Did I Remember?
Did I remember to bring … the luggage? the tickets? the kids? Was I supposed to?
A Book Review
The Fortune Teller by Gwendolyn Womack My rating: 5 of 5 stars I loved "The Fortune Teller." I won't tell you how it ends, but I was hooked from the first page. I liked the main character, Semele, because she was almost as much in the dark as we were, which made her discovery all the more satisfying. I was intrigued by the Tarot cards, impressed by the research, and enthralled by the mystical feel on each page. There was a tinge of foreboding, as we don't find out the identity of the enigmatic "VS" person until almost the end,...
Micro-Memoir
I went to a micro-memoir workshop this last weekend at the Southern California Writers Conference. What is a micro or flash-memoir? Short lives? No, Judy Reeves, author and memoirist actually says that mini-memoirs can be anything from sentences to short paragraphs, and combined into works of various sizes from small books to larger works, usually with a theme. So, I didn't even know it was a genre. It is! There are tons of people who write and publish micro memoirs. Beth Ann Fennelly, for instance, published Heating & Cooling--52 Micro-Memoirs (Norton & Co. 2017). There are dozens of others. Who...
My Dog
How do you equate dogs and people? I don't know. In fact, I don't think you do. Or you're not supposed to, anyway. Pepper was a great person! I do know that I really, really miss my dog. And while I love my kids, who are out of the house, I have a hole the size of Houston in my heart over my dog, whom we sent to the cool dog place in the sky. Tell me they give them treats there all day long, will you? 😃 And walks.🚶♀️And play time. 🎾 🎾 And hugs. 🤗 🤗 🤗 It's...
Age
How old am I today? "Age doesn't matter."Les Snead, General Manager of the Rams talking about then 30-year-old Ram's Head Coach Sean McVay Let me start by saying I am not a football junkie. In fact, I largely limit my viewing to the Super Bowl. But as we find out, the Head Coach for one of this year's Super Bowl teams, the Rams, was 30 years old when he was hired. He is now a whopping 33. So let me say this about that. Age is a number. A state of mind. I could be seven. I could be ninety-nine....
Moderation
"Nobody does moderation well."--Greg McKeown (@GregoryMcKeown) author of "Essentialism, the Disciplined Pursuit of Less" CHERRY PIE by Werner22brigitte at Pixabay When moderation doesn't work. Author, speaker Greg McKeown revealed during a Tim Ferriss Show that he gave up sugar for a year. It was reportedly easier than cutting back, a.k.a. moderation. The folks at Alcoholics Anonymous know moderation doesn't work. An alcoholic cannot 'pick up.' Not even once, or they're back to day one. A newcomer. AA has been around since 1935 and it has worked for a lot of people. 2. Moderation takes discipline. Seems crazy in a way, but sometimes it's...
Alligators
Scary? Fuggedaboudit! The next time you have a massive task facing you, you are likely to see it as a swamp filled with alligators. These menacing creatures are the ridiculously sneaky (yes, ridiculously so) critters that keep you from crossing the swamp, a.k.a. finishing your task. In fact, these large-mouth bozos will do worse: they scare you from even starting. You're not alone. We all have swamps. We certainly have fears. But what if the alligator is mechanical? Or he just ate? Or he's lazy? Or maybe, you take an alligator gun and shoot it? Yeah. Not PC, but hey....
Possibility
I stand at the edge of possibility. It takes my breath away. Every single moment of every single day, we can choose to be the person we were meant to be. I think it's simple. Mostly, we have to get out of our own way. I'm reading The Art of Possibility for the third time. I am convinced that we must commit to being open to the universe, as the authors Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander state. We have to be prepared to receive; able to live in the present; willing to slide through our mistakes on our way to a...