surprised by its departure, and rejoice when it returns. There is so much to be joyful about, so many different kinds of rainbows in one’s life: making love is an incredible rainbow, as is falling in love; knowing friendship; being able to really talk with someone who has a problem and say something that will help; waking up in the morning, looking out, and seeing a tree that has suddenly blossomed, like the one I have outside my window—what joy that brings. It may seem a small thing, but rainbows come in all sizes. I think about Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz singing, about where “bluebirds fly,” and Jan Peerce singing about “a bluebird of happiness.” Well, they may never find it, they may never reach it, and that’s okay. The searching, that’s what I think life is really all about. Don’t you? I

You may not be able to see the battle others are fighting, and you may believe they are confident and have never known sadness or fear, but believe me, they have, so be kind. Take

Death is the price you paid for being born.

Remember whenever money is involved, it brings out horrific things in people. It has the power not only to split families apart, but to destroy the foundations of one's life. Never lose site of this. Take time and be certain you place your trust in those whose interests and goals mirror your own.

Years ago I asked my friend, the great actress Ruth Gordon, to articulate in a few words the secret to her indomitable, unsinkable spirit. Her reply was a gift that became a mantra for me: “It takes courage. It takes believing in it. It takes work. It takes rising above it. It takes me liking you, and you liking me. It takes the dreaming soul of the human race that wants it to go right. Never stop dreaming. Think about it.

The craving to be famous is like an insidious disease, no matter how well known you become it's never enough, it never satisfies.

I love you in ways that are infinite and as in eternity have no beginning or end.

You recently read me a quote by Faulkner: "The past isn't dead, it's not even past." So much of our adult lives is influenced by what happened to us as children. It is all still there, the memories, the feelings, and fears, stored just beneath the surface in the hidden crannies of our cortex.

Someone recently said to me that it is easier to be clever than it is to be kind, and I think that is very true. So I add to my list of regrets the times I have not been kind, choosing instead to be clever, usually at someone else’s expense.

I believe there is an impulse in each of us to make our own personal and individual mark on the world around us. The little child coming upon a stretch of clean white snow gleefully rushes forward to imprint the shapes of his feet upon it. A woman passing through a strange room pauses briefly to move an object on a table, making a slight rearrangement that her eye finds more pleasing. A boy carves his initials upon a tree. We all write our names upon the sand. All of us hope that our choices and our actions will make a little sweeter those rooms we enter, those worlds we move through, those lives we touch, those people and those places we leave behind us. It is, in a way, our small gesture toward immortality, our little message to the universe. It says, "I was here", to the ages.

Health is your most treasured gift. As long as you have it, you are independent, master of yourself.

Let it be my motto, as well as yours. Ever upward, as a new life, a new day begins. Have faith that something unexpected and wonderful is moving toward you at incredible speed-EXCELSIOR! Yes, ever upward we must go, and go together.

Inside, however, in our core, past the aches, pains and creaking joints of age, youth still resides. Keep that in mind. As

recently came across a saying by the Scottish writer Ian Maclaren. “Be kind,” he wrote, “for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

whatever problem you have with someone, project yourself into the other person and see it from their point of view.

Stop this dwelling on fantasy tragedies and disasters occurring unexpectedly. It is time wasted and leads to a dead end, such pursuits sap and waste energy. You tend to worry much too much over bad things occurring, events that may never happen. You can do this if you put your mind to it. Whenever those thoughts pop up, just give them a swift kick in the ass.

We ike to think we are our own people, but sometimes it seems we are just playing out a script that was imprinted in us along ago.

From the time we were little, you treated us as if our ideas mattered. You and Daddy encouraged us to form our own opinions, and listened when we expressed them. We were not just children in your eyes; we were people who deserved respect. That was a powerful lesson.

Trying to please everyone all the time never works. It leads to hating oneself and then hating oneself even more when one later tries to assert one’s authority. Today,

He was forceful, domineering, and supremely sure of himself. When you have low self-esteem, as I did, those qualities are attractive.

Money gives you independence; but when you start chasing it, it is never enough.

The benefit of thinking you will die at fifty is that it can spur you to accomplish a lot of things at a young age, which is what I have attempted to do, but now the prospect of living longer makes me uncertain about the plans I’ve made.

How can my body betray me when there is so much still to be done? You see, it isn’t age itself that betrays you; it is your body, and with its deterioration goes your power. You end up obsessed, entirely focused on your health, paying attention to every nuance, every ache and pain. Instead of working or living your life, you waste your time on appointments with doctors.

Perhaps someday it will be pleasant to remember even this. VIRGIL

The money I inherited never belonged to me.

Does one ever know what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow.