In the book Julie & Julia by Julie Powell (2005), there are two beautiful lines that sparkle. Julie talks about a girlfriend and marriage (pg. 88), how no-one would be good enough for her – not smart enough, not kind enough, with no gift to match her percolating laugh, her voice that can spread its champagne bubbles throughout a room of  strangers. Then of her parents’ separation and reuniting, she says, they stayed together anyway, not because they were the ‘marrying kind’, but because they’d worked like hell and loved each other more than they’d hurt each other (pg. 92).  What wonderful insight, what beautiful words to say of a friend or parent. These are things for us all to think about and aspire to, and a peek into the souls of others, with wisdom beyond the mundane. Being the girl who spreads champagne bubbles through a room full of strangers… wow, who wouldn’t want to be like that?! The notion of loving someone more than you are hurting them is so powerful, and I suspect, hard to achieve. Writing about
this means I will have some hope of retaining some of the richness of my reading adventures, and some chance of the optimism required to keep going, to keep fighting the fight against dementia. The effort of reading, and then writing about reading whether by blogging or by attaching coloured post it notes, covered with words, all over the book (!), is still meaningful and worthwhile, and keeps my glass half full when I forget to look at it this way. The message from these words is that love and laughter must always be at the top of my tree, and as it is for Julie and Julia, food is for me, the key ingredient to bind these two together.