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When I was very young, my brother and I were watching the Jerry Lewis telethon on Labor Day weekend. The local news station had a big fish tank set up outside a hotel and was asking people to come drop off change to help the telethon. My brother and I begged my mom to drive...
I was chatting with an artist friend the other day whose career is taking off. I complimented her by saying she’d done everything right over the years in terms of following all the steps to achieving her desired career and being patient with the process. She said something to the effect that it wasn’t hard...
Once when my daughter was in college, we were driving down the freeway to some event. She was justifiably upset about something that had happened to her. We allowed her to rant, we validated her right to be angry, we agreed that an injustice had occurred, we offered solutions, but she was locked in a...
I’ve been failing at my sabbatical. That’s the word I’ve been choosing to describe this period of stepping back from the work for which I once felt such devotion. It sounded like a more romantic word than “break” and a less confusing term than “gap year” and a less dramatic designation than “mid-life crisis.” It...
The other night at a local concert, singer-songwriter Maia Sharp talked about a conversation that took place when her long-term relationship was coming to an end. Her partner said, “You’re gonna make a nice girl miserable someday.” Maia must have gotten a certain look on her face, because her girlfriend then added, “Oh my God....
This post originally ran on Oct. 31, 2015, but it’s worth a revisit: Today is Halloween, which means you are no doubt getting ready for a party or filling your bowl with candy for the trick-or-treaters or, if you are the parent of a teenager, like me, cleaning your house before his/her friends arrive to...
Since rewatching the broadcast of Come From Away—the Broadway musical now streaming on Apple TV— I’ve had the song “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” stuck in my head. We sang it often at mass when I was growing up, and I found it to be not only a beautiful melody, but wonderfully aspirational...
I was chatting with a woman at a fundraiser about her career at our local university. She described several roles she’d played. “Wow,” I said. “You must have been there quite a while.” “Thirty-one years,” she said. By the tone in her voice, it was clear she felt that amount of time was significant, meaningful,...
My blog posts are created and stored in one long Word document. When I reopen the document to write a new post, I receive a prompt that says, “Pick up where you left off.” If I click that prompt, it scrolls down to the last post I edited. All I have to do is hit...
A friend and I made a pact to focus on joy for 30 days. The funny thing is, after 18 months of pandemic, social and political unrest, climate disasters, and more, I was having trouble connecting to what brings me joy. I decided to focus on really simple, kinda silly things. At the top of...