Thank you for taking time for that cup of tea yesterday. I feel life is on fast forward, the kind of thing that used to happen when we had tape players and you pushed FF and the music all sounded like Alvin the Chipmunk was singing. I know that dates me!

Regardless, my sister forwarded a note from a friend in Italy, now in his fourth week of a self-imposed quarantine, in which he reported:

“I attach a picture of the just arrived flight from Shanghai with 12 doctors and 20 tons of medical equipment. The banner they have unfolded says

‘we are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden’

I later found that these words are from Seneca, the Roman philosopher of the first century AD.’

I could not get through reading this without weeping thinking of the hospital near Shanghai that my paternal grandfather had help establish in the early 1900s. He would be proud knowing this story.

Below are Liz and I, with two of my sisters and their husbands, honored by doctors and administrators when visited there in 2007. Yes, ‘we are waves of the same sea’ indeed.

 

23 Mar This entry was published on March 23, 2020 at 2:54 pm. It’s filed under John Snell, John Snell Photographer and tagged China, coronavirus, Italy, www.johnsnell.photography. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.