The Tennyson poem, The Lady of Shalott , has always tugged at my soul . I encountered it while in school, and, at about the same time, I heard Loreena McKinnet’s musical rendition of the poem. The song haunted me, and the The Lady frequently well s up in my imagination , unbidden. Her story is one of tragedy and triumph. She lives comfortably in a tower overlooking Camelot with but one restriction. She is cursed that if she ever looks directly upon Camelot, she will die. While t he curse stops her from traveling there, she can still indirectly watch the city. She sets a mirror against the wall opposite her tower window, so she can sit before it and look at the reflection of the magnificent bustling city. She fills the room with tapestries, woven with the images she spies through the mirror. Surrounded by images from a life that she is barred from, she eventually decides to risk the curse for a chance to live her life rather than watch ing others live theirs. This is her moment of v
My mom flipped through the small ring-bound book and pointed to one of the pages. “What number is that?” “Uh, 7?” I guessed. “Are you sure?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “What about this one?” She flipped to another page and showed it to me. I glanced at the disk of differently sized colorful bubbles. “There’s nothing in that one,” I said with confidence. While waiting for the doctor to call us into the exam area, my mother and I continued perusing the book. Some of the colorful bubble pictures had numbers in them. In one, a seven made of blue disks stood out against a background of green disks. In another, a red four amidst purple bubbles. Other pages were just fields of different shades of the same color with no recognizable pattern. My mother was clearly flustered by my answers. She stopped at one of the numberless pages. “You really don’t see anything there?” “Nope.” “It’s a three, Daniel.” “What?” “There’s a 3 right there. It’s green. You can’t see it?” she asked, in