Why Lin-Manuel Miranda is my latest crush

The Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning Lin-Manuel Miranda makes me smile whenever I see anything he says or Tweets. That he is wicked talented goes without saying. What I absolutely adore in him is his epic joie de vivre and love for all of humanity. If you doubt what I'm saying, check out the wedding surprise he concocted for his wife. It's apparent that his talent for performance was a gift handed down from father to son.

His treatise on the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out at the University of Pennsylvania was one of the best of all commencement speeches in 2016. 

But it was this that I read in the New York Times By the Book feature back in May that really cemented him in my esteem. 

"I am most in awe of novelists, who move lights, scenery, and act out all of the parts in your mind for you. My kind of writing requires collaboration with others to truly ignite. But I think of Dickens, or Cervantes, or Marquez, or Morrison, and I can describe to you the worlds they paint and inhabit. To engender empathy and create a world using only words is the closest thing we have to magic."

Time is a precious gift, no matter how you get it

The idea of a sabbatical has always been appealing to me--a paid leave to rest, travel, research, study. Education and religious orders understand the value, but the rest of our society is not so enlightened. Now in week 5 of my medical leave, I am grateful for the mental and technological break from a job that can easily consume.
In the weeks leading up to my leave, which granted is a result of having cancer and needing surgery not because I chose to use up all my PTO for my mental health, I prepped everyone for my need to be undisturbed by the daily stuff of work. And they have been incredibly awesome and respectful of that need. For that I am truly thankful. I'll be all the better for it when I return.

Here's what I've discovered in the intervening weeks.

1. WE have to set expectations and boundaries around our availability even in a 24/7 world.
2. Time to think is one of the most precious of gifts.
3. Nothing clears the head like a brisk walk.
4. People want to help. Let them.
5. It is possible to find time to read for pleasure.
6. The sun is a balm for many maladies.
7. Coffee in a pretty mug does tastes better than in a paper cup.
8. The smell of fresh basil in the garden makes my mouth water.
9. Flip flops > heels.
10. I wake up at 7:30 a.m. without an alarm.

So the trick for me is to remember these things when I no longer have the luxury of time. To remember what recharges my creative battery. Because perhaps the greatest realization is that I need to stay connected to my creative self. It's such an enormous part of my being, that I'm not fully myself if I don't create.

I would never go so far as to call cancer a gift, but what it has given me is perspective. So I've been playing around with ideas for essays, blog posts and, who knows, maybe even a book.

I just need to make sure--as the author Liz Gilbert says--that fear is not in the driver's seat of my creative bus.

Life–at warp speed

It's the last day of school, a cause for celebration of the impending freedom that comes with summer. Yet I'm feeling the pull of life zipping me along at lightning speed. Isn't there any way to slow down this ship?

As of today, I am officially the mom of a senior in high school. What an exciting time for him! And yet he's also adjusting to the new world order. Last weekend he began work at his first job as a dishwasher at the Winking Lizard in Avon. We paid a visit to the bank to open up his first checking account now that he gets direct deposit (now that's a change from when I was a kid).

He listened carefully as the bank manager explained online banking, receiving his updates via text, his options with respect to new banking regulations (we opted to have his debit card declined when over the balance rather than suffer the cost of overdraft fees) and the responsibilities that come with a first checking account.

As we walked out of the bank, I told him he was a big boy now. He was suddenly very quiet. I asked what was wrong and he replied, "Life is suddenly moving very fast."

Wow! Yes. It. Is.

Ryan turns 18 in November, time to register to vote and for the draft. He's making decisions about his future--what career to pursue, what college to attend, whether or not to pursue playing football in college.

He's our first, so for better or worse, he's our guinea pig. Hopefully, we haven't done too badly by him. I know that I couldn't be more proud to be his mom. But in the quiet moments of the day I ponder pushing the pause button on life. Actually, it doesn't even have to stop, but I wish it could slow down. I just want to marinate for a while.


Another sign of the speed of life

Today, my parents are off on a month-long trip out West. They are both officially retired. My dad retired a year ago, but my mom just retired from MetroHealth on Wednesday. After years of angst about the security of their golden years, she has embraced the freedom. She called me Wednesday night, as giddy as a young girl at the prospects ahead. I couldn't be happier for them.

Safe journey, Mom and Dad.

My new mantra

"We cannot do great things on this earth. We can only do small things with great love." -- Mother Theresa

Delicious distractions

What a gorgeous day! I have so many chores to accomplish that I'm afraid it's pleasures are going to slip by. While my hubby tackles the yard, cleans the deck and gets the patio furniture out, I'm working on the inside of the house. Sometimes you find pleasures in the mundane tasks of a Saturday.

Several months after I starting working outside of the house, my middle son convinced me to give up the room that had been my home office for 12 years so he could have a room of his own. The work stuff has long been sorted and organized and is stored in the basement, but my books...my wonderful books that served as a source of daily inspiration, have been piled in stacks in the corner of my bedroom ever since.

They are awaiting a new home, a new bookshelf or some other place of honor. So with the mellow sounds of James Taylor serenading me on my iPod, I decide to tackle spring cleaning my bedroom. Only I made the first mistake of cracking open a volume I haven't looked at in a while.

And for the past hour I've been deliciously distracted.

This first book I opened was given to me during a time of transition in my career by a dear friend who had inscribed it with such a moving sentiment that it caused a lump in my throat to re-read today. I haven't seen those words in years, but they were about my increasingly confident writing voice--nourishing words at a time when I needed them most. And still so satisfying to my writing soul.

And then there are my books on writing with post-it flags, marking favorite passages. I found this one in Stephen King's book, "On Writing."

"This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else.
Wash the car, maybe."

Though I've not reviewed books in some time, I'm still on publisher mailing lists and so some of the more interesting titles to arrive, I've added to the stack to check out at some point. Among the titles are "The Wisdom of Your Dreams," "Faith Interrupted" and "Thanks, But This Isn't For Us: A (Sort of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing is Being Rejected."

Good stuff, but now it's back to dusting.

Writing that makes a difference

My first exposure to William Zinsser was in 1990 when I picked up "On Writing Well" in an effort to improve my journalism. What I discovered was a lifelong mentor to accompany me on my writing journey.

Fourteen years later in 2004, I had the great pleasure of meeting him in person and introducing him to an audience of journalists gathered at a conference in New York City. (Pictured above) I've had a passion for his writing and his wisdom on writing for 20 years.

Imagine my delight to learn somewhat belatedly (it was published in 2009) that he has written a book called "Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher." I love the sound of it, I love the idea of it and I can't wait to hear what he has to say about his own journey. I'll be at the bookstore tomorrow to make my purchase, adding this latest to my well-worn Zinsser collection.



His books are filled with my notations: underlined passages, notes in the margins, post-it notes marking entire pages. They are lovingly dog-eared and never far from reach as a source of information or inspiration.

With the patience of a grandfather and the enthusiasm of a lifelong learner, he has embraced hundreds, probably thousands of writers, answering the phone in his Manhattan office on Lexington Avenue and making a difference in the lives of writers. It's a role he embraces.

“Many younger writers have taken me as a mentor. They just look me up in the Manhattan telephone book. ‘I know how busy you are,’ they say, assuming that I spend every minute writing at my computer. I tell them I have many ways of being busy, and this is one of the ways I like best. I particularly like to be busy with people who want their writing to make a difference. And by now I have a small shelf of their books.”

The biggest surprise is to see that this delightfully old-fashioned man, with his trademark white fedora and sensible New Balance running shoes, has embraced modernity in the form of a website.

Playing with poetry

Poetry has always terrified me: Not the reading of, but the writing of poetry. It is writing stripped bear of anything except the most essential. The austerity of it intimidates a writer of prose such as myself.

And yet I am drawn to its simplicity, to its power and to its raw emotion. Maybe my capacity to be pithy, to get to the essence of an idea, is increasing as I age. I think more and speak less. After reading some poetry of late, I conducted a little brainstorming exercise for myself.

I played around with free association with words about things I love or things that move me in life and in fiction. There's no real rhyme or reason to these thoughts. I just wrote them as they came to mind. I've penned only one poem in my life, something so deeply personal that I will likely never share it.

But if I were to write regularly, I would write about rain...spring rain, and long, slow kisses in the rain. I'd write about the smell of old books imbued with the spice of worn leather, dusty paper and pipe tobacco. I'd write about words and their capacity to move me.

Water, plenty of images about water, alternately gentle and rushing, conjuring images of power and emotion and tranquility and touch. And tender, fleshy tomatoes and creamy mozzarella and looks across crowded rooms that focus desire like a laser, causing hearts to pound and bodies to tremble.

I'd write about sand and sounds of foreign lands and the luminous nature of love that envelopes the heart, mind, body and soul, and how light is reflected differently on surfaces, from blue glows to shimmering whiteness.

Though I'm not sure it will result in poetry, this exercise has certainly awakened my mind on this gloomy Saturday morning. Perhaps some of these images will find their way into poetry, perhaps in other writing.

Live the questions now

"I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which would not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I write, therefore I am

"When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence." – Gao Xingjian, 2000 winner of Nobel Prize in Literature