flawed but authentic

A typical day for me begins by plugging in my unnamed laptop, grabbing my portable two-way radio from its charger, and listening to voicemail. It’s nothing for me to have 5 or 6 to listen to and take notes on before I begin making calls. It’s the busyness of the job and I’m stopped several [...]

In a 12-step program I practice, we tell newcomers if they stick around a while, they’ll eventually hear their own story. Some seriously doubt it. They are the ones who think they can’t be helped as others have, because, you see, they aren’t like others. We call that being terminally unique, and I suffered from it when I was a newcomer. The main symptoms are martyrdom, [...]

Mrs. G. was teaching a class a while back, and she and the kids (4th and 5th graders) were discussing The Captain’s Dog by Roland Smith. This is a wonderful book about the Lewis and Clark expedition told from the perspective of Captain Lewis’ dog Seamen. The conversation had just turned to the wretchedness of eating [...]

My sister Laura and I were wandering around the streets of Chicago in summer - hot, sweaty and red-faced. We sought refuge in the cafe in the basement of the State building downtown, the one that looks like a giant silver beehive.
An obviously mentally ill woman came up and began talking to Laura. She was [...]

Everyone needs a haven - a place of refuge in times of trouble, emotional or physical difficulty. I learned early on what my source of refuge was…whose wing to find shelter beneath.
As a child I had a very active imagination. My parents learned early on to protect me from things that negatively stimulated [...]

Two teachers from my high school days made quite a difference for me. One of them was my English teacher. She introduced me to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and changed the way I felt about literature forever. For a while, I went around calling everyone Goody before their name because I thought that “Goody Proctor” [...]