Life is good...just ask Marko

It's ironic that we forget so often how wonderful life really is. We have more time than ever to remember it. My grandparents had to work long, long hours to support lots and lots of children in tiny, tiny houses. The women who worked in factories and sweatshops and then at home too, with two bosses, the one who paid them, and the one they were married to, who didn't.
It was tough life. I still remember the narrow groove worn into one of my grandmother's front teeth, the groove that appears there when you've used that tooth for years and years to bite off your thread from your sewing machine.

There are new generations of immigrants now, who work that hard, but those of us who are second and third and fourth generation are surrounded by high tech appliances, nice cars, family rooms, pools-the kinds of things our grandparents thought only rich people had. Yet somehow, instead of rejoicing, we've found the glass half-empty. Our jobs take too much out of us and don't pay enough. Our children are an awful responsibility. We're
expected to pick the kids up at preschool and run the microwave at home.

C'mon, let's be honest. We have an embarrassment of riches. Life is good. I don't mean in cosmic way. I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way. I think of it in all its small component parts: daffodils, the azaleas, the feeling of one of my kid's hands tucked inside mine, the way my husband looks when he reads with the reading lamp behind him, fettuccine alfredo, fudge, "Gone With the Wind," "Pride and Prejudice."

The fuzz on the edge of my daughter's ear. Everyone who has ever read to an AIDS patient, or cuddled a boarder baby, or taken flowers around to someone who hasn't had a visitor that day, knows that this is true.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of silver amidst long stretches of tedium. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the one most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to live, really live.
-Anna Quindlen