Going to physical therapy reminds me of the nail salon. The manicure clients don’t look at each other and prefer to gaze into space, pore through a People magazine, or stare at the TV mounted high on the wall.

At physical therapy, it’s much the same, except for the magazines. There is no TV and we are too much busy to read. Our determined looks and occasional winces remind me we are all in this together. Everybody is trying to do something physically difficult if not impossible.

The husky fortyish guy prone on the table with his knee wrapped in a huge white bandage looks like he’s about to break into a sweat when all he is doing is lifting his leg a couple of inches. The old woman across from me furrows her brow as she oh-so-slowly climbs up and down a little step-stool.

I make faces when my therapist forces my fingers down toward my palm to encourage my hand to make a fist. “Just two more times,” he says and pushes hard on my knuckles. “It’s hardest the first time. It gets better after this.”

The woman at the next table with her hand wrapped in an ice pack says “That’s not true.” Not what I want to hear. I just can’t do it and it hurts. But I can’t scream here. Nobody else is doing that. I can’t cry either.

The little boy across the room looks about eight or nine and he is doing the exact same hand exercises I am. All by himself. He looks serious but he’s not crying or wincing. I can be as brave as this little kid.

I catch his eye, smile and ask, “What did you do?”

“I fell off my bike,” he says with a shy smile, then goes back to work.

I’ve been coming here twice a week for over a month. In all that time, I engaged a couple of other patients in a sentence or two, but the kid is the only one I’ve asked about his injury. Now I want to poll every patient in the room: “What did you do?” I want to tell them I broke my hand. I don’t know why. Maybe I think I can forge some kind of bond over our shared pain and misery. Maybe I think we can encourage each other.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m doing therapy again, this time after shoulder surgery. Different, smaller office, same silence. No TV but they do have magazines nobody reads. Everybody’s working hard. I still try to make eye contact with the other patients but I quickly see how hard that is while you’re trying to focus on a nearly impossible task. I say a silent prayer for us all and get back to work.

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Have you ever been in a situation where you want to make eye contact with someone? Did you succeed? Tell us in the comments section and I’ll put your name in the hat for a drawing to win a copy of Cathy Lamb’s wonderful novel, The Language of Sisters, about family secrets and communicating beyond words.

The winner of this month’s drawing is Judy Mitten! She wins a copy of Styx and Stone, by James W. Ziskin. Congratulations, Judy, and thanks for your comment!

This week, three longtime friends and I met for breakfast at a newish café. We’ve been getting together for at least twenty-five years – no one remembers exactly how long – and I guess you might say we’re “set in our ways.” But things have begun to change.

For many years, we got together at a diner midway between our homes, each of us ordering our favorite breakfast special – the #2, two eggs with bacon and toast was most popular. Then the business started going downhill. It changed owners and the food and service weren’t as good as we were used to. We tried a new spot down the road, owned by a young couple, and were pleased at the fresh nutritious breakfasts and the friendly service at a reasonable price. All natural, nothing frozen, local produce, because we were now into the twenty-first century and conscious of healthy eating. Fast forward just a couple of years – and I do mean fast –  and the couple opened a branch farther away in a sweet little town. It sits beside a creek in an old mill reclaimed for office space and our new breakfast spot.

The food is upscale and we’ve changed with the times. Instead of the bacon and eggs special, we have a choice of quiche and fruit cup, scrambler of the day, lattes and cappuccinos and other good stuff that feels so trendy. We sit at a high-top table and don’t mind climbing into the chairs because we have other things to complain about: our aches and pains, to be sure, and our spouses’ health issues. We share concerns about life and politics and church activities. And we’re still the same friends who love and support each other. We’ve had our problems: marital strife, job loss, deaths of parents, diseases and broken bones. The hassle of  “customer service” is a frequent topic.

So why do we still meet? Yes, it’s therapeutic to vent, but even better, we share and rejoice in our joys. One friend moved to Florida a few years ago, but she joined us this morning on her way to her summer home in the Adirondacks.  Because she still misses us and online doesn’t feel the same. Gray haired, grandmothers, retired, we are still active, vital women doing good work in the world. We try new things. We ate quiche. And we talked for two hours, just like always.

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Do you have old friends? Tell us about them in the comments for a chance to win a signed copy of Meredith Jaeger’s novel, Boardwalk Summer. Set in California in 1940 and 2010, two young women generations apart follow their dreams, unraveling a family secret and a love story.

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This month’s giveaway is a signed copy of The Gardener by Irish novelist Thomas Dunne. And the winner is:  cyclinggrandma! Check out her blog too!

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” – Psalm 23:6

This beautiful phrase from the Bible comes near the end of the prayer that begins: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” When it popped into my mind today, I thought it was “justice and mercy,” but on looking it up, I found the above translation.

I had been thinking about my essence, and how it informs my writing, after a workshop I took this weekend with Corey Blake at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York. In Corey’s interactive exercises, I zeroed in on the important role judgment and forgiveness have played in my life. Justice and mercy are my touchstones. But there is a very subtle difference between justice and judgment, isn’t there?

In my memoir, Off Kilter,  I wrote about learning to stop judging my mother (and myself) and to just do what makes me happy. I recalled an incident from my childhood. During recess in elementary school, I was unjustly accused of a malicious act that was an accident. The school principal was a nun who showed me no mercy. She had me stand beside her at the entrance to the building as all eight grades of students streamed indoors, staring at me on the way to their classrooms.

Until that day, I was a “good girl.” I tried very hard to do what was expected of me. But it didn’t matter to Sister Principal. And so, for the first time, I understood what it felt like to be one of the “bad kids,” the ones who were held up as examples of how not to be.

We rarely saw what these kids had done that was so bad. We only saw their embarrassed or defiant faces as our principal put them out for public viewing like criminals in the dock.

And now I was just like them. From good to bad, in an instant. I threw a snowball at another girl, aimed at her back. She turned and got it in the face, and there must have been ice inside, because her nose was bloody. I apologized, crying just as much as she.

My pleas went unanswered, and I wondered how guilty the other “bad kids” were. Did anyone ever stop to consider whether they had meant to do wrong?

I was so traumatized I never stepped a wrong foot again in that school. I knew that my intent would not matter if my actions caused damage.

Have you ever experienced a personal injustice? What did you learn from it? Does it matter to you if people misjudge you?

Let’s talk about it. Comment below.

photo by Eric Duvauchelle at unsplash.com

Since the recent presidential election, I have struggled for words. Today’s calendar has unlocked me, bringing back the feelings I had on this date in 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy.

I am angry. I am sad. I am shocked.

I have read columns and blogs and Facebook posts to figure out what happened and why.  I didn’t want to add to the noise. If I said anything in print, it had to be good.

Paralyzed and at a loss, I recalled these lines from the poem Anthem by the late Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

So here goes.

The president elect pulled the scab off our national infection and the pus is oozing out.We have long covered over the ugly symptoms of hate and tried to ignore them but now, with this election, we see how they fester. We can’t look away. And it hurts. Oh, how it hurts.

This essay  by Charles Eisenstein opened my eyes a little more and had me nodding in agreement.

So what do we do now? Michael Moore has a pretty good list. David Brooks offers some thoughtful advice. There’s loads more: Wear a safety pin, write your elected officials,  march on Washington,  speak up and donate and share your imperfect offerings.  Mr. Rogers said his mother responded to scary news by telling him to look for the helpers. Now we can be the helpers.

Before the election, I tried a little experiment to understand why any of my Facebook friends would vote for a man so divisive. I still don’t understand why racism and misogyny were not deal breakers for them. But I’ve been reading that  many people felt forgotten. In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a Marshall plan for the poor in America, black and white. Maybe that’s an idea worth revisiting, beyond name-calling and labeling.

And finally, this: In her book, No Ordinary Time, a great comfort to me these past two weeks, Jan Phillips encourages us to “practice speaking as if your life were a manifestation of your words.” To me, that means say what you want to see. Imagine that.

The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a big fan of her fiction, but I teach and write memoir, so I picked this one up and am I glad I did! Though when I got to the chapter written by her pet chicken, I rolled my eyes. She is such a good writer that I couldn’t stop reading what the chicken said!

Some of her childhood and adolescent memories foreshadow what she will write about in her novels: incest, murder, child abuse. The lost landscape of her youth (and mine) is poignantly portrayed – rural western New York State, the 1960s. Discovered that she taught at Detroit when my husband was a student there (he doesn’t remember her but he does remember the 1967 riots she describes) and that the radial Weathermen’s bomb blew up a townhouse in New York a few blocks from where she was doing a photo shoot for Vogue. Evocative of her era (and mine) as a young woman, and a loving homage to her parents, this memoir is a wonderful selection from a famous writer’s “life and times.”

I was interested that she doesn’t believe a memoir should have a narrative structure, because our lives are not lived that way, yet she acknowledges that memoir is selective, like picking “up a handful of very hot stones.” One “has to drop some, in order to keep hold of others.”

View all my reviews

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Told from the point of view of a woman who was raised alongside a chimpanzee, as an experiment, this novel raises big questions about human treatment of animals, especially in medical and psychological research. Karen Joy Fowler’s name has been on my radar for years, but this was the first book of hers I read, and I will be reading everything else she has written. I was completely taken by the beauty and emotional power of her metaphors – “bad mood walking,” “the whole of the Internet laid out before me like a Candy Land board,” and “the government can’t be wrong about everything; even a stopped clock, etc.”, so much that I stopped to read them aloud to my husband. She had me laughing to myself and feeling very sad many times as I read this novel, and I read it slowly, savoring the story, the words and the strong poignant voice of Rosemary Cooke, protagonist and sister to a chimp named Fern.
This novel is about love, family dynamics, politics, what we do when we don’t want to face the truth and what happens to us when we do. Fabulous.

View all my reviews

On a recent Sunday afternoon, my husband and I took the train to Philadelphia to see the world premier production of a new play at  the Arden Theatre Company. Under the Skin, by playwright Michael Hollinger, was one of the best plays I have seen at the Arden where we have been season ticket holders for the past three years.

While trying hard not to give anything away, I want to encourage anyone who has a parent or has been a parent to see it, and so I will offer a short summary and review here. The play is no longer at the Arden, but I hope it continues to be produced at theaters around the country.

Raina is a young mother who cannot forgive her father for not being there for her. . Her father contacts her because he needs a kidney and she might be a match. At first, she is outraged, but as the story unfolds she learns more about him and herself. Now she is raising a child of her own, and to her horror, she loses her temper and calls her a name. There are some big surprises in the course of this two hour play, for all four characters: Raina, her father Lou, Lou’s former mistress and her son. Some of the characters play more than one part which only serves to accustom the audience to seeing the interchangeable flaws, feelings and behavior among human beings.

Most people vow to raise their children differently than they were brought up. And many of us end up disappointing ourselves, as we become aware of carrying the same mistakes forward. We judge our parents, then we judge ourselves. It’s not a big leap to go on to judge other people we meet.

Why do I want you to see Under the Skin? Because there is so much keeping us apart these days –  fear and terrorism and war and economics and racism – and because a little thing like going to a play and sitting quietly with others for a couple of hours, paying attention to a story not all that different from all our stories, could move you closer to a sense of inner peace.

Today, a story I’ve been working on for years was published online in bioStories. I remember the first time I shared it aloud in a writing workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. At the time, I thought I was just writing a nice story about my aunts and why I loved them. They were nice ladies, and they were nice to me.

The instructor at Penn said it made her think of what we lose, sometimes, when we get what we want. In the essay, I mention reading in one of her books that Gloria Steinem realized her apartment didn’t look like a home. She went on to make it more cozy for herself. My aunts never had that problem. They were housewives of the 1950s and their homes were Cozy with a Capital C. I loved visiting them both.

That teachers’ comment led me deeper into the story, closer to what I was trying to say.

Still, it took years of revision and another writing workshop before the piece was good enough to find a home in print. I went over the ending, especially, many times. As a writer, and as a teacher, speaker, and human person, I find I have a tendency to repeat myself, to say what I mean over and over. And then I write or say more to make sure you really got it. This time, with help, I was able to stop at exactly the right spot.

Do you think I did? What’s your ‘blind spot’ as a writer? As a person?

One of my favorite memoirists is Patricia Hampl, and one of her books is titled, The Florist’s Daughter, so I quite consciously modeled the title of my latest article after her book. Back in the 50s, when I was growing up in what was then a small city in upstate New York, my friends and I often walked into Krupczak’s Pharmacy to pay a nickel for a sheet of pink newsprint with the lyrics of the top 40 songs played on the nearest rock and roll radio station, WTRY.

When I grew up and left town, my mother sometimes gave me an update on Mary Ann, the Krupczaks’ daughter, who became a lawyer and eventually the first female attorney general of New York State. My mother was no feminist, but both she and my dad were proud that a fellow Polish American, and one from our town, made it so high in the political world.

Fast forward forty or fifty years, and I’m writing for a new online paper in that same town, now a much smaller depressed industrial shell surrounded by big box retailers and the occasional remaining dairy farm. The editor asks me to write something for the Polish American issue of Upstream his literary magazine. Immediately I thought of Mary Ann. I found her on LinkedIn,  shot off a few email questions, and with her reply, was back in the old days on Hibbard Street, buying an ice cream cone from her parents’ store. Then I was a young woman of the 70s, first puzzled, then inspired by feminists like Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug…and Mary Ann Krupsak, who knew them both and many more.

Life takes strange turns sometimes, and where we end up cannot always be foreseen. I’m so pleased I got to know Mary Ann better, if only via email, and to add another page to this chapter in the history of the women of Amsterdam, NY, in honor of Women’s History month.

To read the full article, follow this link:
The Pharmacist’s Daughter – An Interview With Former Amsterdamian & NYS Lt. Governor Mary Anne Krupsak

Here’s another Six Sentence Sunday excerpt from my memoir, Off Kilter:

“Recently, I’ve begun to think of scoliosis as a metaphor for my life. I’ve struggled to please teachers, employers, parents, boyfriends, husbands, twisting myself into someone I can’t be. I hurt when I do this, because it’s not natural. But when I stretch my Self, instead, the results are different. When I’m reaching for my personal goals—to be a good mother, wife, friend and writer—I feel my balance return. And the sense of relief, as I become more the woman I truly am, is simply grand.

This Six Sentence Sunday post is an excerpt from my memoir, Off Kilter, published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press.