To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star
This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far
To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause
And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest
And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star!
My sister, Mim, introduced me to this glorious song. To this day, I consider the original rendition - with Richard Kiley - the absolute best. Over the fifty years since it debuted, we wore out numerous albums!
Thanks to Mim, I not only fell in love with this song, I had the joy of seeing the theater where it played in The Village, of walking past Richard Kiley himself! She was taking a summer theater workshop at Circle in the Square & I went up regularly to visit her.
Mim soaked in the wonders of Greenwich Village. Still, she could never have dreamed, sitting in that remarkable theater, seeing what was surely an unforgettable performance, that over ten years later she'd be back to Washington Square, a pioneering student in an experimental degree program at NYU for non-traditional students (there was NOTHING traditional about my sister). At that moment, Mim could never have dreamed that she'd write her bachelor's thesis - which comprised all of her final year's grade - on Cervantes' Don Quixote!
None of that hit me until the wee small hours of this morning, as I lay in bed filled with longtime regrets that Mim never let me read that bachelor's thesis. For the first time, it hit me how unfair that was - how many times did I drive her up to NYC for one of her evening classes? I drove her out to Long Island for an all-day class at her professor's Cold Spring Harbor home. And I wasn't allowed to read it. For a long time, I assumed it was because she thought she'd be casting pearls before swine. "Why else would she not let me see her final triumph?" I reasoned. Now that I'm older, realize there could be lots of reasons.
Still, I regret never having read it. "Full circle" moments give me special delight & this morning the utter rightness of her paper fully dawned on me.
To my little sis eyes, it seemed that Mim saw herself as a kindred soul to Don Quixote. It's clear, looking back over her life, that somewhere along the way she endured an unbearable sorry, perhaps due to an unrightable wrong. Mim pursued so many unreachable stars, tilted at the imaginary windmill of other's disdain (when the opposite was more the truth). So many feel that working with autism is fighting an unbeatable foe, but my sister went at her chosen profession full tilt, nobly & whole heartedly.
If Mim could get her bachelor's from NYU, it's not totally impossible that someday I might get to read her thesis. In the meantime, I'll content myself with reading Cervantes' classic, considered the first modern novel ~and~ the first best seller. Am hoping to have other reading partners join me, because Mim was right in this - my mind is not as well-honed as her's for spotting the underlying, the allusion, the subtle unwritten.
Dear sister who went through life clad in armor to protect yourself from the forces you believed out to harm you - may your heart lie peaceful & calm, because the world does know it's better for your striving for those unreachable stars.
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