But it was his discovery to make, and to share. My husband gave him a huge hug. Kyle is now a sophomore at Yale University — which has a thriving gay community and a culture of acceptance.
His boyfriend is a smart, sweet guy who has accompanied us on vacations and who makes my son incredibly happy. Still, it breaks my heart to know that, unlike Kyle, there are teenagers today who cannot come out to their parents because of deep-seated prejudice -- which is too often cloaked in the satin robes of religion.
Gay teens are four times as likely to attempt suicide as straight teens. I hope they are just as puzzled as I am now when I see old photos of racially segregated schools and water fountains, and I wonder how could it possibly have taken so long for this country to come to its senses? I hope the religious leaders of their generation focus on the best literal interpretation of their Bible: Love your neighbor as yourself. Why not opt for tolerance and kindness instead?
She forces us to consider both sides of these hot topics with her trademark impeccable research, family dynamics, and courtroom drama. Sure to be a hit with her myriad fans and keep the book clubs buzzing! They are gobbled up quickly and the readers want more. Sing You Home You have to admire Picoult's grace under pressure. By throwing us into these debates she gives her readers the gift of faith in a higher justice — not the law, God or modern medicine but human goodness.
Regardless of where you stand on the issue of same-sex marriage and the ability of these couples to raise children, you cannot help but be compelled by the desires of Zoe, Max and Vanessa.
The court case and its outcome is continuously unpredictable and will have readers glued to their chairs right up to the startling conclusion.
While Zoe continues to thrum her healing notes on the cello as a music therapist, she finds love with another woman. Still obsessed with having a child, though close to penniless at 40, she asks Max for the right to implant her partner with their remaining frozen embryos. The novel puts it to a judge to determine where justice lies, but really the decision is rendered by Picoult, once again making the case for human kindness.
This time Picoult tackles two provocative issues— infertility and gay marriage Gripping, powerful—and bound to be talked about. One sunny, crisp Saturday in September when I was seven years old, I watched my father drop dead.
I was playing with my favorite doll on the stone wall that bordered our driveway while he mowed the lawn. One minute he was mowing, and the next, he was face-first in the grass as the mower propelled itself in slow-motion down the hill of our backyard.
I thought at first he was sleeping, or playing a game. But when I crouched beside him on the lawn, his eyes were still open.
Damp cut grass stuck to his forehead. When I think about that day, it is in slow motion. The mower, walking alone. The carton of milk my mother was carrying when she ran outside, which dropped to the tarred driveway. The sound of round vowels as my mother screamed into the phone to give our address to the ambulance. The neighbor was an old woman whose couch smelled like pee.
She offered me chocolate-covered peppermints that were so old the chocolate had turned white at the edges. When her telephone rang I wandered into the backyard and crawled behind a row of hedges.
In the soft mulch, I buried my doll and walked away. My mother never noticed that it was gone — but then, it barely seemed that she acknowledged my father being gone, either. She never cried. When a robustly healthy year-old dies of a massive heart attack, the grieving family is suddenly contagious. Come too close, and you might catch our bad luck. Six months after my father died, my mother — still stoic - took his suits and shirts out of the closet they shared and brought them to Goodwill.
She asked the liquor store for boxes and she packed away the biography that he had been reading, which had been on the nightstand all this time; and his pipe, and his coin collection. She did not pack away his Abbott and Costello videos, although she always had told my father that she never really understood what made them funny.
My mother carried these boxes to the attic, a place that seemed to trap cluster flies and heat. Instead, what floated downstairs was a silly, fizzy refrain piped through the speakers of an old record player.
I could not understand all the words, but it had something to do with a witch doctor telling someone how to win the heart of a girl. Ooo eee ooh ahh ahh, ting tang walla walla bing bang, I heard. When I stepped into the attic, I found my mother weeping. I knew better than to ask why, then, she was sobbing. Instead, I curled up beside her and listened to the song that had finally given my mother permission to cry.
There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. I laugh. Most of the time, he sits in his bed or a wheelchair, staring through me, completely unresponsive. In brain scans, music lights up the medial pre-frontal cortex and jump starts a memory that starts playing in your mind. All of a sudden you can see a place, a person, an incident. The strongest responses to music — the ones that elicit vivid memories — cause the greatest activity on brain scans.
I worked way too hard to have this baby to feel like any part of the pregnancy is a burden. Usually my nursing home clients meet in a group setting, but Mr. Docker is a special case. A former CEO of a Fortune company, he now lives in this very chic eldercare facility, and his daughter Mim contracts my services for weekly sessions.
The last time Mr. Docker gave any indication that he was aware I shared the same physical space as him was two months ago. I am not sure if he wanted to chime in for good measure or was trying to tell me to stop -- but he was in rhythm.
I knock and open the door. Zoe Baxter. You feel like playing a little music? Someone on staff has moved him to an armchair, where he sits looking out the window. His hands are curled in his lap like lobster claws. Settling the guitar awkwardly on top of my belly, I start to strum a few chords. Then, on second thought, I put it down.
I rummage through the duffel bag for a maraca — I have all sorts of small instruments in there, for opportunities just like this. I gently wedge it into the curl of his hand. The end, I leave hanging. Docker, but the maraca remains clenched in his hand, silent. I keep singing as I step in front of him, strumming gently. Suddenly Mr. I can taste blood. The maraca has landed on the pillow of his bed.
This time, I stumble backward, crashing into the table and overturning his breakfast tray. She looks at me, at the mess on the floor, and then at Mr. I nod, and she backs out of the room.
This time, I sit gingerly on the edge of the radiator in front of the window. When he faces me, his eyes are bright with tears. He lets his gaze roam the room — from its institutional curtains to the emergency medical equipment in the cabinet behind the bed to the plastic pitcher of water on the nightstand. I think about this man, who once was written up in Money and Fortune. Who used to command thousands of employees and whose days were spent in a richly paneled corner office with a plush carpet and a leather swivel chair.
For a moment, I want to apologize for taking out my guitar, for unlocking his blocked mind with music. I had begged for her the previous Christmas, completely suckered by the television ads that ran on Saturday mornings between Wonderama and The Patchwork Family. Sweet Cindy could eat and drink and poop and tell you that she loved you.
I had a history of treating dolls badly. I decapitated Ken, although in my defense that had been an accident involving a fall from a bicycle basket. But Sweet Cindy I treated like my own baby.
I tucked her into a crib each night that was set beside my own bed. I bathed her every day. It was beautiful out; I had just gotten my training wheels removed. But I told my father that I was playing with Cindy, and maybe we could go later.
The first time it snowed after my father died, I had a dream that Sweet Cindy was sitting on my bed. Crows had pecked out her blue-marble eyes. She was shivering. I dug up the snow and the mulch from half of the hedge row, but the doll was gone. Carried away by a dog, maybe, or a little girl who knew better.
By the time my session with Mr. Except that the expenses surrounding my baby have less to do with car seats and strollers than with Lupron and Follistim injections. After five IVF cycles — both fresh and frozen — we have depleted all of our savings and maxed out our credit cards.
I take the money and tuck it into the pocket of my jeans. He connected with me. For a minute, the music got to him. For a minute, he was here. This job…if it hurts me, I know I am doing it well. Mim reaches out her hand toward my protruding belly. I can barely keep myself from rubbing my hands over the baby myself, from being magnetically drawn to the proof that this time, it is going to work.
I dream in pink. I wake up with fairytales caught on my tongue. It is all about regulating an irregular cycle, in order to begin an endless alphabet soup of medications: three ampoules each of FSH and hMG - Follistim and Repronex- injected into my backside twice a day by Max — a man who used to faint at the sight of a needle and who now, after six years, can give me a shot with one hand and pour coffee with the other.
Six days after starting the injections a transvaginal ultrasound measured the size of my ovarian follicles, and a blood test clocked my estradiol levels. That led to Antagon, a new medication meant to keep the eggs in the follicles until they were ready. Three days later: another ultrasound and blood test. The amount of Follistim and Repronex were reduced — one ampoule of each at morning and night — and then two days later, another ultrasound and blood test.
Exactly 36 hours later, those eggs were retrieved. And three days later, with Max holding my hand, a vaginal catheter was inserted into me and we watched the embryo transfer on a blinking computer monitor. There, the lining of my uterus looked like sea grass swaying in the current.
A little white spark, a star, shot out of the syringe and fell between two blades of grass. A third. We celebrated our potential pregnancy with a shot of progesterone in my butt. There are games. My part-time bookkeeper, Alexa, has organized the whole event — and has even gone to the trouble of rounding up guests: my mother, my cousin Isobel, Wanda from Shady Groves and another nurse from the burn unit of the hospital where I work, and a guidance counselor named Vanessa who contracted me to do music therapy earlier this year with a profoundly autistic ninth grader.
And Max would rather be run over by his own lawn mowing machines than identify chocolate feces in a diaper. I try not to focus on how depressing it is to be 38 and not have any close female friends, and instead watch Wanda peer into the Pampers. Vanessa gets the diaper next. What do you have to say for yourself? She had blinked at me, and then looked down at her calendar, and flipped the page backward. Ah, she said. Guess the rep from Kaplan is coming tomorrow. Two, to be exact.
My mother reads from a paper Alexa has printed off the internet. Suddenly I am seized by a cramp so intense that all the breath rushes out of my body and I jackknife forward. Harvesting Opportunity explores these recent findings, highlights models for collaboration between policymakers, practitioners and the financial community, and discusses research, policy and resource gaps that, if addressed, might contribute to the success of regional food systems strategies.
Chapter 1 — Local Food Demand in the U. Electrical stimulus, as is the case with heart pacemakers. Figure 1. This heart-assist device uses a flexible piezoelectric energy harvester. Languge: English. Users who have this book I have the Ebook I have the Paperbook.
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