Long before the dreary days of winter and my life on the couch with fractured ribs, say last December 7, my husband and I flew to Orlando to see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios. It was on the last day of this trip that I tripped (!) down a step and …
Continue reading Growing Older: Not Too Late for Harry Potter
For weeks I've been thinking about how I want to spend the rest of my life. I retired 15 years ago and have done everything I wanted to do from attending concerts and plays, volunteering at church, writing a book, and taking a few dozen writing and humanities courses. My thinking about the future started …
When a title like this comes to mind, it usually means a story is begging to be told. Well, here’s my story. While a child may sing “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth,” an older woman like me probably won’t sing “All I want for Christmas is a few fractured ribs.” …
Continue reading Growing Older: Fractured Ribs for Christmas
This past week, you've all heard about the aftermath of gun violence in my hometown of Chicago. You've also heard, once again, of other horrific events in our United States. Did you know, also, that last week, for the first time, the New York Times asked us on their front pages to do something about …
Continue reading End the Gun Epidemic in America – The New York Times
“It doesn’t have to be anything big,” humorist/essayist David Sedaris said recently at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago. He said many more good things about writing, like it can be about something "annoying" or "humbling", but it was dark where I sat in my half-price seat in the nosebleed section, so I managed to scribble …
I'm a big proponent of writing your life story; I often think about the phrase that when we die, our words die with us. My husband and I recently took a trip to Minnesota near where my paternal grandparents had lived. I never met them, or my aunt or uncle. On our trip, we were …
When I discovered Call the Midwife on PBS a few years ago, I was thrilled that someone in the media finally got nursing right-- nurses as intelligent, knowledge-based, autonomous practitioners. Most TV shows portray us as either bimbos or handmaidens of the physician or both; therefore, I'm happy to share The Truth About Nursing's 2015 …
Living with chronic pain is exhausting. I’ve lived with fibromyalgia for at least 18 years. Most of us with fibro have the pain long before we’re diagnosed, so I don’t know how long I’ve actually had it. And here’s a miracle—I no longer have the pain. How did this happen? Last spring I was visiting …
I went to a writer’s conference over the weekend. The morning after, I usually wake up filled with ideas about what to do with many unfinished writing projects. Not today. I woke up this morning feeling embarrassed. Why? It took a second to remember. I’d dropped my phone Saturday. More correctly, I’d let it slide …
Continue reading Growing Older: Getting Use to Embarrassment
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