Avery knows

how Elisa is excited to speak to someone well informed and at least semi-intelligent. God knows how many people like that are left in the world.

And yet I realize more and more each day that slowly but surely more people like this are rising out of the ashes of what our generation has become like blades of grass and flower buds after a fire, unfurling their new found life and spreading their life unto others, and they spread it to still others, and the cycle repeats and repeats, without end; until almost our entire generation is beautifully well informed and caring.

But it's not over yet; for anyone familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution is quite aware that any knowledge we have acquired over our lifetime is not passed on to our children, and we can only watch from the sidelines as the cycle is repeated from the very beginning. We preach and pray and yell and whisper our advice and encouragement to the struggling youth and they listen readily and just as readily forget. We bite our nails and sit on the edge of our seats, hoping all the time that they will learn, by some miracle.

All the while, our parents are sitting back, laughing amusedly and humoring our useless worrying, because they've been through the same thing and they know that our children will come out beautifully, in very much the same manner that we did.

And the cycle repeats, and repeats, without end.