Sunday again

Meant to post this on Father's Day, along with a carousel of photos of our dude who abides. That's his resting bitch face, but don't be fooled. He's not fierce, really. He's a boy dad and a girl dad and his boy calls him "Yo Pops" and his girl calls him "Papa Bear," and they both have his number. We'll have been married 40 years this summer, where did the time go? So much love for the man who's done this parent walk with me, beautifully.

It's Friday night at twilight as I write this, a hard hour for me. Since I was a little girl, I get restless, lonely, especially if I’m inside the house as the light starts to fade. I need to be outside at the in-between time, the spacious sky overhead, wide air in every direction. Otherwise I feel as if I in the wrong place, the wrong body, in the wrong time, as if I’m supposed to have done something more with this one precious life but I missed the turn. Tonight I’m thinking I have no friends I can call and say let’s go sit outside and talk or not talk. Everyone is always busy. Or just not up for being spontaneous. And for some reason it doesn’t feel quite the same to go sit outside alone. It’s lonely. I feel the void keenly. 

Another day. Sunday now. I’m done writing and editing for today so now I’m here with myself again. The man is watching World Cup Football in the living room. I’m in the back room contemplating the fact that being a mother to grown children means not calling them when the impulse strikes, knowing they’re out living their lives, as you once did, and you’d just be interrupting their flow. Wait for them to call you. It’s okay to miss them and feel sorry for yourself while you wait, as long as you never guilt them with it, because this is just life as it ever has been. How well I understand my own mother now. 

I read something this morning in a piece titled “How To Be Old” by Roger Rosenblatt in the NY Times. It said never ask others to share your despair. It’s simply not fair. I get that. It’s amorphous and existential anyway, so how do you even explain it? It’s just a state of being that arrived bit by bit as you aged and now it travels with you, a part of you, a melancholic nostalgic yearning for what is past, and will never again be, and how fleeting it was in the end. This is why I am endeavoring not to distract my children from one moment of the days they are living now. How much more despairing I’d be if I didn’t have those days to miss, to yearn for again. I had them once. There is that. 

Melancholic nostalgic yearning. All three together. And somehow not redundant. This is how it feels on Sundays before the light starts to fade. Maybe I’ll go lose myself in another episode of Blue Lights. It's a police procedural set in Belfast, plays on BritBox. I find it riveting.

Wrote this a week ago, while my blog was private. Now it's public again. I can't decide what I'm doing here, it seems.

Tiptoeing back into the fold

I’ve been so unmotivated to bare heart and soul here. I worry that anything I write can be used against me if things take even worse turns, because let’s face it, there’s very little daylight between what’s happening here and what happened a century ago in another place, as we’ve read and seen the memoirs, novels, documentaries, films, and histories of that “never again” darkness that has come again. Things get quiet sometimes, because the once-incisive press has largely been silenced. We still get a facsimile of the news 24/7, but the true horrors unfolding for some people, those stories are hidden, ignored, or go unreported. We glimpse the tip of the terror when it bubbles over, before it’s suppressed again, and the news cycle moves on, the zone gets flooded, and we don’t know where to put our attention. So I don’t know how to write here anymore. This place used to be where I could play. And process my crazy. And whine and opine to my heart's content. Now it is where I could wittingly or unwittingly burn everything down. 

Melodramatic much?

But is seems I’ve been reawakened by the wave of euphoria that swept through my city these last few weeks. The Knicks parade is today. My kids and their loves are already out there this morning, lining up to cheer for the national champions. And I’m here, attempting to record, at least pictorially, some of what I would have posted about if I hadn’t been too numbed out from trying to get through the news cycles, as surface level as they are, these past several weeks. I’ve had my head down working too—I just delivered the first two thirds of the book I’m editing, and am now on the final lap there. I'm working with another lovely subject, I am so fortunate, really, in who I've been able to partner with on these projects. I'm working with a man this time, an actor with an unprotected heart, which makes me love him; the ones who feel the world too deeply, they are my tribe. 

My previous book is also going through the production stages at the publisher, so there’s still periodic work coming through for that—I had to write a new epilogue, for example, due to a recent exciting and audacious development in my subject’s life, plus there's the copyedit read, the legal read, first pass pages, cover and interior designs, the whole nine. I also got asked to profile a subject for the cover of a magazine, which frankly had me hyperventilating, I had only a week to do the interview and write the story, I feared I wouldn't do the person justice, but that’s done and delivered now, and the subject and the editors were happy, so I'm breathing normally again. 

Let's see, since last I posted:

1. We celebrated Mother's Day with brunch at my daughter’s place in Brooklyn. The usual suspects came. My daughter’s husband made the most beautiful bouquets for his mom and me. It included all my favorite flowers, orchids, ranunculus, and tulips. Swoon.

2. This darling little one turned three years old at the end of May! And at the end of July, she and her lovely parents will officially have relocated from Dallas, Texas, and be living in Brooklyn, New York. She's enrolled in school, their new apartment lease is signed and they get the keys on July 22.

3. I completed the refresh of the back bedroom of our apartment, which involved finally pulling up the 25-year-old carpet in there, and laying new floors. I also had the broken blinds replaced, the walls spackled and painted anew, and my girl and I got rid of ten garbage bags worth of stuff from the bookshelves alone (my kids took things of theirs they wanted to keep to their homes). On my birthday my daughter and I chose a new rug to go in there, which I absolutely love. I work in that room a lot now, sitting in the recliner with my laptop, and then coming down and feeling that soft plush rug under my feet. At first, my daughter was saying I needed to get new shelves and beds, and even new bedding but I disagree. Now that the bookshelves are vastly less burdened, I'm perfectly happy with my mother's former bed with it's old timey romanticism, and my daughter's childhood wrought iron trundle bed, they both hold very fine memories. Here's a picture but it doesn't really capture the serene feel of the room or the gentle quality of the light in there. 

Now all I have left in this room-by-room house refresh that I embarked on five years ago is our master bedroom. I have no idea how to start!

4. And this just in! The kids just texted the group chat this pic from the Knicks victory celebration parade this morning. More than one million people are out there, many of them having lined up before daybreak. Go Knicks! What a time to be a New Yorker!

Collective Effervescence

I cannot tell you how much joy washed over my city as we watched our Knicks basketball team march to the championship win last Saturday night. Watch parties all over the city, in restaurants and bars, on sidewalks and in parks, on rooftops and in backyards and living rooms, block party cookouts with everyone invited, music blaring, people dancing, everyone sharing in the same euphoria, differences erased, and in between games, we met each other as members of one tribe, regardless of outward appearance, background, circumstance, we shared this beautiful possibility, with our wonderful young mayor as the cheerleader in chief, reminding us that we are indeed one, all of us making up the whole magical idea that is New York City. God, we needed this joy. We needed to come together like this. We needed to remember that, as one Luis Jonathan Hernandez put it in a post on instagram, "Joy is not a break from the work. Joy is the work."

"When a system wants you defeated," Hernandez wrote, "your joy becomes a problem for that system. A people who can still gather, still feast, still dance in the streets, still love each other out loud, is a people that has not be conquered. That is why joy is resistance. Not only because it feels good, though God knows it does. Because it is proof. Proof that we are still here, still together, still ungovernable by their fear."

It was incandescent, what New Yorkers experienced en masse as we watched Jalen Brunson, Karl Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and all the rest never give up, even when the situation looked hopeless, watched them be mentally tough enough to scrap their way to victory, coming back from a 29-point deficit in one game to win by one point with one second to go! New York just about fell ouuuut! Good God it was magnificent! The whole city roared! 

Apparently, there's a name for what just happened here. It's called Collective Effervescence. Here's the science, from sociologist Emile Durkheim, as explained by a trauma therapist named Susan Zinn on social media—I'm quoting her because she explains it better than I can right now—"When thousands of people feel the same emotion at the same time—joy, hope, belonging—something extraordinary happens inside your body. Your heart rhythms synchronize with strangers. Your nervous system wakes up. You feel alive in a way you forgot was possible. Sociologist Émile Durkheim named this in 1912. He noticed that humans are fundamentally transformed when they gather around something larger than themselves. A ritual. A belief. A shared purpose."

She points out that New Yorkers haven't had a Knicks championship win since 1973, and now, it's happened. "Fifty-three years of waiting. And then—the thaw. Most of us have been living in Functional Freeze. Functioning perfectly and managing everything, and feeling almost nothing. Last night, New York reminded us what we’ve been starving for."

The Man

May 3 was my birthday

I'm finding that my word smithing work steals my mojo for other writing, so that I tell you all my news in my head, but can't seem to get any words onto the page here. But yes, I had a birthday. 

I spent the day roaming with my beautiful daughter. We went to the at the movies (The Devil Wears Prada 2—we have a cute history with the original installment from her growing up years) and then lunch at our fave spot, and then home to plan a refresh of her former bedroom, browsing online to choose a rug and paint colors, drawing different furniture arrangements, taking measurements, with the two of us intermittently flopping side by side onto the bed to debrief on life things, laughing, being completely in the flow, and it was just a divine time. She had been at a friend's bachelorette party in New England since Thursday, one of The Six (friends since elementary school) is getting married this summer, while another of their number will have a baby in the fall, so she was feeling all filled up with the beauty and complexity and serendipity of love and life. She came straight here from her train ride back from New England with her suitcase in tow to spend the day with me. She went home to her husband later that evening. My own husband was around all day, but he graciously stayed in the background reading, knowing unstructured time spent with my girl was my birthday gift this year, and it was the sweetest.

The nieces and my girl and her love are coming over tomorrow night for a Survivor watch party and to cut cake with me, so we'll do my actual birthday celebration then. My son and his wife won't be here. She has to teach a class and he just went back to work from medical leave. His got burned on the job, flames swooped over his ears—yes, I know!—and he was off for four to eight weeks as he healed. He healed very fast thank heavens, four weeks in you couldn't tell he'd been burned, his ears looked completely back to normal, and he was cleared to return to duty. But since he just got back, it's too soon to be asking folks to switch shifts with him. He says he and his love will do something else to celebrate with me when he's free. Meanwhile my girl stuck two candles in a Jamaican plantain tart and she and her dad sang me happy birthday. I'm wearing the amethyst earring my man gave me as a gift. He knows I love my mother's birth stone.

As I type, two men are in the back room of my house pulling up the grody carpet and patching up the walls in preparation to paint and lay floors in there. And then it will be just my bedroom left to refresh in this years-long redo of my home, which I contemplated for more than a decade before finally getting started with the kitchen in 2022. Four years later, I'm closing in on the finish line. I feel completely overmatched when I consider taking on our bedroom, but this is a conundrum for another day.

I also meant to post about the man and I going to the New York Botanical Gardens Orchid Show a couple weeks ago. I walked and walked with no issues at all. At one point we came to some stairs and from force of habit my husband said, "The ramp is over there—oh, you're up the stairs already!" And I was. I use my cane for stairs because I still have bum knees, but with the cane, they don't hurt at all going up, and I can lead off strongly with my newly fixed left leg, too. This counts as big excitement for me nowadays. Here are some pictures, and look, I made a post!

A Day Later

I took down the yesterday's post about our crazy, but thank you for all your supportive comments. As our friend Georgia wrote, "Yes, marriage is hard. But you have a long good story with this good man. He may be overwhelmed at the moment. Sometimes carrying on and waiting (as extremely difficult as it is) is the best thing the do." Her words gonged loudly in my spirit, and I take that to mean they were the permission I sought to lay this blade of worry down, to let it be what it is, to meet whatever comes, knowing my husband is being who he has always been when it comes to medical things, I won't change him after forty years, forty good years on balance. I know I have PTSD from the emergency open heart surgery he had nine years ago now. We got through that. Whatever this is, we'll get through it, too. The lesson perhaps? Release the illusion of—the grasping for—control.

It did help that my dear friend Isabella came by for lunch with me yesterday afternoon. She being a psychotherapist by profession, and the two of us, mothers together, having almost three decades now of talking each other down from our worry ledges, had a good rambling chat about everything, the eccentricities of husbands, grown children fully claiming and shaping their lives, the surprises of longtime marriage, aging on the outside while feeling something else entirely on the inside, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, the inevitability of the unexpected—it was all so gentle and true. I love you, Isabella! And thank you for my beautiful flowers!

Also yesterday, I had my final PT session, and noted to my lovely therapist that I had lost ten pounds since I began working with her. Yesterday she basically followed me around the gym, making sure I had mastered the machines and the weights for the routine I will follow on my own going forward. She made an adjustment here and there, but mostly we chatted like girlfriends as I worked out, and as we parted she hugged me and said, "Let's stay in touch," and I would like that very much. This is me on the day I finished PT after my hip surgery. I'm getting stronger all the time, and the man and I are planning travel that is quite far afield come fall. 

This being social

I woke thinking of all the social interactions I have ahead of me today, starting with my second to last session with my lovely PT person, as I have apparently met the markers, turns out I am a tad too determined to do what is asked of me and I powered through. After that I am to meet up with my neighbor Jane to walk in the gardens, just a pleasant stroll with my friend to enjoy the cotton candy blossoms arriving on our trees. Then my childhood friend Alison, who lived with us for a few years when we were growing up, and with whom I now sing in choir (except I'm not there this term because of my recent surgery), is stopping by after rehersal to give me my birth certificate, which my brother asked her to bring to me from Jamaica when she was there recently, for Easter. If you followed that sentence, good for you. I'm too lazy to go back and fix it. After Alison and I visit, I'm supposed to sit on a bench at sunset with my other friend Lisa, who's recovering from dental surgery, and who I haven't seen since before my surgery, though she left flowers at my door twice during my recovery, bless her. And finally at 7:30 tonight I'm due to attend the monthly meeting of our co-op's Tenant Committee, of which I am a member along with several of my fellow co-operators. In between I will get in a bit of work, maybe. I have already been up early, editing, and the weather is gorgeous out, so the days of taking my laptop downstairs and working in the courtyard under trees and sky are finally here. Yesterday I sat at an outdoor table and formatted blind endnotes for the manuscript I finished last fall, which is at the publisher, working it's way through the many-months-long book-birthing process. 

Anyway, I woke up thinking of all the social engagements that would be a part of this day and I thought that maybe I would put on make up, make an effort to help out my haircut, but by the time I was showered and dressed, that idea had run its course and I had settled for clean and neat. Earrings and a necklace will have to serve as proof that I tried. My hair is growing in a bit, though, and the color, which had seemed way too dark when I left the salon, now seems okay. It may not actually be a bad cut, it may just need a few weeks to come together. Maybe. Here I am in my daughter's back yard last Friday. My cousins from Orlando spent last week with us, and my girl and her husband had us all over for a cook-out to celebrate three recent family birthdays, except it was a little too soon for cook-out season, definitely still too cold, so we all huddled inside coats and sweaters and soon escaped inside. But just being together for a few hours in this mad surreal world, was soul restoring. 

Birthday girl, lightworker, lifesaver, the next indicated thing

Today is my girl's birthday. She is celebrating it in Paris with her love, and by the looks of it, having a grand time. I love that for her. For them. They've been sharing pictures and videos of their adventures with the fam at the end of each day, and it's been such a treat for us all. The famous attractions and citiscapes are fabulous but it's the pics of the two of them that I swoon over. Here are some of my faves.

She looks happy. And that's really all I need.

___________

Thank you for the kind comments in response to my low mood yesterday. I'm a lot better today, though the haircut still looks wacky. Later in the day, I realized my vapor of sadness wasn't really, truly about the hair (though it is going to be a challenge making myself show up in the world with this crazy cut). It started really with our son telling us the night before that his firehouse had been the first on the scene at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday evening after the Air Canada Express flight and the airport emergency vehicle crashed on the runway, and those two pilots died. My son and his crew were the first responders who had to cut those poor pilots out of the wreckage, and get the injured survivors to safety. It was a horrific scene, and I went to bed that night thinking about how hard some of my son's workdays are, and those pilots not making it home from their own regular workday, the fragility of our world, and then I couldn't sleep, and I got up at 3 AM and looked in the mirror, I looked so scalped and undefended,  and when I climbed back into bed, and continued to lie awake, staring into the darkness, it just started to feel like so much, too much, and that's when I started to go under. But I'm okay now. I'm a mother. Mothers rally. Parents rally. We have children in the world. And so we do what we can to get back up each day and do the next indicated thing to make this place the best it can be. For them. In this moment, on my daughter's birthday, that lightworker of a girl, and my literal lifesaver of a son, I can think of no worthier cause.

Inflatable thing

I lay in the darkness this morning and felt myself sinking under the waves, felt myself going under, had to fight my way back to the surface, trying to find breath, trying to breathe without the feeling of a thousand tiny knives. It came out of nowhere, and yet was so enticingly familiar, the sinking, the awareness of darkness closing in, the long sad weariness with myself, inviting me to relax into it, like I was an inflatable thing with a slow leak and suddenly, with no warning, I was empty of light and air. 

Mom, have you gone back to therapy after surgery yet?

No, I feel like I have nothing to talk about. 

Well, don’t wait till you’re in crisis. The real work happens when you’re not just trying to stem the bleeding. 

I reached for my phone in the dark and messaged my therapist that I was ready to start back, Mondays were still good and could I schedule an appointment. I put the phone down and concentrated on trying to breathe. 

What tipped me over? It might seem like the shallowest thing. Mere vanity even. My hair. I hadn’t had it cut since before my surgery. It grew willy nilly, curls popping out, refusing to be tucked in, except the top , which got straight and thin and wispy the longer it grew, only being tamed with curling foam that laid it down. I took the scissors to the rest, snipping off wayward coils to achieve a uniform shape, till the whole thing was wildly uneven. The woman I trust to cut and color this head full of different textures isn’t back in town till late April. I decided I couldn’t wait. I went to someone else yesterday for a repair job. It was a disaster. I’m scalped at the back and sides yet the top is still too long. She didn’t understand that the back and sides lie flat against my head when its too short and the top doesn’t curl till it’s shorter. So now I look even crazier. And I had her color it too because I was tired of the gray, but she went too dark so now I look wan and jaundiced against my patchy too dark hair with scalp peeking out all over. I look as if I just underwent a fairly aggressive round of chemo, which is to say when people see me, they're going to ask with concern, "Are you okayy??" 

It’s hard enough being inside this body on a good day. It’s harder after several weeks of poor sleep because I have to lie on my back because the hip is still healing inside, and sleeping on my back is uncomfortable as hell, my whole body aches by morning (except the hip) and I know, I know, I have no good reason to feel so low, I have so many blessings in my life, I know I do, but I get so tired of myself sometimes, I have a hard enough time showing up in the world, and this new scalped chic was just about the last straw. 

Every time I think I might stop writing here because this crazy world, I realize I’m literally insane and I need to write out my insanity and this place is therapy and don’t mind me I’m just here trying to keep on.  

__________

The kids are in Paris for her birthday. Here they are inside the Louvre. She’s walking fine on her braced ankle. They look like art themselves. See? Blessings. 

Every body is healing

First, the Costa Rica update: My girl was having a wonderful time, then her husband and I received this text on the day before she was to return to New York: 

What we couldn't see was that as she was texting, she was crumpled on the beach, unable to move, her ankle throbbing and ballooning. A woman photographer came over to her and held her hand and talked to her soothingly while the surfing instructor went to find a rescue vehicle. Then some men on the beach helped carry our girl to the vehicle and helped settle her inside, after which the instructor drove into town in search of a medical clinic. The first two were closed. Finally they found a pharmacy staffed by a "lovely woman doctor," according to my daughter. The doctor spoke no English, but there was a woman there who translated the Spanish, and my daughter understood that though her ankle was very painful and she could put no weight on it, no bones were broken. 

Then the doctor brought out a syringe to inject something into the swollen joint and my girl, who is needle phobic, began to hyperventilate and cry. An older Black woman who was shopping in the pharmacy heard her distress. She came over to my daughter and hugged her and stroked her head and tried to comfort her. "She began rubbing my heart," my daughter told us later, unperturbed, because the woman's actions did help to calm her as the doctor administered multiple shots to her ankle and foot. "Honestly, Mom," my daughter said afterward, her voice bright, despite the ordeal she had just been through, "I felt as if I was surrounded by angels the entire time."  

"What did the doctor inject you with?" I inquired.

My daughter, who was back in her hotel room FaceTiming with her husband and me by then, burst out laughing. "I didn't ask," she admitted. "I wasn't even curious. I guess I was just trusting the universe."

I hyperventilated a bit myself at that point, but what could I do? My husband said later the injections were probably a steroid to keep the swelling down.

For the rest of her final day at the beach in Costa Rica she iced and elevated the ankle, ordered room service for dinner, and got around in a wheelchair the hotel provided. She said everyone, to the last person, could not have been kinder and more helpful to her. The next morning, someone at the hotel made her breakfast to go for the hour and a half trip back to the airport, where she would be met by a wheelchair. While she was in the car, I was having my PT session in New York. I called my daughter so that my wonderful physical therapist, Deidre, could give her a few tips for the plane: wriggle your toes, do ankle pumps to the degree your pain will allow, move the leg back and forth from the knee, and ice the ankle if you can. 

Her brother met her at JFK, along with her sister in law and her husband. Her brother brought her crutches and showed her how to use them. On their way to his car, our girl sent her dad and me a picture of her brother pushing her in a wheelchair, big smiles on all their faces and I thought: She's still surrounded by angels. That was the moment when I finally exhaled. 

The next day, our intrepid traveler summed up her Costa Rica experience in a text she sent me: "I had an adventure. And I remembered that I trust that the world. Doesn't stop bad things from happening but I'm surrounded by good energy to bring me through those times." 

May this forever be her truth.

She went for an X-ray to confirm nothing was broken and is now doing PT, recovering slowly. She and her husband are supposed to travel to Paris at the end of the month for her birthday, and her PT person thinks she will be able to make the trip. In the midst of it all, she had a job interview yesterday for an internal transfer at her company, and was up till 3AM the night before finishing a deck for her presentation to the four-person panel. Apparently she aced it, because they offered her the job at the end of the interview. I am in awe of her.

___________

In news of my own healing, I had my six-week follow up with my surgeon this week, and everything appears to be progressing well. My son drove me to my appointment and waited for me as I underwent X-rays and the physical assessment of my gait and how the joint itself is operating. The new titanium hardware and rotating ball are playing nicely with the bone and surrounding tissue, fusing where needed, rolling as appropriate, and I have now been released from movement precautions. This means I can bend past ninety degrees again, cross my legs, turn my feet inward, bend over a jigsaw puzzle and peer closely at the pieces to my heart's content, and lean far forward to study the flow of sentence on my laptop screen, all without worrying about dislocating the new hip joint. 

I confessed to my physical therapist yesterday that my arthritis flares are back, which I suppose is to be expected given that my post surgery medications have now been stopped, including the twice daily mega doses of aspirin, which served as a blood thinner, and the morning dose of meloxicam, an anti-inflammatory to help tame swelling in the surgical leg. Both of these also nicely throttled back random body pains. But, as I told my husband when I became aware of the old aches returning, "Everything hurts, except the hip, and that is massive." 

In the past, people always insisted to me that the remedy for arthritis pain is movement. Nah, I'd think. That's just more pain. Of course it was. I was walking on a broken limb. But now, when I ache, I find that my actual impulse is to grab my trusty cane and go for a walk. It's what my instinctive brain is telling me to do, and I obey. And it does help. The pain recedes. My body feels more limber. Holy moly, walking actually feels good. 

My son and I had some errands to run after my appointment. In the Whole Foods store, as I trundled along, he said, "Is that pace comfortable for you? Because you might want to slow down." Apparently I was moving faster than he was comfortable with. I walk just fine without the cane at home, but my PT person wants me to use it in public until at least three months post surgery, as apparently the bulk of my healing will occur between six weeks (now) and three months. As well as I feel, and despite my incision being externally sealed, internal restoration is ongoing. I am also working hard in my weekly PT sessions to reawaken and strengthen muscles that I have avoided using for fourteen years. My therapist points out that the cane is a visual cue to people that I'm not yet entirely steady so please don't run me over. I find I'm becoming fond of my cane, which is ironic given how I spurned the use of one when I severely needed it. Oh, me.

At large in the world

My youngest is traveling solo in Costa Rica until mid week, so of course my whole consciousness is there with her, willing her safely from one place to the next, praying constantly for her well being, entreating guardian angels to surround her, and visualizing her laughing and joyful in auras of beautiful light. She just up and decided she wanted a break from the regularly scheduled programming, to reconnect with herself in a tropical place, so off she went, and now I will not take a full breath till she is back home, as much as I admire her agency and sense of the world being hers to experience as she chooses. I trust she will have a wonderful time.

How did my own mother stand it, I belatedly wonder , my traveling solo all over this country and to different parts of the world in my twenties, as a reporter for Life magazine, scouting people and places for stories, before returning with a photographer, often for weeks at a time, to develop fully realized photo essays. I had no fear for myself, but now I'm remembering some of the isolated places I ventured. Some of them opened their arms to me, like Greasewood Canyon, Colorado, and the North Woods of Minnesota, where I reported on hermits; and The Falkand Islands at the foot of South America, when I traveled to find a fleet of perfectly preserved sailing ships wrecked centuries before in their passage around Cape Horn. Other places had a distinctly unfriendly air—Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I visited an archeological dig, even felt a bit unsafe; so many gun racks in pickup trucks emblazoned with confederate flags. But how did my mother endure me being in all those unvetted regions on my own? I confess I was oblivious back then to her possible concerns. Like most twenty somethings, I felt close to invulnerable.

Here's a photo of me in my twenties in the Minnesota North Woods lake area. I've posted it before. I was there with photographer Brian Lanker for a story on a local legend known as Knife Lake Dorothy, who had lived alone on one the Boundary Waters Wilderness islands for fifty years. Then in her seventies, she was the very definition of a powerful and self-directed woman. 

I saw a factoid last night—America has only not been at war for sixteen of its two hundred and fifty years of independence. 

In times such as these, my beloved girl is at large in the world. Never wonder why I pray.