Y Chicks Preview...

Within an hour, we knew that many of us had been married more than once. Some of us can’t get enough of our grand-kids. A few of us are sorry that our grown up children and grandchildren live quite so close ,because we don’t want to be on instant call for childcare or worry. All but one of us is retired. We are. Poets, writers, community activists, housewives or single by way of divorce or widowhood. None of us are under-stimulated—we all claim not to have enough time. We all have friends who are very sick. We are aware of our good fortune with financial security, and only minor aches and pains. That doesn’t mean that we can’t and don’t complain about the ordinary.

Y Chicks

Just finishing up a manuscript about 6 post-70-year-old women. Normal, average, West LA Y members who I met at the pool, not a support group. None of them splashing around look like they need support. Somehow they got to this age having experienced the following:

Marie, the New England Wasp whose Scientologist daughter married a Nigerian con-artist; Adrienne, the nice Jewish girl from New York and her complicated ménage-à-trois resulting in a pregnancy; Rita, Lefty social activist and mother in anguish over her adored son’s heroin addiction leading to San Quentin and ultimately his fatal overdose; Susie, who's mother stole her 20-year-old boyfriend; 90-year-old Beth whose past is less traumatic but no less challenging; and Kathryn, devoted Catholic who survived the appalling discovery of her late-husband’s incest with two of their daughters.

Any suggestions for an interested publisher?

Oh So Wise

I did it.
It took 80 years
But I did it.
I am wise
Oh, so wise.

I learned from the East:
Here is the only Now
Take naps
Love.
Be Lucky

I learned from the West:
Optimism
Keep trying
Have health insurance
Love. Be Lucky.

I learned from the poets:
Listen, feel, touch, taste
Remember, forget.
Be in awe.
Love. Be lucky.

I learned from my friends:
Take the high road
Vote right—left.
Be there—here
Love. Be Lucky.

I learned from the Jews:
To kvetch is human
To act, divine.
Love.
Be Lucky.

I learned from my children.
Mutual respect
Letting go
Forgiveness.
Love. Be lucky.

I learned from my husband:
Fearlessness, presence, laughter,
To love what is.
How easy
If you are lucky and he does the dishes.

I learned from the world:
Choose your place, carefully.
Chose your time, specifically.
And this above all
Be Lucky.

83 vs. 40

It was encouraging to be with a forty-year-old highly successful professional today who couldn't find his mouse, and said it gets worse every day. I am trying to convince myself that this has less to do with aging and more to do with the fact that we are all simply fragmented.

How dare they give us something new to learn every day. No brain was created to endure such treatment!

One-Way Ticket

Below is an excerpt from my book, One-Way Ticket: Our Son's Addiction to Heroin. Perhaps this book will touch you, but if nothing else, some parents may be able to shed their sense of uniqueness and guilt and see themselves as citizens of the world, influenced like everyone else by their family's particular landscape, biology, geography, politics, timing, heroes, history, and luck. Possibly Josh's story will influence a few kids who, like him, crave excitement and think it's cool to be a part of the drug scene.

The book is available in its entirety at Amazon.com.



It was 1974, Josh was almost seventeen when he went AWOL from the Institute and came home. We decided not to send him back. I had never been comfortable with their long-term institutional philosophy, and in those eleven months he had not related to the psychiatric intern they had assigned to him. In fact, Josh hated him then, and over the years his anger towards him never subsided. After looking at Josh's records, I understand why.
This jerk wrote, "His family appears to be very cold and uninvolved." Then, at the end of the clinical report, he contradicted the previous statement: "They do not seem able to separate themselves from the intense emotional attachment they have with their son."

Poem of Reconciliation

For my inaugural post, here's my politics. An Ode to George W. Bush that I wrote in 2004:

In the spirit of the season
And reconciliation with
my Republican neighbors
I offer the following poem…

The election is over
The results are well known
The will of the people
Has clearly been shown.
We should show by our thoughts
Our words and our deeds
That unity is what
Our country now needs.

So lets all get together
Let bitterness pass.
I’ll hug your elephant
You kiss my ass.