Kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see. ~ Unknown Many people appreciate that being kind is synonymous with showing you care about others.  On the other hand, others sneer at kindness in business and express the belief that if you’re too kind, you only set yourself up for […]

I’ve written about my depression before. But since this is Mental Health Awareness Month — and since every month should be Mental Health Awareness Month — I want to revisit the topic. In that earlier piece, I wrote my depression was characterized by stark, unrelenting terror. It resulted in a kind of hypervigilance, an exaggerated […]

As the obsessive language freak I happen to be, I’m always sensitive to new expressions creeping into the vernacular. Most frequently, those expressions are meaningless; that is, they don’t actually express anything of substance. But they’re valuable for what they signal. And they signal four things about the people who use them. Those people: Likely […]

I was sitting at my desk the other day with a characteristically blank look on my face. Anne walked by and asked, “What are you doing?” I said, “Nothing.” “You’re actually doing absolutely nothing?” she asked. “Is that even possible?” “Well, since you seem to be rather insistent about it, I’m drifting,” I said. “Drifting?” […]

When I visit schools to share my children’s books, the students always ask, “How do you know anyone will like them?” I say, “I don’t. But if I don’t write and publish them, I’ll never know.” When I write fiction for adults, the adults who read it always ask, “How do you know anyone will […]

In 1999, I was working at a small public-relations firm in Avon, Connecticut. My dentist was in the next town east, which, oddly enough, is West Hartford. (Everything is relative.) Exiting I-84 on Prospect Street, I drove north on Prospect, intending to turn left onto Farmington Avenue, the street on which my dentist’s office was […]

Author’s Note: This story is an elaboration on a comment I posted in a thread initiated by my friend, Tammy Eldredge. It’s also a faithful recounting of an actual event and a very valuable lesson. In 1974, I was playing in a band with some guys who rented a house on West Street in Rocky […]

As readers of my ravings likely know by now, my father was a U.S. Marine. To him — and, so, to us — time was an adversarial construct. There was no later. There was no gradually. There was no patience. There were just two things: (1) Now. (2) Now, God damn it! Growing up in […]

I did not grow up with cell phones, social media, or electronics as my main source of communication. It was a different world in the ’60s, ’70s, and even the ’80s. Today, there is information overload, communication via text/email, and a culture that has practically eliminated the art of conversation. If you are of the […]

As a girl of the 1950s and growing up in a small town in Jamaica, I was constantly reminded of the need to be conscious of other people’s opinions. “What will people say?” “What will people think?” “You know, people don’t appreciate that.” Who were these ‘people’ my mother was concerned about and why? It […]