Within our culture every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy basically.
My mom was a saint. She taught me to be terminally nice.
I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire but at the same time there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life of how things change how they're not the same ever again.