The Golden Crown

I wonder how long that piece of paper has been taped to my wall.

I know it’s been years, as the paper is torn, wrinkled and yellowed with age.

I’ve taken it with me whenever I moved and made sure post it near my desk so I could look at it when I was writing and needed a quick boost of inspiration.

I think it might actually date back to my typewriter days, when the only time I saw a computer was on Star Trek.

Yes, it’s that old.

This is a copy of a poem called “Don’t Quit”, which my mother cut out of a newspaper or some other publication and gave to me.

“When things go wrong as they sometimes do,” it begins. “When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill, when funds are low and debts are high, and you want to smile but you have to sigh, when care is pressing you down a bit, rest if you must but don’t quit.”

My mother was always looking out for us and this included finding things in the newspaper that she thought might interest me or my siblings.

Whether it was career advice or healthy diet tips, or just something she thought we’d enjoy, my mother would get out her scissors and go to work.

I’ve had that poem for many years, but I hadn’t read it a long time.

And then last week I found myself trudging uphill with personal and professional pressures and I was so downhearted I couldn’t begin to smile.

‘Though the Pace Seems Slow’

I honestly can’t remember now what was exactly bugging me so much, which is a strong indicator that it was probably all in my head.

But I know that at one point I was so angry and frustrated that I had decided that the new year was a total bust and that I would never live up to my resolutions.

And then I saw that yellow piece of paper on the wall, and I started reading it, really reading, it for the first time in decades.

I read about the struggler who had given up and learned too late, when the night slipped down, how close he was to the golden crown.

I read about how success is failure inside out and the silver tint of clouds of doubt.

I thought of my mother, who had nothing my best interests at heart, sitting down and painstakingly cutting out this poem because she wanted to help me succeed.

There was no email back then, no texting. If you wanted someone to see something, you had to give it to them.

I thought about how she was gone from my life now and how ungrateful I had been when she was still here. And I started crying.

I eventually calmed down and remembered that one of my new year’s resolutions was to cut out the self-sabotage.

Regret and shame will only hold me back and I know my mother wouldn’t want me to live like this.

This piece of paper was botha message and a gift from my mother and the best response is gratitude, not grief.

The last line of the poem tells us to “stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit, it’s when things seem worse that you mustn’t quit.”

Thanks, Mom, I needed that.