UD can faintly — very faintly — recall her mother reciting the first lines of the poem Desiderata and then laughing at them. She used a fake British accent and a high-pitched voice.
She can recall her father joining her mother in this laughter.
UD didn’t know, then, that they were laughing at a poem — it was just some language her parents thought funny.
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Desiderata turns out to have been a wildly popular inspirational poem. It still is.
Terre Haute now has a sculpture of Desiderata‘s author, Max Ehrmann, sitting on a city bench.
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Deteriorata was the inevitable parody of Desiderata.