A Love Story

I wrote this poem once, a long time ago, but I never shared it with anyone - until today.


I look at your face,
Aglow and softly lit

As though from some source

That shines on you and you alone.

I look at your face

As my eyes trace

Every contour, each angle,

Memorizing each

Sweet expression,

Each subtle shift.

I look at your face,

Slightly out of focus

As though seeing it

From behind a tear.

My body trembles,

Suddenly aware

That your fingers have moved

To caress my cheek,

Gently,

Softly,

Finally.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Our First #NorEaster2018

Friday was horrendous. The storm that was predicted as all rain in this area turned to snow and driving a school bus full of children became challenging to say the least. Because the worst of the storm didn’t hit here until after 2:00 p.m., schools remained open. By 3:30 p.m. the roads were so congested the buses couldn’t get through to the elementary schools and many young students didn’t get home until after 6:00 p.m.

I didn’t leave work until after six when the thought of taking the 45-minute drive home was so daunting I decided to stay nearby where I was safe, but alone, and where I ate a light supper and got into bed and slept for the next twelve hours.

In the morning I got up, picked up my cell phone, and listened to a guided meditation I have been listening to for the last ten days, a meditation containing these words: Albert Einstein once said that there are only two ways to live your life. One is to see nothing as a miracle. The other is to see everything as a miracle.

As I listened I reflected back on the day before, thinking about the miracles I had seen and heard:

1). Cars taking turns moving through intersections where traffic lights were out.

2). A bus driver who agreed to take on more runs than he had to.

3). Dispatchers who worked well beyond the call of duty.

4). Bus drivers coming together at the end of the day to share their experiences and perhaps a laugh before heading out through the storm again to make their way home.

And as I thought about these things, I thought, too, about what I had written a few weeks earlier, after the Super Bowl, about how we are all champions doing our jobs, even those of us who bitched and complained. Because in the end we all fought the dragon and won.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

A Teacher Speaks #ArmTeachers

When I saw what happened at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Florida on Valentine's Day, I cried.
But when I heard what the President of the United States was proposing as a solution, I was stunned beyond tears.

In reponse to the President's proposal to arm teachers, my granddaughter, herself a teacher, posted the following words on Facebook:

The teachers have been begging to be armed. Arm us! Arm us with pencils, pens, crayons and markers. Arm us with notebooks, binders and folders. Arm us with enough desks for our 30+ students and a room big enough for the desks, and heat in the winter so our students can stay awake and fans in the spring and fall so our students can concentrate.

Arm us with a budget for the child who comes to school late and hungry or the child who has already read every book in our one shelf library twice. Or arm us with a liveable wage so that we can afford a discreet drawer full of nutrition and a collection of challenging literature. Arm us with evidence based practices and the latest technology.

Arm us with your confidence in our professional ability and your support for our professional growth and our personal self-care. Arm us with a culture that does not toss us out as overpaid crybabies who only work the bare minimum and lounge by the pool all summer, who value us and the national treasures, the most precious commodities, who smile at us each morning, who come to us for hugs and breakfast and lunch, who seek us for help and comfort and understanding, who lash out at us verbally or physically on a Wednesday and know that Thursday will be a new day when we will show up still loving them.

Arm us with a culture who sees us, hears us, asks us on the front lines what the solutions could be and then dares to try it our way. Arm us! ARM US! With all these tools, we beg you to arm us.

And you've come offering a loaded gun.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

On Being A Champion

I was born and raised in Philadelphia so naturally when the Eagles became the Super Bowl Champions- and did it so spectacularly - I was as excited as anyone else. Today as thousands, maybe millions, of fans line the streets of the city, there will be a parade of champions moving from South Philadelphia to the steps of the Museum of Art. And as I await the start of the parade, I can’t help wondering if, when they arrive at the museum, they will climb the steps while the theme from the movie Rocky plays in the background.

Yesterday while moving quickly through my Facebook feed, I saw a picture of Eagles owner Jeffrey Laurie and former player John Dorenbos standing together. Beneath the picture was a caption saying that Dorenbos was traded to the Saints in August, and that while being examined by a Saints doctor, it was discovered that he had an aortic aneurysm. This discovery ended Dorenbos’ career and voided the trade, but it saved his life.

But - and here’s the kicker - it also said that Laurie is giving a super bowl ring to Dorenbos who played with the Eagles for eleven seasons. Right there, for me, Jeffrey Laurie became a champion of champions.  

But for me, we are all champions. Not just the famous or infamous, but all of us. Sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning and getting ready to face the same old routine - or some unexpected trauma - can be a feat of heroic proportions. And sometimes after I’ve gotten out of bed on a cold winter morning like this morning and I am standing beside my bed, I swear I can hear the theme from Rocky playing in my head.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

More First Lines

“All children, except one, grow up.”

Do you recognize that sentence? It’s the first line of J. M. Barrie’s story, Peter Pan.

The last time I wrote, I told you how, in order to progress in my writing, I was headed for the library to collect the first lines in novels and to see if they worked – that is, to see if they grabbed my attention right from the start. Certainly, Barrie’s line does as it leads us willingly towards a land of enchantment.  

Here’s another one that works for me: “Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead – familiar faces and others, half-forgotten, fleetingly.” It’s the first sentence from Colm Toibin’s The Master, the powerful story about the writer Henry James.

“Excuse me sir, may I be of assistance?” are the benign and friendly first works in Hamid Mohsin’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which are especially benign considering the chilling words at the end of the book.

Although most of the lines I found were from books I’d already read, this one wasn’t: “Matanni, my grandmother, said it began deep inside my mama’s womb when she was pregnant with me.” These are the first words in Icy Sparks, a novel by Gwyn Hyman Rubio, which according to its back cover is “a story about a girl growing up in rural Kentucky with an undiagnosed affliction that manifests as violent tics and uncontrollable cursing.” I found this interesting and eerily similar to my description for Rude Awakening, my memoir about growing up in 1950s Philadelphia with an undiagnosed disorder that affected all my relationships, even into adulthood.

What about you? Do you have a favorite first line, your own or someone else’s? If you have, I’d love to see it in the comments below.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

First Lines

Since finishing my second book I have been stymied, trying to decide what to write about next. Finally, I decided to go back to the basics, relearning some of the things I learned while writing my first book. In that endeavor, I picked up a copy of Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories. In it he encourages me to take a look at first lines, which he says probably didn’t become first lines until after a lot of revision.

This was certainly true for my own first line in Rude Awakening which begins “My mother kept secrets.” That sentence, and the entire paragraph that followed, didn’t come along until I was well into my final draft. But for my second book, Dear Elvis, a book written as a series of letters to Elvis and as a diatribe against death and dying, the first sentence was the first line I wrote.  

In order to start writing again, Roorbach’s book has advised me to go to the library to start collecting first lines and to decide whether or not they work. I’ll do that tomorrow. In the meantime, I don’t need a library to recall my favorite first line from my favorite book, A Tale of Two Cities, which begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, …”  

According to my Kindle, that book “has sold more copies than any other individual book in history.” More than two hundred million copies.” And, of course, that first sentence works, echoing the themes in the book like the contrast between London and Paris during the French Revolution and the contrast between the two main characters, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton; as well as the war going on in Carton’s heart.

Remembering it, I can’t help wondering how long it took Dickens to come up with that first line. How I would love to go back in time to ask him!

  
My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Dear Elvis

My new book, Dear Elvis, is a story about a woman who, after learning about the death of a beloved friend, turns to her childhood idol for guidance. In a series of letters to Elvis, she describes her overwhelming sense of loss and disbelief. Along the way she meets a complete stranger, a priest named Father Chris, who encourages her to continue her search for answers, and sends her on an unforgettable journey to Graceland - and beyond. The first of the forty-two letters written to Elvis begins this way:  

   

Dear Elvis,

I’m sorry that you’re dead. Forty-two was much too young to die and you have been dead for such a long time. But then dead is dead, or at least that’s what a writing instructor told me once. He said there are no comparative or superlative forms for dead. There is no dead, deader, deadest. There is only just dead. But then I’ll bet you already knew that.  

So listen Elvis, where are you? Are you in heaven? And if you are, where is heaven? To tell you the truth, I kind of believe in heaven. So there must be one. I just don’t know where it is and I kind of figured you would know since, well, you know, you’ve been there for forever. And you must know everybody. Like, do you meet everyone after they arrive? Everyone who knew you? Or knew of you? 

Let me get to the point. Is Don there? Have you seen him? Have you talked to him?... 

Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE