It’s Still There

I heard from him the other day. Not unsolicited, of course.  No, I’ve hardly ever heard from him out of the blue like that.  Even when I was working for him, emails from Rick Springfield only appeared in my box with the inevitable re: in front of whatever subject title I had been writing about.  [...]

There is No Try

I have been wrestling what to do with this body of work here for a while, now. Scratch that.  I know what I want to do with this blog, and have for quite a while now.  I’d like to turn it into a book.  A real one, bound, with pages, maybe with an ebook version.  [...]

Haters Gonna Hate

I chuckled looking at the computer screen, nearly choking on my first cup of coffee.  Was that the best they could do? This week our town held its annual budget vote.  In our tiny New England town, the residents have to approve the spending plan each and every year at the polls.  It’s called an [...]

Compare and Contrast

Compare and contrast.  If there was a theme to Mr. Tymrak’s tenth grade Honors History class, it was that.  Compare and contrast. Every assignment could be boiled down to those two simple words.  Every lesson required us to compare and contrast people, situations, policies.  Find the similarities and the differences.  Lay them out.  Intertwine them, [...]

Bitter

I couldn’t stop. It didn’t matter that my son had called me last night and told me that he’d finally heard from his biological aunt about the funeral.  She had thanked him for his concern, told him of the nice service in the only town his great grandmother had ever known.  She had told him [...]

The Question and the Answer

It was a cool and rainy November morning in Connecticut.  I’d sent the kids off to school and should be walking on the treadmill to start getting serious about dropping the extra weight I’d been slowly gaining over the last few years.  But I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going on in Michigan today.  [...]

Instant Message of Pain

I sat in front of the television, laptop balanced on my lap two days later.  It was ten or so, the little ones in bed, my husband in Michigan.  He worked there now, about eight days a month, him having been given the job after all but it being determined that it wasn’t a big [...]

The Taste of Victory

“I can’t fucking believe it!” were the words of our illustrious First Selectman on the night of the second budget vote in April, 2008. We were standing in the small 1970s era hallway that led to the Town Clerk’s office on the night of the vote.  Those of us who had spent the last two [...]

Moving Forward

I walked into the coffee shop that Saturday morning in April and was surprised to find so many people waiting there for me. It was the weekend after our first failed budget attempt, and our First Selectman (what our tiny little town called the person who acted as its mayor) had offered to meet a [...]

Just Like Everyone Else

I sat on the bench at the local kids’ play gym, watching my two youngest.  Tonight was the Special Needs Playgroup night at the gym, and about ten families of children were in the huge enclosed space of toys and mats and dress up clothes.  R was working in New York City these days, so [...]