When I was a junior in high school, as a future editor of my school newspaper, I received a scholarship to a month-long journalism course at Catholic University in Washington along with the two other editors. We lived near CU in a spartan boardinghouse, in an area of DC called Brookland. The July course was intense and challenging, an experience unto itself, but we wanted to see the city. In every spare moment we boarded the downtown bus and took in everything we could—tramping around in the intense heat to the Capitol, all the museums, the White House, Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool, Georgetown---just glorying in striding amidst the stately government buildings around the Mall. We watched fireworks at the Washington Monument on July 4rth, spreading our borrowed blankets out on the lawn with hundreds of other joyful revelers. We even tried to fry the proverbial egg on a hot sidewalk one particularly sweltering day. Each moment was crystalline and special to those three young Connecticut girls.
Read moreARE YOU OKAY?
A few weeks ago, Megan Markle, Dutchess of Sussex, asked this question in an op-ed column of the NYT, The Losses We Share. She wrote about the miscarriage she’d had and the terrible grief it brought. She spoke about what it had meant to her, while traveling with Harry in South Africa, exhausted and breastfeeding her first child, trying to keep up a brave front, to have a reporter ask her, “Are you okay?”
She answered that she was grateful to be asked, saying that not many had.
I’ve been pondering that question ever since, wanting to ask it to those of you who read these posts.
Answering it to myself.
Read moreThey Won, But…..
I’d so hoped to be writing about the joy I felt last Saturday, when I grabbed my Biden sign, held it over my head and went shouting down the street, “They won, they won!” but that elation was short-lived.
The next days have been traumatic.
Read moreGRAVE LESSON
Last week, I went to my son’s grave with the pumpkin I bring him every Halloween. As I do each time I come to him there, I stand quietly and read the inscription it took me a year to find for the stunning piece of Westerly granite that stands guard over what is left of his body.
And think not you can direct the course of love,
for love, if it finds you worthy, will direct your course.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Read moreOASIS
This is Stella, a day after her surgery (she was spayed, a routine procedure but nonetheless traumatic for both of us). I sent this picture to a friend and she responded, “That’s exactly the way I feel right now.”
I think many of us, too, can relate.
It’s hard not to feel despondent about our lives, our losses, the pain of the world.
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