eye saw an overweight mother walking down one of our avenues. Beside her, a daughter of perhaps eight or nine years of age.  The mother was heavy though once in possession of attractive.  Plump everywhere, thought kindly, was  the daughter. Past obese, on her way to fat.  While at that age you can easily be transformed by a lucky blossom, a passion for sports, both the mother and daughter were holding hands, smiling and happy together, as is...as they were, where they were...

in a big city and universe where skinny is the currency of happiness, I grew agitated, internally.  The mother had to have been injured by the most awful slings and arrows of the world's impartial, unforgiving dislike for all things that were not pitch perfect.  Agonies that children are often the object of the subject of verbal water boarding by bad gene bullies were surely yet to come!  Why did she not as a mother, protect her daughter's future and have her avoid the pressure of a world that pretends to celebrate diversity, but truly loves only the infirmity of acceptable uniformity? Diet, execise, caring, mothering, something!

why did she allow, permit, nay perhaps, encourage this child to mimic her thus? Was it a caustic indifference, a simple misery needs company?

of course, it could have been genetic and I'm just another overwhelming overweight ******* too.

But twenty fours later, I saw them in my mind's eye clearly - holding hands and happy together, and I forgave them my conditioned trespasses, but remained worried about the many nights of tears that no prophet was required to predict.