Things are not as they seem

       It was lunchtime, and I crossed at the intersection to window shop along 16th Street in Philadelphia.  I noticed a simple painting in a store window displayed on an ornate easel.  And something made me hesitate and  then stop - - full stop.  For the lone figure  swathed in salmon-colored shades portrayed a well-seasoned lady of the evening  leaning against the doorway of a burnt-orange one-story adobe house.
       She was gazing at the far-stretching desert which was giving way to the first rays of the pale morning sun.  But the lady was not interrupted by beauty; she was weary.  Her sun-bleached hair cascaded down her back and over her diaphanous gown which was loosely fastened, if at all.  Her face was not seen but her body told the story. It was titled.  "Tomorrow, tomorrow and . . . tomorrow." The utter despair of it swept over me as I stood there.
        And what made me think of another lady in a famous painting I will not know.  But my mind flew to that masterpiece by Whistler of another lady.  Sitting in a simple rocker,  just a white-haired older lady.  Her wrinkled flesh hangs from her disinterested bones. She is staring straight ahead, her watery eyes not focused on anyhing we can see, her ears long since given up waiting for the interruption that never comes. The open book on her lap slides to the floor but she does not move, she is painfully alone.  There is nothing but a vast emptiness crushing her.  Her very soul despairs as she lifts her broken heart to God.
      But the onlooker walks by and says, "Now, isn't that dear lady lucky?  There she sits in her rocking chair, warm and well fed with nothing to worry about and no job that tires her out.  What a deal.  I wonder if she ever counts her blessings."
       But that "dear lucky soul" torments herself wondering where her daughter is and why her sons have not called her.  She wishes someone would touch her, give her a hug and tell her not to cry.  But her inside tears are for the persistent pain she suffers day in and day out and her worry is for the operation she faces and the lack of money to buy the prescriptions she needs.  But nobody knows this except for the dispassionate nurse in the doctors's office.
       And the dispassionate nurse simply does not care.