Today, June 8th, is my daughter Marena's 27th birthday.
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In the photo she's three, waving to me from across our long ago east coast lawn. She knows I'm within reach; she knows she can run and throw herself into my wide-open arms.

Time was endless in that Northern New Jersey moment, the years of ballet slippers and school plays and parent/teacher conferences having not yet begun... sprawled out ahead because years were long, substantial, tucked deep into a pocket like a solid heart-shaped stone not going anywhere, until you spin around three times and your child is grown up and she lives somewhere else, somewhere across an ocean.

The high school, college, grad school yearbooks, they're packed up in boxes with everything else that already happened, that played out, and the remembered tears as I tried to walk her all the way up in a Hawai’i airport security line, hoping she'd turn and look at me one more time, and she always did, before disappearing out of sight. Back into her grown-up life.

And the heart stone in my pocket has long ago moved onto a shelf with other reminders of those endless years that lasted only a minute. Now she's a young woman teaching theater to elementary school kids in San Antonio, Texas who live way below the poverty level, because this is what matters to her. In the photos the kids are laughing and reaching out to her, as she once reached out to me, and she's bringing much-needed joy into their days in the form of art. She knows that art saves lives.

My girl is 27 today. She spent this day making Black Lives Matter bracelets that she gave away on Instagram in exchange for donations to organizations that support black trans individuals. I know that she knows what matters... she protests, she speaks up in a loud voice, she calls it out, she is firmly an ally as she gets ready to move to New York City to work in a school with other kids who have very little, but in her care, they'll have theatre and they'll know they matter. Because she'll tell them every day they do. And she'll put them on a stage, shining a light on them so they're seen.

My girl is 27. My girl, faraway. I feel such pride that she's my daughter. I haven't seen her in so long, since before the world closed down. But she's an inch away; she's everywhere I look.
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Happy Birthday, Marena. I love you beyond words that exist.❤️

On the plane to San Francisco to lead a two-day writers' workshop (after a few beautiful days in Houston, seeing my parents and brother).
 
There's a girl sitting behind me on the plane – maybe three or four years old – sitting between her parents. She's keeping up a long, animated conversation with herself and/or them; she's singing, making observations, asking to be read to, asking what things are outside the window, looking for her coloring book, creating a village with little dolls, telling her parents she loves them.
 
Her parents aren't shushing her at all, which I love, even though it's not a quiet conversation and we're in a crowded plane.
 
And I remember that my mother was occasionally called up to my elementary school because I would sing in class (to myself), and it was "disruptive," (“students should be quiet,") and I apparently asked all those questions too, endlessly, and it occurred to me that at some point so many people lose that... the singing, observing, asking, playing, seeing, coloring. But we started out as that.
 
And then there are the people who grow up and stay that way. The actors, singers, dancers, writers, painters, poets... artists who missed or ignored the prompt about being quiet. That's why we have tribes. To be with other people who still play.
 
Those are the people I want to spend my time with.

Part Two (later that day)
 
My friends. There's a part two of my airplane story from earlier today. The one of the child behind me who was so animated and joyful that it prompted me to write about a post about it. I didn't look at the family, I just listened, and I assumed the kid was a girl, but it turns out that he was a boy. I was sorry to misgender him in that post, but here's why I'm writing again.
 
The boy sitting between his parents, who turned out to be four years old, was a cancer patient. He was on his way back from two months at St. Jude's, and thirty (thirty, the mom said) rounds of chemotherapy for an advanced cancer. This was said to me because I turned around toward the end of the flight to tell them how much I Ioved sitting in front of them and how great their kid was.
 
I told the mom I had posted about them on Facebook, which made her laugh. I told her how wonderful their parenting was, that they never once told him to shush. The boy was coming home after two months and was about to undergo radiation. He had lost all his hair and was so gaunt, with deep circles under his eyes, but he was the kid sitting behind me that I wrote about because he was so alive. Singing, coloring, making a doll village, looking out the window, asking questions, telling his parents he loves them.
 
This changes the story, because to me this is the story. The resilience of children. The joy after suffering all that. It's startling.
 
I will never forget this kid.
 
There are very few things I've experienced in my lifetime, certainly in an airplane, that went as deep into my heart as this.  

When you realize you're drowning you have to find new ways to breathe.

After losing a lobe of my lung to cancer I was obsessed with the idea of snorkeling. Of getting back in the ocean to tango with the tiny turquoise fish... the bright-orange-dotted-with-black fish... the lime green ones with splashes of yellow, and the purple fish, that deep purple that makes you feel, at least for a moment, that everything you went through was worth it to witness such purple again in your lifetime, whatever's left of it anyway, because early on "later" takes on a new meaning.

One you won't know for a while.

And these multicolored fish of Hawai'i, they're something alive that wakes you up.
 
They've been endangered lately, along with the coral reefs, because of the toxic sunscreen tourists tend to slather on before they enter this ocean.

I went out on a small boat with Big Island friends the first moment I could after cancer. When there wasn't enough air that day, I panicked. When I couldn't breathe through the hose, and no one could see me not breathing because I was too far out, I had to figure out a way to get back to the boat.
 
It never occurred to me to just take off the gear. To float on my back. To stay above the water.

I believed I was drowning so I couldn't see the bigger picture.

What I did realize, when I realized it, was that I had to relearn to swim with less air in the eight minutes it would take me to get back to the boat. And that my lungs were a reconfigured organ I also had to relearn.

I made it back... and the colors of the fish from that day were burned into memory. Turquoise, bright orange, lime green, yellow... the purple I never wanted to relinquish, like all the other things I don't want to relinquish now.

My boy reading a scene from his new play on the phone.

My girl singing in a zoom room during the writers' workshop yesterday.

April in Paris.

The rainbow eucalyptus... all the colors of the rainbow in the bark of a single tree.

The gecko who's moved into this office, waiting patiently on the wall while I write, and then disappearing when the workshop is over, only to reappear the next day in the same exact spot.

The way we do reappear.

Today a dozen people in my life told me they've hit a wall... they're at their wit's end... they're losing it.
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Here's the thing. When the way you once breathed is no longer an option you find new ways. And I know, firsthand, that there are new ways.

For me, life during the time of coronavirus has been a marathon of facilitating and writing in these workshops every day, except the day I lead a youth theater troupe. The joy of all that.
 
My friend is teaching herself taekwondo in her back yard. Another is reading some of the significant books she'd never read because there wasn't time. Someone else is learning French. Listening to books on Audible. And so many of us are writing and then reading our work in the literary salons that are popping up in zoom rooms. That's a beautiful thing.

And then there are the people practicing stillness. Doing none of the above because they're regrouping. Yoga. Reflection. Breath.

Netflix. If we're telling the real story, there's always that. The binge-watch.

Here's another gift to come out of this...

The fish of Hawai'i, the ones that were dying off because of the toxins in all the sunscreen tourists use, they're coming back. Along with our coral reefs.

The turquoise and orange with black dots and lime green with yellow and that purple that makes you want to live. It's all coming back.

And if there's any major gift to come out of this pandemic, it's the one we're giving nature by leaving her alone to recover.
 
To relearn how to breathe.

When I held my Hawai'i ocean retreat in November and we went out with the whales and the dolphins, I didn't tell the writers about my last snorkel experience, my post-cancer snorkel experience, the one where I couldn't breathe, the one where I thought I might drown.

I wrote the story afterwards, and in that piece was the story of the ancient tattooed whale we discovered that day, and the mother and baby spooning past us, not swimming down as whales sometimes do when humans appear, not moving away from us.

And the joy of the snorkel was returned to me in that ocean retreat. It swam in on whales and dolphins and the bliss on Mary Artino's face when she sat on the edge of the boat looking out into the ocean. Even seasick. Even that.

If you can just find new ways to breathe during this, you'll make it back to where you need to go.
 
Hang in, loves.
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There's purple everywhere.  💜

​Today I woke up with the clearest sense of the other side of all this. What's coming back in abundance is joy. That's both the irony and the gift of a pandemic. When you survive it you learn something significant, and you'll never go back to who you were before.

The art to come out of this... the writing, the music... the paintings people have shared, it's stunning. Yes, there's the disaster of everything we know is disastrous, all of that is obvious - first and foremost the lives lost - but underneath the story of the economy and the wild mismanagement of our federal government and the fact the theaters are closed and festivals have been cancelled and everything else we all know is about loss, is that we're connecting and creating in ways that would not have been possible if everything in our lives hadn't come to a crashing halt.

I've heard the words "I love you" spoken from more people and more often than I have in my life. I'm guessing the same may be true for you. I've learned that I'm capable of leading a six or seven-hour writers' workshop, and writing myself, every single day. A marathon for me, and something I didn't know I could do, but I can. The coral reefs in Hawaii are thriving without all the dangerous sunscreen that harms them, the earth is greener, the air is more breathable, the canals in Venice, with clean water, are said to have dolphins in them (and even if that's not really true it's gorgeous to envision that), the children are singing in zoom rooms, the writers are writing the story of these days in online workshops (led by many different facilitators) and reading their work in pop-up salons.

Yes, the theaters are dark, including our beloved Kahilu Theatre in Hawaii, and the schools are closed, but students are learning online, and people are making face masks for other people and gardens are being planted and we're sharing recipes, and artists are singing online (Rufus Wainwright in a bathrobe and Martin Sexton from the road), and actors are reading bedtime stories on apps that will help you sleep.

How is this not an opportunity?

If we focus on what we've lost and not what we've found, we may as well stay in bed until we come out the other end of this. But we ARE coming out. The death rate in NYC is going down. The curve is flattening. And way more people are surviving than dying. And we're learning that the people who have survived are most likely immune to the virus.

So the survivors of this become a gift to the rest of us.

Surviving cancer changed me. Everything meant more after I didn't die... all the colors were brighter. Now I'm always looking for that light, the light you see in survivors, except now I'm seeing it everywhere.

It's hard to see joy while we're still inside this pandemic, but having survived a personal plague, I see it... the color burst at the end of the tunnel.

So here's to the many gifts to come out of this, because when we go back into the world, which we will, we'll remember them. We'll remember what was impossible, but we'll also remember the meals cooked, the slowing down, the books read, the art created, the cleaner planet, the I love you's, the ways we held each other up... the way we walked each other home. Everything we didn't have time to do before, and we'll feel gratitude.

After fissure 8 opened in Hawai'i in 2018, and all those homes were destroyed by lava, the volcano stopped erupting for the first time in since 1983. The island was suddenly clean... no vog. You could see Maui from the Big Island. Everything was more alive, more vivid. But it came with sacrifice.
 
The photo is a lava field, and even in lava flowers grow. But the meaning of flowers will have changed because it all means so much more, and you feel it in a place where you never before felt the meaning of flowers.
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I already feel it.

Today I experienced a small, extraordinary thing.

After an inspiring writers’ workshop, my head filled with swirling images from the stories I had just listened to... stories of color and light, of flying dragons and soaring yellow birds (and after spending ten to twelve hours a day these days in front of a computer between online workshops and acting students) I needed to move my body; to run out Into it. So, I did.

(I took my face mask with me.)

When I walk or run in my Hawai'i neighborhood and I pass someone on the street, there's usually a nod or an obligatory wave. Everyone's paying attention to their own breath, their own run, as they should be.

Today, in the late afternoon, on an empty street on the Big Island of Hawai'i, someone in the one of the houses was playing loud music. Decent loud music.
 
And there was a rainbow ring around the sun as three of us - each of us walking or running from different directions - converged on the street to look up.

It's a wide street and we were more than six feet apart, but we naturally pulled even further apart (yes, even outside). It was me, a young guy, and an older woman. I recognized both of them from the neighborhood although I had never spoken to either one of them and they didn't seem know each other.

Maybe we initially stopped because of the music or because there's so little human contact and the business-as-usual wave didn't seem like enough today. Maybe it really was the rainbow ring around the sun.
 
Or maybe it felt like something needed to be said about all this. About the world now.

But there were no words. What is there to say?

And for me, nothing said from ten feet apart on a street would have come close to the significance of the words that had been written and read and spoken back in the workshop I had just finished.

And here's the small pandemic miracle. 

With no words and all that distance, we started dancing in the street to that music. Really dancing. A teenage girl who must have seen us from her window came running out and then there were four of us, ten or more feet apart, on a street in Hawai'i, dancing.

The last time I had a meaningful experience with strangers it was two years ago in an airport and we didn't introduce ourselves. Today we told each other our names after the music stopped and the dance was over.

We didn't say, "see you later" or "let's do it again" because no one knows what later means now and even though we all live in this neighborhood, we don't know each other.

But in the middle of COVID 19, there was a moment of joy with people I'd never officially met but will certainly remember.

A small, extraordinary thing in the middle of a pandemic.
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Here's to joy, anyway. During all this. 💕

Awake at 4 a.m. in Hawai'i, so I went outside to see the stars... to be part of something bigger, something not inside.

There aren't any stars visible tonight, only a blanket of black.

I sat on the ground looking up, envisioning stars. So much of what has to happen now is us envisioning. Envisioning wellness. Safety. A solution.

My child on lockdown across an ocean... envisioning him here with me, later. My other child, in a place too far away to even consider. Envisioning my children, safe.

All of our children. Safe.

This distance will lead to connection, they say, because the curve will flatten if we respect the distance. Trying to respect something that goes completely against my grain.

Distance.

Outside, looking into darkness. It's hard for me to be patient awaiting the stars' return. To not feel disappointed; I count on the stars for so much. Maybe tomorrow.

The next day.

Waiting it out... Letting it be what it is and still seeing what needs to be seen. 

Because it's all there. Everything. Our lives. The stars. Our kids, somewhere else on lockdown.

A solution, in the distance.
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So, we wait... and we keep looking up. 💖

When the thoracic surgeon at Mass General was trying to figure out if I had lung cancer in 2008, before he knew I did, he ordered a bone scan. For some reason, he decided to do it backwards. I would find out if I had lung cancer that had spread to my bones before I even knew if it was in my lungs.

If I had lung cancer that spread to my bones, I had a fifteen percent chance of surviving.

I was lying on a metal table with two male technicians running the bone scan, while two women on the other side of the room, also technicians, were viewing the scan from behind a blue hospital partition.

I could hear the women talking even though I couldn't see them:

"Oh no."

"Did you see that?"

"What a shame."

And a tsk sound.

A tsk that reverberates to this day.

I knew that these women were reading my scan. I also knew that I had two children back in Hawai'i whom I needed to see grow up. I had never needed to see them grow up more than I did in that moment.

One of the male technicians was in training. They told me that when they started the scan. Mass General is a teaching hospital, connected to Harvard, and I remember begging him to tell me the result. Maybe he wouldn't know that he wasn't supposed to give me an answer, he was training. I needed to know if I had cancer that had spread to my bones. I needed to know at that moment, not later, if I was most likely going to die.
 
There was no oxygen in the room and the world had become too small to contain what was left of me that day.

I told that young technician about my kids... an entire soliloquy from that metal table... I told him how frightened I was, that I had never even smoked so this didn't make sense... I told him that I was 5,000 miles away from home, that my husband was alone there with the kids and needed to know if I wouldn't be coming home... If he would need to bring up the kids without me.
 
I knew he could hear the Boston in my voice; I had the same accent he did because this was the place of my childhood. I was still in my forties, realizing, in that moment, that it would be in the place of my childhood that I was going to find out if I would die from inexplicable lung cancer that had spread to my bones.

Everything was inside out.

The tech started to say something, he was clearly upset, and the other tech swooped in with, "Only the radiologist can read this scan. You'll hear from your doctor."

And they both left the room.

The female technicians left too. They had been wearing powder blue scrubs and hospital masks, and, still in my too-big blue hospital gown, I ran down the hall, chasing the women I hadn't seen. The women behind the blue partition. They were women... they might have kids... I needed them to tell me what they meant when they said what a shame. When they said oh no. And the frightening tsk, what that meant.

I found myself in the front lobby with an ocean of doctors and hospital workers in identical blue scrubs. I ran from blue scrub to blue scrub, not knowing who I was looking for. "Was it you who just did my bone scan?" "Was it you?" I was the crazy women saying to the wrong person, "What did you mean when you said, ‘What a shame’”? “What did you mean when..." I was out of control, hysterical.

And then the worst moment of all... I looked towards the front of the hospital, and through the giant glass windows I saw my mother. She had brought me there that day for the bone scan. She was outside, looking in. Frozen, like me. Seeing me running in a circle, lost.

It was the lowest moment of my life.

As it turned out, I did have lung cancer - I would find that out days later after a surgery - but it had not spread to my bones. The technicians weren't even talking about my scan; they were apparently having a conversation about something else.

I told the story to the hospital later, after I knew I wasn't going to die. Not in that moment, anyway. I told them what a conversation like that during a bone scan does to a patient waiting to hear if it's fifteen percent. In my case, a mother with young kids.

What I think of when I think of that day is the misinformation. The panic of not knowing. It was the moment I made a pact with God and the Universe that if I survived this, I would do more. Live louder. LIVE. This was also the moment that I saw what this cancer fiasco was doing to my aging parents. My mother outside the window.

This was when I realized how far away I was from home.

Here's the thing...

When I came out of this, I made a decision to become macrobiotic - which I am to this day - so I pay attention to what I put into my body. Only whole foods. I truly believe this is part of why I'm still here. After all that, I was healthy and whole, even with one less lobe of my lung. I was ready to write and perform a one-woman show and lead these writers workshops and direct a youth acting troupe. And to continuing singing on a stage. To hit the high note. And most importantly - see my kids grow up.

The worst moment of my life reinvented me. So much of the minutia of before that disappeared. There was no time for anything but living.

The panic around a pandemic reminds me of me that day, of me running helter skelter through that Boston hospital. But the thing is, when I came out the other end, I was more than I had been.

Because crisis does that. Because overcoming fear / panic empowers us. Because at a low time, even in the worst of times, we gather our resources because we see what we could have lost. And then we see what we're capable of.

The world that opened after that day I ran like a desperate mess from blue scrub to blue scrub was technicolor. It had always been bright, but afterwards it was brighter.

Here's to us getting through the Coronavirus together, each of us knowing that on the other end (because there will be the other end) is the joy of having made it through the fear and the isolation and the unknown.
 
We just have to hunker down and ride it out. To stay connected, even if we're not in the same room. We just have to visualize the beauty that comes out of surviving something.
 
And then we're more than we were because we got through it.
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We're more.❣️

I'm writing this on the plane from Hawai'i to Palo Alto.

I want to share something beautiful about travel on this day. This March 10, 2020 day, with the Coronavirus firmly in our midst.
 
I had so many phone calls and messages from writers in my upcoming mainland workshops deciding about planes and wanting to hear if I think it's okay or not okay to gather, and in answering them, because I needed to answer them, I was late getting to the Kona Airport.
 
I arrived with less than an hour till my flight would take off, ten minutes till boarding, and the line through security was around the corner. Maybe 200 people in that line.

The lovely agent at Southwest who took my bag told me I would miss my flight. I would most likely miss my flight. There was nothing she could do, she said. Maybe try again tomorrow.
 
But I needed to get there today.

I asked the woman in front of me in the back of the line if she was on the flight to San Jose that was about to board. I told her I was on that flight.
 
"I'm not on it," she said. "But try to get to the front of the line. Sometimes people are kind."

Sometimes people are kind.

We're in the middle of the Coronavirus. People are hunkered down... sticking to themselves... keeping a distance. Aren't touching.

But here's how it played out:

I asked every single person in front of me if I could move in front of them in the line and I explained why. Every single person said yes.
 
"Please do."
 
"You'll make it."
 
"Go right ahead."
 
"It'll be okay."

I was shocked.
 
One young woman, about fifty people up, was distressed because she and her young daughter were on the same flight to San Jose, but she was too shy to ask anyone. I took her with me.
 
The three of us moved to the front of the line, one by one, and we made it on this plane.

So, in a time of quarantine and fear, people are kind. Not one person... tourist, local, young, elderly... rolled their eyes or hesitated. Said "No, because you should have been on time." And of course, I should have been on time. But I wasn't. No one tried to teach me a lesson today.
 
Maybe airport terminals are the place -at least in my life- where kindness manifests in unexpected ways. You'd think it would be another place... a theater, a synagogue, a church. But it's an airport.
 
A man took my carry-on and put it up in the overhead compartment because I was carrying so much stuff.

A flight attendant gave me (gave all of us) two snacks not one. And I got the whole can of seltzer, not just a cup.

A male flight attendant is walking up and down the aisle as I write this asking each of us how we're doing.

Today I learned, firsthand, that during the Coronavirus we have each other's backs.
 
And because we have each other's backs, and because today played out like it did, I feel armed with so much positive energy (in addition to all the aloe-infused rubbing alcohol I brought with me) that no damn Coronavirus is getting through.
 
My lungs already had their crisis with lung cancer in 2008. Now they're strong, solid, they take in enough air to sing and call out and dive underwater and breathe deeply.
 
The Biology of Belief, my loves reading this. It's powerful.
 
Here's to the kindness I experienced in an airport during the Coronavirus crisis.
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It's something.

You don't need eyes to witness.

The 73-year-old recent-PhD singing writer who is blind spoke back almost an entire piece all by herself. 

All the ways we're awake.

I LOVED the group of women who wrote in my online workshop today. I was riveted by their stories.

Now, alone in my office for a moment with just the whistle of the Wild Waimea Wind as a soundtrack, I'm in a story swirl with everyone's words in my head. I'm (literally) dizzy.

Every writer reading this post knows what that is. The deep engagement with story.

A profound way to say I was here, and this is what happened... going that far in. 

I saw this painting, and this is what occurred to me. How long do you hold the cocoon in your hand before you release the butterfly it became while you were deciding to live?
 
Write the story.
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I promise you, you'll be reminded how alive you really are. 💓

My friend Kelly Wilson posted a gold bracelet on Facebook with the words "choose joy." The picture here is hers, her bracelet, her fingers holding joy.

Last night I dreamt about Nazis and woke up at 3am, gasping for air. As if my lungs, the four lobes that remain, shut down in solidarity with what happened. Breathing in gas instead of oxygen.

There were cousins lost to those gas chambers, redheaded girls who sang, like me, cousins who disappeared on a train they might have thought was going someplace safe after the rounding up of Jews, but instead was an end-of-the-line ride. Something incomprehensible yet as real as the photos of the bodies of starved and tortured Jews piled high next to a mass grave in the ground. Smiling Nazis stand on either side holding shovels as they pose for the camera. They're proud of their work.

We watched black-and-white films with the same images when we were children in my Hebrew School, east of Boston. It was 1967 or 1969. Nazi propaganda films from the war. The old Jews who survived stood in the back of the room praying, uttering the words, "Never Forget" over and over. We were too young to watch those films, but they felt it was essential. It was twenty years after the war, and we were what remained... they wanted us to remember.

Still, there are people who deny that the Holocaust happened, who claim the photos and films are fake.

There's a deep insidiousness in denying atrocities. In saying something didn't occur because there were no witnesses. But the thing is, there were witnesses. People who got out, to tell.

Four years ago, at Muhlenberg College in Allentown Pennsylvania, I watched Holocaust historian/crusader Deborah Lipstadt speak. I flew in from Hawai'i and sat up front at one of the round banquet tables. Deborah Lipstadt was played by Rachel Weisz in the 2016 film "Denial," based on Lipstadt's book, "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving."
​
Irving accused Lipstadt of libel because she called him a Holocaust denier, and this was in a London court where you are guilty until proven innocent. Lipstadt refused to put the Holocaust on trial even though so much was on the line for her, and without asking survivors to take the stand to try to prove the Holocaust happened, she took down Irving. He'll be remembered as what he was, a Holocaust denier. Something unfathomable, the denial of all those millions exterminated. In London, she called him out and won.

I watched Deborah Lipstadt at that podium, her riveting keynote speech about all of it - and then I watched my girl, my daughter Marena, flown in from grad school in London by Muhlenberg College to make another keynote speech that day, to talk about her own work with othering, bullying, and antisemitism when she was an undergrad at that college six months earlier and again the year before, through a play she directed and performed. A powerful Holocaust story. Her keynote speech was also riveting.

My girl, a millennial born five decades after the Holocaust, telling the story of what happened.

I stood in a line for Deborah Lipstadt to let her know what her words / her work meant to me, and to maybe get her autograph on the book I held in my hand, but she only wanted to talk about Marena when she learned I was her mother.

"She's me," the Holocaust crusader said. And my knees buckled. I sat down in one of the white cushioned banquet chairs that tucked into her table, a chair that reminded me of my Bat Mitzvah in a similar social hall where Jews gathered to celebrate what survived.

In 1995, on a street in Park Slope Brooklyn, my then two-year-old daughter looked at another girl in the front of a line pulling the children behind her in another direction. My girl said those same words. "She's me." A foreshadowing on so many levels.

Words that repeat must be given attention.

My son Sean wrote a play about the women's Concentration Camp, Ravensbrück. Harriet Robinson posted about Ravensbrück last night, and it reminded me.

Sean's play, "The Undocumented," was performed on a stage in NYC. I wasn't there, but I watched the video over and over. To remember the words. To try to let the impossible images land. Sean wanted to tell the underbelly of the story of the women. What was done to them is not something we can comprehend. The experimental surgeries, injections of gasoline and poisons, organs removed without anesthesia, new tortures invented during the Holocaust by people with names like Mengele and Oberheuser. Oberheuser was a German woman torturing and murdering Jewish women and girls. Her experiments were particularly heartwrenching.

Sean's play explored what we'll do to survive and what we can endure, or can't possibly endure, even with every hope to stay alive.

I have a boy who writes plays about those on the outside. About loneliness and loss, about the search for salvation. Survival. And this play... the surgical torture and mass murder of Jewish women during a time of profound shame in our world.

My boy, a millennial born five decades after the Holocaust, telling the story of what happened.

There's always a mother in Sean's plays asking the question, "Are you happy?" She appears in different costumes and circumstances. I know that mother is me, at least in part. Even if she seems too eager in one play, or lost in another. Or controlling. I did ask that question. I do ask it. I am, if I'm being honest, desperate to know if they're happy, my children. Because there's so much heartbreak. And in my own mother's lifetime, there was a Holocaust.

It's been a week of remembering.

My mother telling me stories of Uncle Itsy and the babies the Nazis used for target practice; of Uncle Eddie, who was in the Army medical core and a first responder in the camps in Germany right after the war ended. Eddie couldn't put words to the stories of what he witnessed; it was too horrific. Uncle Eddie is long gone, but I wonder if my cousins Shelly and Julie, his daughters, remember. Know more than my mother knows of what he saw there. I wonder if anything was spoken later. I wonder what memory can hold when the events are unspeakable.

And my children, both of them, telling the story on stages, navigating what can be navigated through art. I stand back, in awe, occasionally asking the ineffectual question, "Are you happy?"

When the reminder of what was is too present, there's nothing else to ask.

But there's a bracelet that Kelly posted on Facebook, a gold one, that says "choose joy." And with all that knowing in my genes and DNA, all that was lost that wakes me up at night trying to remember how to breathe, I choose joy.
​
Because there's no better way to rise up. To say this is what wasn't taken. And there's so much beauty. I see it. I choose it. And still, on behalf of my own family and the six million... I Never Forget.

The rain drowns out a dream about rain, and then I'm awake at 3 a.m. in Hawai'i.

It's really something, how life will keep you up once you're awake. There's a book, a good one written by a friend, it sits on the nightstand next to the bed, but I know if I pick it up there's no shot at sleep. There are pieces waiting to be redlined for writers when it's really Sunday, because now it's in between Saturday and Sunday and editing is too much in the darker dark. That will shift at 5:00 a.m. when I usually begin to wrap myself around other people's words. An honor to be trusted with that, and something that requires some light.

On the right of this screen, a list of people in my life who are here on fb, the green dot announcing this - a cyberspace invitation of connection. I scan the list before the names shift as people move into their day in other places where the sun is already up, and the dream isn't as loud as the Waimea rain.

Their places: Boca Raton, Boston, Baltimore, Denver, NYC. San Francisco, Cape Cod, LA, Seattle, Ramsey NJ. That's the order of the people on the right. The first ten, anyway. 

Something about each of them... 

She's in Florida visiting her aging parents, navigating Alzheimer's and sadness.

She's sixty and getting married again. It was a surprise that he asked and she's both terrified and ecstatic.

She misses her person, gone twenty years now, and soon we'll write on the anniversary of her beloved best friend's birthday, remembering what it meant that she was here.

His wife beat cancer and they're going on a cruise to Alaska to celebrate the thing they didn't think they'd get to do together. She had a dream of Alaska and he surprised her with it.

She was raped and never told anyone until she wrote the story in the workshop and now she's advocating for others who were too afraid to speak up.

Her mother is turning 100 and she's pinching herself to have the great gift of that. 

She's an award-winning author, and her first book is still one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read.
 
She's expecting her first child after years of trying. She's online, reading about what to expect. She, too, is pinching herself at her good fortune, at the dream of her daughter... the one she so wanted but didn't think she'd get to meet.

She taught me that elephants weep for a lost loved one. A story written in a recent writing room that stays with me, that also finds its way into my dreams, like the rain.

She's been sober for twenty years. A milestone she's celebrating, cheered on by those of us who love her.

The rain stopped. And just like that, the names have shifted. All the living we do while we can... all the stories we pull into our hard-beatings hearts.
​
Here's to all of it. 

I'm thinking about what we dream in our lifetime.

About the carrot dangling just out of reach, and the stories we pass on to our children. The stories we tell them, and others written in our imagination, received by them through osmosis or words unsaid... lingering longer on the first lines of a children's book, "In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines..."

In the year 2000, when my daughter was seven, she created a handwritten book for a school project, titled "Read All About Me." Her name, Marena, was written in confident looped and curled letters that spread out across the bottom of the page. There was no room for a last name, as if she was already planning on just being her first name.

She wrote the word Paris as "A place I would like to visit."

So, she was already dreaming Paris back then, the same place I was dreaming. Seeing this now, twenty years later, the heart-jolt of realizing that not only did she later visit Paris, but she lived and worked there for several years, learning French, and meeting her love.

My girl met her love in Paris, the place we both dreamt.

And because she was living there, I found my way to Paris. It was 2017. April. My father sang "April in Paris" for months after that. My girl was in her early twenties when she arrived in the city of lights and I was in my fifties, but I got there.

The year I went to Paris, someone handed me a tiny piece of paper ripped out of the corner of the LA Times. The date on the newspaper was August 18th, my birthday. It was a quote from Henry James. "Paris is the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes."

The temple of Paris. The place I didn't visit.

I found my way to other cities in Europe long before that, but not Paris, as if it needed to be the carrot dangling just out of reach; the thing to look forward to, later; the gift for having earned the right to arrive in the place you've always imagined. The city named by my daughter as a place she would like to visit in her Read All About Me book.

I woke up on a metal table in 2008 after a surgery during which I was told I had lung cancer, and my second thought was I'll never get to see Paris. My first thought was about my family, but right after that it was Paris. Had I not been in so much pain, I would have laughed that this is what occurred to me in that Boston hospital recovery room. Paris... the place I didn't think I'd get to. But all the other things I thought in that moment wouldn't happen after cancer... they all happened anyway. I got to see our kids grow up, when once upon a time I thought I wouldn't even see Sean enter middle school.

A long time ago, in an east coast place far away from Hawai’i, my daughter Marena and I snuggled in a canopy bed with purple and white polka dots that had belonged to me as a child. The book I was reading to her was "Madeline." One name, as if she was already planning on being just her first name. It told the story of a girl in Paris.

The dream of place my daughter and I shared.

Here's to what we hand our children, spoken or unspoken.

And then later, holding our hand, they deliver us to that temple.

Joy is a precious commodity.

And time, which sometimes feels endless, isn't at all endless.

My heart breaks for a woman I know – someone I care about who wrote today that she feels she "missed her life." She's at the end of the journey and she doesn't know how she didn't get the book written, didn't (dot, dot, dot). There's a whole list of what she meant to do but didn't get to. She couldn't figure it out, she ran out of time, she didn't know how to start, how to continue, where to go, she was busy with day-to-day things, etc. I know how hard that was for her to write, but what actually happened, or didn't happen, has to be harder. Because time isn't endless.

And one life.

Regret is useless, really, because we did what we did in our lifetime. But here we are in the present, and time IS limited, so now is it. Now is it. It's usually the minutia that gets in the way. All the things that eat up a day, a year. Things we can't remember after we did them because they weren't significant.

My mission with both facilitating the writing and the theater work has been to get the work on its feet. Find your way into a room where you'll find the stories, where you'll read the piece, perform the song, finish the play / book, stand on a stage and tell your story, get the words out in the world. Risk it. There are a good number of people facilitating this work. We all get to it differently, but we get to it. Go with what speaks to you.

I don't want to wake up and have missed the thing, and I don't want you to miss it. To write that you missed your life is a tragic statement.

I wish I could wind the clock back for this woman, but I can't. It crushed me, reading that. But it's her truth.

So let's do the thing while we can. Let's just do it, my peeps.
 
There's only now.

​A joy moment at the end of 2019

We're driving down the Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway, my son and I. There's no vog at all, and there hasn't been since Kilauea stopped erupting for the first time since 1983, almost like a miracle and certainly a gift, one week before our 2018 Volcano writing retreat and just when I was about to cancel because Tutu Pele wasn't giving us permission to enter, and then she was. But, of course, that's the least of what she gave back when the eruption ended... our small writing circle. Still, we were filled with gratitude to be witnesses to the volcano goddess rewriting the story of an island.

Sean is playing the ukulele in the passenger seat and singing something in his long-ago tenor, the one of back then when he still lived on this island and his voice was high like that, and Hawai'i, driving down the Queen K from Waimea towards Kona, looks like a sculpture with distinct edges in shades of brown/red lava, the rough ʻAʻā kind, and the verdant mountains, and turquoise ocean, and if a juxtaposition can wipe you out in its sheer splendor, this one can.

At this moment the Big Island of Hawai'i, the place at the end of the Earth where I somehow landed, is as glorious as anything one could dream up, and I think about a prompt I give, a prompt I repeat so the writers who've heard it before nod, understanding that this prompt will return, like the morning returns if we're lucky, writing under a gnarled tree at 69 Beach where Annie from Portland wrote in what looked like a nest, a story-nest where you can hide with a notebook and pen, giving birth to the story of what it means to write in Hawai'i, on this remote volcanic island.

It returns, if we're lucky... like my boy, here and gone from Hawai'i, and then coming home, that circle of how we live - a push/pull, hello/goodbye thing, and now the island spread out in front of us as we drive down the highway, so sweet in its reminder that we've been here before, we've seen these mountains and this lava, this endless Pacific, and he was a small boy in a faraway place and now an almost 23-year-old with a ukelele singing in a remembered voice, and I try to hold on to this... and to the image of my girl in San Antonio living her fullest life, even in my longing for her to be here today, in Hawai'i, even in knowing that it falls through our reaching hands like the black and green sand of this island, and the harder we try to grab it, the more it slips through because of endings, because of loss, because of loved ones no longer with us, because of our own mortality, grabbing at the endless life in front of us that's not at all endless.

But on this day, my boy plays the ukulele and Hawai'i is a sculpture, and that prompt I give, the one that returns, the one you can start the story with or weave into the story, "In the glorious later..." it's all around me, reminding me that I need only to see, to remember the words of Ram Dass, now lost to us but never really lost because he left a legacy of story, of words we can hold in his books, in that so-familiar purple book on my shelf, "Be Here Now."

Right now.
     
And that's the moment I turn the corner and the lava and the ocean and the memory of whales just a month ago with the writers - the whales that didn't swim down when we approached in their ocean; they stayed with us - and the day I stood at the edge of that same ocean, surrounded by black lava, the smooth pāhoehoe kind, the kind that tells the tale of a volcano, and my boy is home and all this beauty, and the story of what it all meant. The words to say what it meant.

In the glorious later I'm driving down the Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway, on the Big Island of Hawai'i. It's December 29th, 2019 and the island is spread out in front of me like a miracle. Like a gift. And that envisioned paradise of the glorious later is here.

Right now.

A little Christmas magic, like every time we imagined what was on the other side of the hidden wardrobe, or down a secret staircase that revealed itself. Nancy Drew, or better, Peggy Lane - the actress/detective who found a theatre in the pink and white hardcover Peggy books that were the reason I wanted it to rain when I was a kid, so I could stay inside and read.

This tiny lacquered wooden table was in my Atlantic Ocean house in Winthrop, Massachusetts. The house of my youth. I don't remember the table not being there. It was my mother's sewing table, which is ironic since she didn't really sew - Nana Anna did all the sewing - but my mom had this table filled with needles and spools of thread and silver thimbles. Opening it was a ten-year-old's best thrill because there was sometimes something surprising that showed up, like a small exotic coin or a scrap of gold ribbon, the kind that might be a clue for Peggy that would lead her to a theatre. One she could call her own.

When I moved to Hawaii a dozen years ago, this table came with me. A piece of my childhood connected to memories of mismatched buttons and what the world was like when people still had Remington typewriters and record players with 45's, and telephones with rotary dials.
     
Now the table sits next to a chair in the living room of this Pacific Ocean Hawaii house and it holds things that aren't significant, like remote controls for the ceiling fan and Roku.
     
But last night, Steve and I opened it and took everything out, imagining magic at a time when magic is needed. It's the third night of Chanukah and Christmas Eve and Sean is back in Hawaii for the holiday and I said, "What if there's a secret compartment?"
     
And Steve, because he believes in magic too, and he knows how to take things apart and then put them back together, opened up the table and saw that there was a piece of wood that might have a world under it... and he pulled it up. I held my breath... my beloved table... but there it was.
     
My mother's sewing table, the one I had opened countless times in my life, is actually a music box.
     
Steve and I looked at each other - two kids who discovered the secret stash of chocolate truffles hidden high up in a closet, on a shelf you aren't supposed to be able to reach.
     
Steve turned the table over and saw that there was a hole where a winding key to the music box used to be, but it's gone now and the tiny gears of the mechanism were dried up and a bit rusty, and Steve, who knows how to navigate these things, used a drop of WD-40, and small pliers that he waved like a magic wand, and there was the song.
     
It's a classical song we didn't recognize, and it was a symphony orchestra in that moment.
     
When we find a key for it (the pliers will strip the threads if we continue to use them) and we play the song again, we'll figure it out. Or I'll post a recording here and someone will recognize it. 
     
A once-upon-a-time song played by a table that was used to hold needles and thread and thimbles but is also something else. Something through the hidden wardrobe and down a secret staircase.
     
And after all these decades a magic table really is magic after all. The bliss of something precious revealing itself as even more precious because music was waiting underneath, and it was there all along.
     
​A Christmas story. ❤️

This past Monday, eleven years after an epiphany on a day of eights, 8-8-08—that once-in-a-thousand-years infinity day of only eights, when I was paying attention to my body although I didn't know the full significance at the time, I checked into Mass General Hospital in Boston for my annual CT scan to see if I'd managed to stave off the cancer beast for another year.

It's always a nerve-wracking thing, climbing into that machine in a too-big powder blue hospital gown, 5,000 miles away from Hawai’i, with the familiar recorded voice that tells you to hold your breath, and then breathe. It's always a man's voice. A woman, at that moment, would be more soothing I think, but maybe it's not soothing they're going for. Maybe it's some kind of perceived authority thing. Your dad telling you to breathe, because your life depends on it.

This year, in the machine, I conjured one of the Hawai'i mermaids who can hold her breath for six minutes if she's not moving at all. I met her when we writers swam with dolphins and whales just weeks earlier, far away from the freeze of December Boston. Six minutes. She can hold it that long, longer than any singer I know, and opera singers can hold their breath forever. But not six minutes.

Inside the machine, the thing I both dread and await every year, the contrast dye pushed through my body. I've had many CT scans since that infinity day when I first requested one, not yet knowing I had lung cancer but my body knowing something was wrong, so I asked. And the doctor made it clear he thought I was crazy, and he called in his nurse because he didn't want to be alone with me and he told me he wouldn't put it through insurance because it wasn't medically necessary, "So do you still want it?"

After that question I no longer asked, I insisted. I wasn't polite. The same doctor who later apologized when it was cancer after all.

"I've just never seen anything like this,” he said. A 'feeling' with no symptoms. I hope you can forgive me for..." 

And he seemed so much smaller.

This year they ordered contrast and the IV got tangled when I put my arms over my head and they had to redo it, and there was some confusion about the need for contrast so they had to call the doctor while I waited thirty minutes on a cold metal table, remembering relearning to breathe eleven years earlier at that same hospital, on another metal table, after a surgery to save my life.

Inside the machine with its scanning sounds I thought about the two days of writers’ workshops that weekend and stepping out after the second day into the first snow of the season and the whales and the freeze and the words and the yin yang bliss/heartbreak in the writing room and the extreme beauty of the writers and the six minutes and the class reunion that same weekend, "Hey, it's been forty years, how've ya been?" And the meaning of even needing contrast because they were following something the oncologist said needed to be followed, and the technician telling me that the contrast stuff makes your body heat up “and you’ll feel like you're gonna pee, but you don't," and she said this even though she knows I've had so many scans I already knew all of it, and the recorded man's voice saying, "hold your breath," and I did, and then, "breathe," and I did, and then it was over.

Out of the machine, into the light.

They removed the IV and left the room and I sat there, alone, on the side of the metal table thinking about how I found myself there. Realizing that if I hadn't insisted back then, I would have missed everything after age 49. I'd be long gone by now. Most likely I would have.

There's usually an in-between day after the scan and before the verdict but this time the oncologist had to see me the next day, and I sat across from her on Tuesday, in real clothes, no IV in my arm, and she said, "Exciting news! The thing we were following is gone and your lungs look perfect (she used that word), and I'm moving you to every other year."

"Congratulations."

And she danced out of the room to the person in the next room awaiting news of life or death.

There's never been a year since August 8, 2008, without the countdown to the annual CT scan, but here it is.

I bought two years on Tuesday.

So, my friends, insist on what you need to insist on to save your own life. Your body knows what it knows. Don't be polite when you tell them what has to happen if they say no, accusing you without using the words: hysterical, hypochondriac, crazy.

Don't be bullied out of your instincts when it comes to living.

And then, firmly off the metal table, there's every precious moment that comes afterward. That's the post-machine joy.
​
Every precious moment.

When you get into a conversation with your Uber driver in LA about his life and he ends up telling you his story.

His brother was a member of the Grape Street Watts Crips and was killed by a rival gang, the Bounty Hunter Bloods, and he, the driver, I'll call him J, was a member of the Compton Front Hood Crips.

His story takes you deep into the gang wars of LA and the violence he witnessed, the young people, including his friends, who lost their lives to the rivalry between the Crips and the Bloods, and how if you grew up in Compton you had to be a member of one of the gangs for protection.

And then your contribution to the conversation is that you directed "West Side Story" in Hawaii last summer.

As soon as this comes out of your mouth, you realize it's the lamest thing you've ever said, basically telling this former gang member that you directed the musical theater version of what he actually lived, and then, to make it worse, THIS comes out of your mouth:

"People died in West Side Story too, Bernardo and Riff, in the Rumble. Of course, that's a dance..."

And as you trail off (before you tell him that Tony was also killed, by Chino, at the end of the musical, which is what you were about to say next), you're aware that you've dug the deepest possible conversation grave for yourself, maybe saying the most inappropriate thing you could say.

But he surprises you by laughing a big, full-bodied laugh (because he realizes that comparing the musical theatre version to what really happened is ridiculous) and then he tells you that West Side Story is his favorite musical. He "saw the movie a whole bunch of times." 

And you ask him if he knows this one and you start to sing the Jets Song:

"When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dyin' day..." and he does know it and he JOINS YOU in the song.

And you sing the whole thing together, acapella. 

And you realize that musical theater is the great gift because you're singing a number from West Side Story with someone who actually lived the gang story in LA but got out, and he knows almost all the lyrics. And he has a decent voice.
 
You don't suggest he take voice lessons with the really good voice teacher you know in LA, even though you consider it for a second.
​
And it was your best Uber ride, ever.

A private message (which I'm sharing because it feels important) from a woman who signed up for my online writers' workshop.

She lives in a city I don't travel to and hasn't taken my workshop before. The fact that she's posted statuses on Facebook that were beautifully written is beside the point.

But I'm mentioning it as a caveat here. You'll see why.

This was our chat.

Her: "Hi, Beth. I took that spot in your workshop, but I think I have to back out." 

Me: "What's going on?"

Her: "Oh, well, I" (pause in the chat) "I wrote something I really liked, and I showed it to my sister, who's an actual writer, and she said it kind of sucked. So, I think it probably does. I may just give my spot to her if that's okay. She wanted to take your workshop anyway and it's sold out. And she's the writer in the family."

Me: "No, I'd like you to take the workshop you signed up and paid for. I don't want your sister to take your spot."

(pause in the chat)

Her: "Why?"

Me: "Because your sister saying your writing 'kind of sucked,' whatever that means, has nothing to do with you finding your story. And your story will be good because it's your story. No one can replace that. Don't give up your spot. That's giving up your voice."

(pause in the chat)

Me: "It's your turn to write."

(pause in the chat)

Her: "Okay, fuck it. It's my turn to write. Thank you. I'll keep the spot."

Oh, boy. How we step to the back of the line... This is a reminder for every one of us. Don't give up your voice. Even for your sister. (Who means well? Hmm.) And don't let ANYONE tell you that what you have to say doesn't have value. It does.
 
One Life.

​At the Seattle Airport yesterday, on a layover, coming back to Hawai’i. A little girl was walking around a Starbucks. Maybe 3 or 4 years old. An older, rather conservative-looking woman, behind me in line, asked the girl where her mommy was, obviously thinking she was wandering around alone. (She wasn’t – her parents were right there in line, watching her.) The girl said, “I don’t have a mommy. I have two daddies.” The woman’s response: “Lucky You.”

And that’s how things have changed. One of her dads swooped her up, seeing she was talking to a stranger, and took her back to the line. He didn’t hear the conversation, but I did. And while “Where’s your mommy?” isn’t a great question as it assumes a lot, the response was great. 

“Lucky you.”

The world now.

​Better.

When you slide on water someone spilled as you make your way to baggage claim at the Houston airport, carrying a very heavy backpack with writing journals and a book and your new reusable water bottle and lots of other stuff, and you're going to land on that crazy-hard floor (it's impossible to not fall once you lose your balance) but you somehow process HOW you need to fall, which happens in a split second, and maybe all those long-ago stage combat classes actually stay with you for the rest of your life, and you fall well (that's how you perceive it, anyway, from the perspective of someone witnessing), if there's an art to falling (the art of the fall - something Rena Shapiro perfected years ago, terrifying random strangers in a semi-regular prank), and tonight, after falling like that, you're popping back up gracefully (sort of) -- feeling kinda magical, like Mary Poppins -- after going down on your ass in the middle of an airport in Texas with a computer in your bag.

The computer is in a military case, but still...

So yes, you feel like a klutz, but you also feel like a break dancer.

And no matter how tired you are at midnight when you find yourself lying on the ground at the Houston Airport, wondering if this is a metaphor for something you need to pay attention to, when you pop back up and you're bounding on to baggage claim... nothing broken in your backpack or your body... you realize it's a hurrah moment.

And you want to sing "I Could Have Danced All Night" (it does occur to you), but you don't.

Because everything bad that could have happened after going down hard at the airport didn't.

And a little gift is no little thing.

Here's to the random falls that don't take us out. And of course, we're not invincible, but sometimes we're just so very lucky.
 
And a little bit balletic. 🙃

On Saturday, I taught my first Kahilu Youth Troupe acting class of the semester.

Twenty-five or so kids, mostly teens, who were willing and even eager to spend four hours of their Saturday learning a method acting technique and doing improv & theater games. We had a really good first day. 

Instead of posting the picture I took of the class, I'm posting a photo of this two-year-old dog who came to the class with a new student, one of the younger kids - I'll call her "J."
 
J has Type 1 diabetes, and the dog, who will stay down like this, stands up if J needs to check her blood sugar. She may stand up to stretch too, J's mom said, but I would know if she's standing because of a blood sugar issue.

Everything that could be learned about commitment, making choices, and being in the moment (so much of what you need for acting) could be learned by watching this dog during the four hours of that class. Even though she seems to be resting in this photo, the minute J moved anywhere in the room, this dog shifted focus. And when J left the room to use the restroom, she was on high alert. At one point she did stand up, and J walked out of the improv she was part of to check her blood sugar level. 

It's 9/11 today.

I lived back east in 2001, 5,000 miles away from where I live now, in Hawai'i, and I wrote a piece early this morning about watching the towers burning from my back yard. I've written the story before, in different forms, of how that life-altering day played out for each of us.
 
It was Sean's first day of kindergarten and I couldn't help my friend, the mother of one of Sean's classmates, who couldn't reach her husband in the World Trade Center, and the panic attached to that once she realized what was happening.

He lost his life in the first tower on a beautiful September morning, during his oldest child's first day of school. 

I spent some time writing that piece, but then it occurred to me that today, eighteen years later, the story I want to post is about how we hold each other up. In this case how a dog can hold up a girl just by standing, with such hope connected to that act. The care it took to train this dog, and the kind of devotion it takes to save a life all day, every day.
 
That kind of love. 

Heroes come in many forms, both human and animal.
 
A dog in an acting class with a young girl with the singular task of service. Of knowing her blood sugar level. That's what I'm thinking about on 9/11 - eighteen years after we were witnesses.

That's what's good in the world. And right now, with the state of things, we need some good. 

Here she is, my friends. In animal form. 
​
And I was a witness to that too.

​Oh, man. I was just on the phone with a customer service representative who had to put me on hold to get some information for me. A version of “Midnight Train to Georgia” came on that I had never heard. Not the usual on-hold music, it was an acapella cover with a fantastic singer singing the Gladys Knight part (there was no one singing the Pips’ backup) and I quickly realized that I was listening to someone actually singing on the phone, it wasn’t piped-in music.

When she came back I asked if that was her singing. There was a long pause and she said, “I put you on hold,” but she obviously didn’t, and she was singing to herself while she was looking up the info.

Her: “I’m so sorry. I really thought I put you on hold. I’m not supposed to sing at work.”

Me: “Oh My God, you have a fabulous voice. That was thrilling.”

Her: “What? Are you kidding?” (She starts laughing.)

Me: “No, you should be singing. I want a copy of your version of Midnight Train to Georgia.”

She starts laughing hysterically.

Her: “You know that song? My mother played that for me when I was a kid. She loved that song.”

(Ah, I realize I’m probably her mother’s age. Midnight Train to Georgia came was out in the mid-’70s, when I was in high school.)

Her: “I can’t believe this. My boyfriend says I should try out for ‘The Voice’ but I’m too busy with work. That’s all I ever wanted to do, anyway. Sing. Umm, okay, I have your information. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

She didn’t want to get in trouble for singing. When I was a kid my mother had to go to up to my school for a meeting, more than once, because I was singing in class (to myself) and the teacher said it was disruptive. But I had a mother who wouldn’t let anyone shush me. My mother never told me to stop singing, even in school. Instead, she took me to voice lessons.

Me: “I don’t care about the info, I can get it later. Could you sing Midnight Train to Georgia one more time?”

Pause.

Her: “Really?”

Me: “Yes!”

Her: (laughing) “Oh My God.”

​
​And then she sang the entire Midnight Train to Georgia and I’ll tell you right now that if she goes on The Voice or any of those other you’ve-got-talent shows she’ll move to the top because she’s incredible. A husky, soulful voice with perfect pitch (even without music) and an emotional connection to what leaving LA means to go home to Georgia because the guy she loves didn’t make it in the big city. “I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine.” All heart. All talent.

I told her I love her voice, I urged her to find a way to audition for that show, and we talked briefly about how short the window is and that the dream is the dream and then my signal died and I lost her. I didn’t even get her name.

Don’t let anyone tell you to stop singing, to stop doing anything that brings you bliss. There’s one window in your one life to do it. Find a way, if you possibly can. Chase the dream.

So I dedicate today to the singer at customer service whose name I didn’t get, and who thought she put me on hold but didn’t, and who ended up being the gift in my day.
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One life.

My friends.
 
This is what I'm thinking about at 4:55 a.m. in Hawai'i, in the dark, with my body having lost all concept of time zone.
 
Tell the people in your life what you see when you see them. One of the best uses of the written word is to speak someone back.

Not just their words, but them.
 
My gorgeous friend in NYC, Deena Levy, a gifted actor/acting teacher, wrote this to me yesterday:

"You so exquisitely live on that edge of pain and bliss, balanced by such gratitude."

That statement not only took me by surprise, not only thrilled me, not only gave me at least two new writing prompts (which I will credit to her), but her words are staying with me today. The meaning of that edge and the concept of gratitude as a balancer, and how we experience the yin yang of pain and bliss.

Which reminds us we're alive. And the intensity - and yes, gratitude - of being seen.

A writer wrote, in one of my workshops, about the difference between saying, "I love you" and "luv ya." It may feel too naked to say the whole thing, to go all the way with a declaration like that, but "I love you" is the much greater offering. There's nothing truncated or held back.

It's 5:00 a.m. in Hawai'i. This is what I'm thinking about in the pre-morning darkness.
 
Words as a gift. ❤️

And then, at your kid's graduation from college, you're a million miles away in a Greek amphitheater—and you're in the top row so there's no way your boy can see you from where he is as you take a photo of the whole graduating class, five hundred or so kids—but he's looking right at you, smiling. And your daughter, who came in from San Antonio for this, is cheering so loudly for her brother, "Go, Sean!!!," that it's even louder than the orchestra, and you know that while there will be, if you're lucky, many other moments to celebrate in your lifetime, that moment of finding your kid in the crowd, as you sit surrounded by your whole family with your daughter screaming her brother's name, is a joyous heart-beating-hard thing that happened in a split second.
 
And you caught it in a photo.

A woman wrote to me about one of my upcoming writers' workshops.
 
She read about it on Facebook.
 
She wrote, "I'm bursting at the seams with stories but have never written any of them down. I'm about to turn 80. Is it too late to start? To even think of calling myself a writer?"
 
Her message did me in. I sat with it for a long time.
 
The image of the stories trying to burst out of the seams of a life, like an old dress that doesn't fit... your body saying no to that too-tight thing, unable to squeeze into what no longer works.
 
I sent this quote back to her. "It is never too late to be what you might have been." ~ George Eliot.
 
I really believe that. That it's never too late. That's what's so gorgeous about living. You can do what you need to do when you realize you need to do it. Writing is a practice.
 
Just pick up a pen and start.