I agree, singing is wonderful therapy, if you can muster the energy for it. Another thing I like about making music is that it makes me feel ageless...not young, not old...it's not about age at all, a pleasant escape from time's reality!

Bex, I agree entirely that being told to cheer up because, in effect, you have nothing to be sad about, is rubbish, as jOhn would say. The no shoes, no feet parable was one my mother was overfond of quoting. To get her naggy voice out of my head I wrote the following:

ON THE LACK OF SHOES, AND FEET

My mother always said to me
When I brought her my tales of woe
No shoes?   Or no feet at all...
Which row would you choose to hoe?

I understood the metaphor
But it always seemed to me
Her rote reply was not well thought
For it begged the question, i.e.

Why should a man who has no shoes
Perhaps no food or heat
Feel better about his lowly plight
Because he retains his feet?

Is sympathy so hard to spare
So thin upon the ground
That for a man who has no shoes
No compassion can be found?

If heat and shelter can't be had
In bitter winter cold
A man sans shoes soon finds himself
Sans feet, if truth be told.

And now what good is compassion?
Now that sympathy is much to late?
For once the feet are truly gone
He must live out his crippled fate

Decorum preserved, complacency assured
The righteous now can sigh
"Oh no, how dreadful for you, dear"
Then on their own two feet walk by

How much better to show sympathy
Shoes don't cost that much
How much better to solve that problem
Than to have to supply a crutch

I suspect it's because cheap footwear
Is well within our scope
So puts the onus on us, then,
To help the shoeless cope.

But hospitals are so costly
Surely no one can be expected
To pony up a surgeon's fee.
And so the threat is deflected

Of having to give up something
That might cost us in some way
Thus the unshod can be justly ignored
And there is only the devil to pay.