My Thoughts

 Oh my, I can so vividly remember the excitement, the joy even, of opening the AOL app and hearing "you've got mail"- the eventual reward for waiting for the dial up to reach across time and space to connect to a world that had been so remote only a year previous. I, like so many others, found new friends (connections) in those early chat rooms - reading the conversations of strangers and finding familiar threads of commonality.  For a couple of years, I even had a couple of steady email friends who brought my loneliness into companionship and helped me also discover my sequestered voice again. Even 22 years later, the Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan movie enchants me.  I try to watch it at least once a year and to use it as a guidepost into my own growth.  This year, as I watched it, I was caught off guard to a new fact that I have seemingly ignored for a long time - Joe and Kathleen were "cheating" on their relationships.  The dark and often crippling reality of "in...

Amy, Today is the epitome of Spring, one of those amazing days you would say actually "sang" to you.  White, puffy clouds linger so lazily in a crystal blue sky, and birds echo a chorus that drowns out humanity's presence  All afternoon I have wanted to spread a blanket on the cool, green grass and lie prostrate, immobile, completely still and get lost in all the possibilities of the world.  Although green is so often associated with envy, the green I see today lulls complacency and harmony.  It is the green of renewal, of possibility. I think of the stories you often told - the ones about running barefoot in the grass, about splashing recklessly in a cool stream and about long, lazy afternoons making shapes out of the clouds.  I always imagine you lost in a world of your own creation.  You may not know it, but the many quirky things you once did to escape a torture and to sooth a bruised soul are the very things that sustain me now. ...

The first time I felt cheated was when I was only five years old. My cousin had temporarily came to stay with us after she had been severely abused by her mother. She enrolled in school with me; she was my age;  therefore she was in my class because we were in a small school. I do not remember feeling cheated, angry or upset because she was at our house; but something about her being at school with me made me feel extremely cheated out of my opportunity at school.  I was not a very gracious host during that time frame, and I let my jealousy get the best of me. It is a regret that I have lived with for a really long time - the way I treated my cousin. At five years old, I really couldn't understand what she needed. I felt cheated out of the attention that I got from my teachers and my classmates. I felt cheated because school was my opportunity to shine, to be the smartest, the best in kindergarten. I could already read, knew how to color within the lines very well,...