#63: Melinda Mae.

Discuss an activity, interest, experience, or achievement in your life (this could be a book, movie, or an activity or experience at work, home, or at school) that has been particularly meaningful for you. (University of Florida)

I've always loved Melinda Mae. Melinda Mae is the title of a poem and the main character of the poem. I read it when I was 6 years old, in Shel Silverstein's book, Where the Sidewalk Ends. I know the poem off by heart, and every now and then, I look at the illustrations in the book. There's this very tiny girl sitting on one end of the table, with a huge whale in front of her. When you turn the page, there's the same girl as a wrinkled, old woman with a big platter of bones. The small girl sitting on the table in the beginning of the poem has reminded of the same lesson over and over again. When I was 6, the poem taught me to never give up on any task as impossible as it might seem. I'm reading it again right now, 16 years old, and the poem reminds me to never give up on any task regardless of how impossible it might seem. Over the course of ten very long years (at least for me), Melinda Mae sends me the same message. It's hard to not give up a lot of times, especially for sports or any sort of physical exercise-type thing because I've always been bad at anything to do with running. When I'm running or doing anything very tiring, I find it very comforting and funny when I think about a small girl eating a whale till she's 80 years old. Exercising doesn't seem so hard after that. Sometimes, I think about how hard it might have been to swallow blubber and all the other weird internal organs that make up the whale. The whale wasn't even cooked. I thought about this when I was younger, (a lot younger), and life and anything that it throws at me doesn't seem hard anymore. Any hard task I've done till now also takes about a maximum of a few hours. Melinda Mae spent almost her whole life. The thought makes me feel a lot better. Melinda Mae has also taught me to not always believe everything others say. People told her she wouldn't be able to eat the whole whale. It didn't seem impossible anymore looking at the next page with the bones. If we were to listen and obey every person that tells us something is impossible, we'll soon have nothing to do. We can't live life like that, because we're not exactly living a life anymore. 

The tale of Melinda Mae sums up in just eleven lines life as it should be lived. Risks, determination, and in some cases, ignorance of people around you can lead to great things, or so I think, and I think Shel Silverstein does too.