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7 Things To Do Instead of Watching the RNC

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , on July 18, 2016| 2 Comments »

  1. Get caught up on Netflix – I’m way behind on “Orange is the New Black” and that wacky adorable “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” saga.
  2. Watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” – Great Grandma Ada and I are going to do this. We need to know why Kanje is fighting with Taylor Swift.
  3. Go out for a walk – Just don’t chase fictional Pokemon characters puhleeze.
  4. Read – Anita suggested this; she just finished, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, be aware it will probably make you angry. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/eviction-matthew-desmond-housing/471375/
  5. Take in a Movie – How about the new Ghostbusters? Can’t wait to see it!
  6. Sign up for a new Blog – I mentioned this gal before, she’s definitely a fun read. Imagine an armadillo applying for comfort animal status: https://imissyouwheniblink.com/2016/07/11/armadillo-applies-for-job-comfort-animal/
  7. Of course, you could always listen to music! Or talk with your significant other. Or do yoga together, or anything else really. Tango? Hot tub?  IMG_4852

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“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 22, 2016| 1 Comment »

While looking at colleges for the Rocker, we stopped by my alma mater. After the proverbial backward-walking tour, I dragged him into the library. I remember being told that each graduate’s senior thesis would be stored there permanently, until the end of time, and my young self thought, “Hey, this writing thing is cool!”

Sitting with him, we poured through the old-school paper, and I could see he wasn’t all that impressed. After all, there were numbers and graphs and charts, and psycho-babble about what those statistics meant. I had spent the better part of a year testing a group of deaf children to find out how the development of language influenced cognition. His eyes remained focused on the middle-distance. Then I said,

“You know I did all of this by hand, right? We didn’t have computers.”

The Rocker grew up with personal computers. Not just at school, but at home Bob was a very early adapter. Granted they were bigger, and cumbersome, but we were like that family that got the first color TV on the street. Or maybe the first black and white. So it was no surprise to see how well the Rocker could integrate his God-given musical talent with technology. That pioneering spirit came straight from his genes, from a Dad who never stayed within any line he ever saw.

In fact, when people ask whatever would Bob do if he retires, I think to myself, he will always be hungry – he will never be afraid to be foolish.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish” was imprinted on the back cover of the last old school paper edition of the bible of innovators, The Whole Earth Catalog. This book turns 45 years old today – a mere blip in time – but it was like Google before personal computers, and its creative genius was Stewart Brand. The single most influential guy in Steve Jobs’ universe.

…it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog – organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers – are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.   http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog?CMP=share_btn_tw

Maybe Bob will start the first commune/co-housing community for old Boomers and revolutionize the continuingcare/assistedliving/nursinghome industry? I can see it now, the Rolling Stones and Parlor Mob playing in the dining barn.

As for me, there will always be meals to prepare. We celebrated a friend’s graduation yesterday from UVA. An amazing wife and mom of three, Michelle is an exceptional NICU nurse who completed her doctoral thesis and will Walk the Lawn today. Congratulations Michelle, my former roller derby cohort, you are inspirational on so many levels for young women today.

And of course, since we are always hungry, I made lobster pot pies!  IMG_4435

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MJ Fever

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on February 27, 2016| 2 Comments »

Last weekend, we had our good friends Al and Mary Jo aka MJ over for dinner. They are a big part of our history; we vacation with them frequently as part of the “Big Chill Thanksgiving.” Al graduated from high school with us, and he lived with Bob during part of college at Duke and med school. Our adult kids are more like cousins. When Al’s Mother Angie died over the Bride’s wedding weekend, he didn’t tell us. Great Grandma Ada and Angie were pretty close, and he didn’t want to cast a shadow over the festivities.

That’s a special kind of friend. One who figures out how to raise an unheated pool’s temperature just enough by recycling the water through black hoses in the sun. Yep, this engineer made a solar water heater for me on one trip! And MJ is a retired psych nurse, so her sense of humor is totally aligned with mine. While they were here, I gave MJ a gift of one of my eternity necklaces. IMG_3855I’ve been stringing pearls and seed beads like crazy lately. It’s a way to create and relax, to focus on one thing for awhile. Since I broke my finger, knitting has taken a back seat to stringing.

So when I saw an “MJ FEVER” license plate in a parking lot, I had to chuckle. I’d just started reading the non-fiction book, “Age of Ambition – Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the new China” by Evan Osnos. His very first sentence is about the term the Chinese use for a new fashion, a trend, and even an American police show on TV:

Whenever a new idea sweeps across China – a new fashion, a philosophy, a way of life – the Chinese describe it as a “fever.” In the first years after the country opened to the world, people contracted “Western Business Suit Fever”…and “Private Telephone Fever”…

Such an apt term. A fever is fleeting, like snap bracelets and dance aerobics. It’s like the tide, but it can also be an obsession. We here in corporate America take our fevers very seriously. For instance, the latest arbiter of color for fashion has come out with its Spring colors. And in this pusillanimous political climate it’s no wonder the fashion industry wants to inject a bit of peace and calm into fashion week!

Pantone has deemed Rose Quartz to be the color of the moment.

“Rose Quartz 13-1520 Percentage of designers who used this color: 22.55 This really is a beautiful pink that will radiate well on the skin for women as well as men,” Eiseman said. “Women can always be helped along by cosmetics, but guys have to rely on the colors they’re wearing to sometimes make them look a little healthier.”   http://wwd.com/fashion-news/designer-luxury/pantones-top-10-colors-for-spring-2016-hint-at-calm-10214532/

I wonder if the Republicans changed their tie colors to rose quartz instead of red, I wonder if they’d stop sounding like schoolyard ruffians? I don’t know about you, but I have Spring Fever. Our crocus leaves are up, no flowers yet but buds are bulging on trees. Bob has been pruning to beat the band, he has a “Pruning Fever.” My necklaces are very Downton, one might say I have an “Eternity Necklace Fever.” And they are MJ approved and getting pinker every day.   IMG_3897

 

 

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“Waiting to Live”

Posted in books, Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on January 14, 2016| 2 Comments »

I’ve never heard of a book getting so much pre-publication press. The Bride sent us the NYTimes Book Review and pre-ordered it from her fabulous Nashville bookstore. Bob pre-ordered it on his Kindle. Then right after Parnassus uploaded Ann Patchett’s new year book recommendations on their blog, Musing, she sent out another special edition to sing the praises of a previously unknown author http://parnassusmusing.net

“When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi – Ann said

I’m making it my personal mission to urge everyone to buy it and read it, in part because the author isn’t around to do his own promotion, and in part because he’s left behind a wife and a young child who should get the royalties. I want everyone to read this book because it’s a brilliant piece of writing and a singular and profound piece of thinking, but it’s also more than that: When Breath Becomes Air makes us stop and think about how gorgeous life is, how heart-wrenching and brief and amazing. Paul Kalanithi’s life was short but utterly essential, as our lives are, in very different ways, short and essential.

From what I hear, every store in the country has sold out of this book!

Dr Kalanithi was a neurosurgical resident at Yale when he began to feel the symptoms of his disease. Metastatic cancer had flooded his body, his lungs were peppered with tumors. Time stood still. Should he and his wife have a baby? Would he ever be able to practice in a field he’d spent nearly half of his life studying and preparing for; could he learn how to die in such a short time. He had been a student for so long, obtaining two BAs and an MA in Literature at Stanford. Then still searching, he received another MA in Philosophy at Cambridge. Finally medical school, with a residency in Neurological Surgery, followed by a post-doc Fellowship in Neuroscience.

We know what this life is like, the Groom is in his last year of a Fellowship in Pulmonology and Critical Care Medicine. They have been waiting to buy a house, waiting for that academic posting, waiting.

Dr Kalanithi was almost finished with his training, when he would have to reverse course, and become the patient. But from everything I’ve read, his writing is sublime. He takes us on the adventure of his life, from being home-schooled in Arizona, to his first introduction to a cadaver in medical school. Witnessing both birth, and death in the same day. Not every doctor can craft a perfect expository essay, but it seems his steep background in literature uniquely prepared him to write his own biography. He started typing during chemo.

Knowing how this will end, normally I’d pass on this book. I’d say no to the pain of reading what happens around us every day. Aunt Sue died of lung cancer last year, Bob became a patient last Fall suffering complications from spine surgery. The Groom’s mentor at Vanderbilt succumbed to pancreatic cancer right before Christmas – a physician who was so loved at Vandy, his nurses stayed at his bedside round the clock for weeks before he died. My brother Mike and Brian. And then there is my own Father, dying at 47 from brain cancer, when I was seven months old.

But I’ll be next to pick up Bob’s Kindle. Maybe I’ll learn how to live each day as if it is my last. I’ve always wondered what that phrase would mean to me. Would I start trying to squeeze 20 or 30 more years into the time I had left, check off my bucket list, or would I relax and simply enjoy each moment? Accepting the fact that we will all die, and choosing to live life with grace in spite of that, is our highest calling.

I only have a picture of my Father on my desk, Dr Kalanithi’s daughter will have so much more.

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Expeditionary Diplomacy

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 23, 2015| 1 Comment »

He sent his wife and child to the country so they could eat fresh strawberries. He hoisted the Union Jack above his residence, which he calculated was about three miles from a Federal garrison. In April of 1861, he actually boarded a dinghy in Charleston Harbor to get closer to the shelling of Fort Sumter.

Robert Bunch was the British Consul in Charleston, SC during the years of secessionist talk leading up to the Civil War, and I’m smack dab in the middle of reading the non-fiction novel by  Christopher Dickey, “Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South.” I thought it would help me understand the city while we were visiting it, but I was wrong. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-undercover-abolitionist-1437160470

Britain’s attitudes toward slavery were complex. In 1807, Britain and the United States had outlawed the trade, but unlike the Americans, the British were serious about it: The Royal Navy was charged with capturing slave ships off the African coast. In 1833, the U.K. freed all of the slaves within its empire. And yet, Mr. Dickey writes, “England hated slavery but loved the cotton the slaves raised [in the American South] and British industry depended on it.”

The African Slave Trade had been illegal for over 50 years. Now the North was enforcing the law, captured slave ships were being towed into the harbor for all to see; Dickey’s description of one is enough to make you sick. But Mr. Bunch was tasked with repealing the “Negroe Seamen’s Act,” which meant that any ship docked in the harbor, under any flag, must hand over every Black on board, free or not, to the jail until said ship left the port. The conditions of the prison meant that many men either died from disease or torture, while the lucky ones escaped to be captured and enslaved.

Still last night, during Hillary Clinton’s impressive marathon grilling on the Hill, I was struck by how many times she referred to Benghazi as a “19th Century posting.” So I wondered how present day Libya might compare to the pre-Civil War South. And it seems that communication is fraught with peril now, as it was then. That sense of distrust; Bunch (who was accepted by the aristocrats in the city, while he abhorred their sentimental reasoning for slavery) sent private couriers to Washington with his dispatches in code. He was a diplomat, a spy, and his own security force rolled up into one man.

All that badgering of Mrs Clinton, about how her email messages were received, if she was alone on the night in question, why Blumenthal had access, had she signed a waiver, if her diplomat had her private phone number…? It was maddening, and it was sad. Because it showed us, the American people, the antipathy, the malicious partisanship our leaders have wallowed in for so long.

I was reminded of Bunch’s “Smile of Indifference.” Hillary is our woman in Washington – a 21st Century presidential candidate, in a sea of Republican nonsense. “The frightful evil of the system is that it debases the whole tone of society — for the people talk calmly of horrors which would not be mentioned in civilized society.”  

The sign outside an H&M store in the Kress building

The sign outside an H&M store in the Kress building, Charleston

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Mesa Morning

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , on May 18, 2015| 1 Comment »

In the old days, Bob and I would travel together to medical conferences with some frequency. I toured historic sites while he schmoozed with colleagues (or rather attended lectures). It was a welcome break from the usual; seeing SanFrancisco, or Atlanta and Baltimore instead of shoveling snow in the Berkshires. But in the past few years I’ve stayed home, and I’m not sure why. Travel trauma? Apathy? Well today we awoke to an alien landscape, Arizona!

Bob is off to learn a few new tricks in his trade of Emergency Medicine. There will be a state of the art SIM lab and more dead bodies, yay. I’ve tagged along because when he’s done, later in the week, we’ll be visiting the Rocker and Ms Cait in California. LA is a mere one hour plane hop from here, but meanwhile what to do?

There are museums, a desert botanical garden and shopping. Since when did travel mean/equate shopping malls? There are premium outlet shopping malls, big southwest fashion malls, and a historic upscale designer district. I’ve got a strange feeling that the same stores you’d find in a shopping mall in NJ will be represented here. And walking around a garden in 90 degree heat isn’t my cup of tea so that leaves the museums. 

And since I’m currently reading “Alena” by Rachel Pastan, I’ve got the nomenclature for art down pat! It’s the story of a young woman who becomes a curator at a small museum on Cape Cod. It’s a little mystery, a little romance, and a lot of contemporary art talk. I am prepared to be moved by art, to get goosebumps, to expand my understanding of the process and see what an arid, brown landscape can reveal. 

Last night I watched the Call the Midwife finale on PBS which was luckily on early since we’ve switched time zones. I can’t rave enough about this period drama and one of the most profound subplots was the one about the doctor and his wife – who used to be a nun/midwife. I don’t want to spoil this for anyone, but it did give me chills. Especially because in the Berkshires I knew a woman who was affected by this “medical miracle.”

Art in any form reminds us of our humanity. The art of medicine, of painting, music or film. Sometimes even writing can take us away from our ultra mundane 21st Century lives. Now I’m off to explore and conquer the cactus!  

 

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Yesterday

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on May 6, 2015| 4 Comments »

Two of my favorite things collided at the Jefferson Library, literature and politics. Andrew Burstein introduced his book, “Democracy’s Muse,” to his audience and its most interesting paradox; how can the Right and the Left lay claim to our city’s most cherished President? The answer is, it’s complicated.                                    http://www.monticello.org/site/visit/events/book-talk-democracys-muse-andrew-burstein

But it all started out with a feeling, a “breathless feeling,” after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt read a book by Claude Bowers. The now famous book, published in 1925 and titled “Jefferson and Hamilton, the Struggle for Democracy,” clarified for FDR his vision, his strategy for fighting the Great Depression. He began to quote TJ, and our early fight to become not just a republic separate from the British, but a Democratic Republic. Partisan politics began with our first breath, and the primal question of the role of government took center stage when the Democrats first lost the South in a “privilege or pillage” speech that asked, “Who spoke for the people and who spoke for the rich?” Sound familiar?

That Keynote Speaker at the 1928 Democratic Convention was not a politician. Claude Bower, author, newspaper editorial writer, historian delivered these words:

 You cannot believe with Lincoln that the principles of Jefferson are “the definitions and the axioms of a free society,” and with Hamilton that they are the definitions of anarchy.

You cannot believe with Lincoln in a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” and with Hamilton in a government of the wealthy, by the influential and for the powerful.

After all, the Republicans had Lincoln, and so the Democrats anointed Jefferson. FDR’s Chief of Staff, Edwin Watson, in fact lived at Kenwood, next door to Monticello. The very building we were standing in yesterday, was where FDR waited to hear about the invasion of Normandy. Yes, I get goosebumps just thinking about that.

But eventually Ronald Reagan coopted Jefferson as the GOP’s own, claiming TJ was a champion for small government. And of course if you say it enough, half the country will believe it. And before you know it, Newt Gingrich was quoting the Charlottesville bard to illustrate his own “Contract With America.”

Returning home last night, Bob reminded me to check out the Google doodle. It was about another influential writer and newspaper reporter. I always called my foster mother, Nell Mahon “Nellie Bly,” it was her nickname and yesterday I found out who the original Nellie really was – a pioneering investigative reporter! At the ripe old age of 20, Nellie actually got herself admitted into a notorious insane asylum for 10 days in order to expose the inhumane treatment of patients. And to cap that off, she reported on her journey around the world in 72 days! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/05/nellie-bly-google-doodle_n_7210966.html

I was totally exhausted after one day tracing Nellie’s journey and the ideas that shaped our country, and our political partisanship. Today I think I’ll return to gardening, something TJ would certainly approve.

The Jefferson Library

The Jefferson Library

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Journey Women

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on March 21, 2015| 2 Comments »

Almost by accident, I bumped into an author event at the Virginia Festival of the Book yesterday.

“Searching for Home and Life: Fictional Journeys” caught my attention while I was roaming through Barnes and Noble, looking for something to read at the gym. Instead, I stayed to listen to three authors read from their novels.

LaShonda Barnett’s “Jam On the Vine” is a coming-of-age story that takes place in the Jim Crow South. Barnett wanted to depict a “normal” Black family, not some dreary, dysfunctional stereotype. She told us that before Plessy vs Ferguson there were 20 Black universities, all in the South, and she brings to life a family that revered the written word. Her young heroine becomes a journalist, moving from Texas to Missouri in the process. I loved the way Barnett spoke about her characters, how they came to life, almost of their own accord. When I mentioned her voice was so beautiful she should record the audio book herself, she told me Phylicia Rashad had just finished doing it!                              http://www.npr.org/2015/02/08/384695774/black-and-female-in-jim-crow-era-a-reporter-in-kansas-citys-vine

Hiary Holladay’s “Tipton” is about a young woman searching for her departed husband. She starts her journey at the Tipton Home, an orphanage in Oklahoma, traveling by car to Virginia with her best friend. Holladay told us she was commuting to James Madison University, a treacherous trip in the winter over Afton mountain, while she dreamed and wrote about her characters’ road trip. Her voice gave us a hint of her melodious language skills, later I found out she was also a poet, which didn’t surprise me. The action takes place in the 30s, the same time period of the Flapper’s story. I asked Holladay is she was able to speak with anyone, or knew of someone, from that orphanage. She said she hadn’t, which made me think of my half-sister Shirley and brother Brian. How poor single, widowed women had to use an orphanage like a pawn shop for their children for centuries. This is an intriguing novel I can’t wait to start.                                           http://hilaryholladay.com/2014/12/19/how-i-wrote-tipton-2/

Katia Ulysse presented us with her novel, “Drifting”, a collection of stories she likened to leaves, drifting to the ground in a haphazard way, that is also well choreographed. Ulysse is an ESL teacher who is also an immigrant herself from Haiti, At times her native language, Creole, would take over her writing; as she told us, some words defy an easy translation. Her heroine is packing, eager to reunite with her husband in the United States, and we immediately feel her urgency, and her pain. “…in their drifting, they find not only their progenitor, but themselves by way of artificially produced calamities and natural disasters. Thus, no matter how far one drifts, one will always find himself or herself back home to an ethereal world created within the solace of one’s mind and heart despite misfortune, pain, and suffering.”                                               http://www.blackstarnews.com/entertainment/books/books-katia-d-ulysses-drifting.html

What is home to you? What kind of courage does it take to risk it all and set off on a journey? And are we ever too old for a second or third act? Barnett told me her heroine was an accidental journey woman, that “…that’s the best kind.”

I thought of my “accidental” stop at this event. and I thought of my Mother, the fearless Flapper, moving deliberately from PA to NJ to be closer to me, her last child. In doing that, she ensured my vista would expand beyond the lilac tree outside my bedroom window. Home isn’t a place, it’s the smell of lilacs and the touch of Bob’s hand.

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Dystopian Teenage Angst

Posted in books, Country, Journaling, wedding, tagged , , , , , , on March 12, 2015| 1 Comment »

It just so happens that I read a couple of books on vacation that I would categorize as that heightened, coming-of-age, hormonal soup called YA – or Young Adult Fiction. Pity they didn’t have this category when I was that age, unless maybe “Little Women” qualifies? One book I picked up in the overstocked bookshelves of our villa was, “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. He wrote “Remains of the Day” and the jacket said he was a Booker finalist, so I thought, “Why not?”

The other was “The Giver” by Lois Lowry. This one I found in a French bookstore, and I really should have known it was YA, by the author and the large print, but it was just something for the plane and I figured, “Pourqoui pas?” Also, it was in English.

Ishiguro went big on description, but he hooked me right away. Granted there were no vampires, no Katniss archery-action scenes, in fact, the plot just sauntered along, from the perspective of Kathy, a “Carer,” about to retire from her job. Slowly we learn she’s maybe 30 years old and she’s been doing this Caring business for as long as anybody can remember, 12 years! Her memory is the meat of the story; her two best friends and their time spent at an exclusive boarding school in England.

Spoiler alert, they are all clones! If you love English drama, subterfuge, and mystery, you will love this book.

Ishiguro does not write like a realist. He writes like someone impersonating a realist, and this is one reason for the peculiar fascination of his books. He is actually a fabulist and an ironist, and the writers he most resembles, under the genteel mask, are Kafka and Beckett. This is why the prose is always slightly overspecific. It’s realism from an instruction manual: literal, thorough, determined to leave nothing out. But it has a vaguely irreal effect. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/28/something-about-kathy

Bit by bit we finally learn why his characters seem so rigid, so overburdened with angst. Can they be truly human, whatever that means. The author wonders if they have souls. I came away thinking, holy crap, I wonder if this could really happen? Because that’s what great dystopian, sci-fi fiction will do, take us just a few steps into the future. You know if they can clone a sheep, and your pet dog, we humans aren’t far behind.

Lois Lowry’s 1993 book has been made into a movie, so some of you may be more aware of “The Giver.” In this novella the 12 year old protagonist is about to be assigned his life’s work. I thought about French children taking their BAC exams at age 16 or 17, and then being herded into the appropriate training college. Lowry pulls you in by the idyllic family life which seems fine, until you learn what his father actually does as a “Nurturer” and what Jonas’ job will be, the receptacle of the world’s memories. This community, that functions without color, or emotion, needs a scapegoat to remember the past. Rebellious pre-teens of today may find the action short but the overall mood of this little gem is compelling.

It’s always good to learn when everyone is the same, we are all lost. And this morning comes the news that a British author in the fantasy genre has died. ” I can’t imagine a 13-year-old alive who wouldn’t be changed a bit, for the better, by reading Terry Pratchett,” said Caitlin Moran on her Twitter feed. Sir Terry, who looked like a character from Hogwarts, succumbed to Alzheimer’s at the young age of 66. Best known for his Discworld series, he used satire to point out paradox in the adult world and published 70 novels.

“His death was announced on his Twitter account, on Thursday afternoon. The first tweet was composed in capital letters – which was how the author portrayed the character of Death in his novels.” http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31858156

“AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER,” it stated.

La Librairie a Gustavia

La Librairie a Gustavia

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“You’ll Come Through”

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on February 24, 2015| 2 Comments »

Anne Lamott is one of my favorite writers. A friend from my Rumson book club gave me my first fix of Anne. Bob and I were preparing to move to the Blue Ridge, my youngest was heading off to college, my home on the tributary of the Shrewsbury River was filled with packed boxes. I was recovering from a severe bout of West Nile, putting steroid drops in my eyes every two hours. Hard change doesn’t come easily to me, and this move was proving to be extremely hard. Polli gave me the book “Traveling Mercies,” and inscribed:

I will miss you. I have loved having you here on Buena Vista as a neighbor and dear friend. Now the neighbor part changes, but never the dear friend! Enjoy Anne Lamott’s irreverent spirituality…

Anne is a recovering addict and alcoholic, she writes about it shamelessly. In fact, that’s one of the things I love about her, the shameless part. She’s also into Christianity, and I thought nah, I’m not going to enjoy this journey so much. Look how I fought to leave all those shaming, stern nuns behind; look how I married a Jewish man and raised my children Jewish. But finding grace is nothing to sneeze about, and Anne found it living on a houseboat and carrying on with a married man.

She woke up one morning and poured the wine and box of pills over the side of the boat, got into recovery and was baptized. Then she immediately got pregnant and her best friend discovered she had stage four breast cancer – she had to raise a child and help her friend prepare to die simultaneously. And i thought I had problems.

Here is Kelly Corrigan’s epic interview with Anne Lamott. https://medium.com/foreword/w-a-t-c-h-be1a0b70368e just for you.
I’m currently reading “Small Victories, Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace.” Because I need her now more than ever. She tells us not to try and fix things that are unfixable, she tells us to swim. That we don’t have time to worry about showing our upper arms or our thighs. When Kelly asks her if she could say four words to anyone, she says, “You will come through.”

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