Category: Family

Kraft American Singles

5/13/2018

We are watching Ed Sullivan, as we always do on Sunday nights. We are in the den, a narrow space off the living room. A couch lines the long wall beneath a couple of windows whose venetian blinds are shut; a few feet away, an upholstered chair sits in front of the desk where my father comes to pay bills. Now he’s in the chair: dark hair parted and combed to his left, button-down plaid shirt, khaki pants, each foot on the floor. The rest of us – my mother, my two younger brothers and I – perch side by side on the couch, twisting slightly to our right to face the television set.

During the commercials, we can get snacks. Eating while watching television – it’s the perfect pairing. My father likes to have an apple; my mother takes a little bowl of black licorice nubs. I don’t remember what my brothers have. I head for the kitchen, open the refrigerator and peer into its illuminated insides. I consider carefully until I know what I want: cheese.

Kraft American slices – the orange ones, each individually wrapped. I get one in my lunchbox sometimes. Tonight I slip one out of the package where a stack of them looks like shiny corduroy. I bring the piece back to the den intact, and as the program resumes, I start in.

I begin by lifting the cellophane and pulling it back to expose about a third of the slice of cheese, which I fold onto the rest of the slice and watch as it breaks off in a straight line, its edge jagged. I continue folding that third horizontally until I end up with three plastic-y squares. I put one on my tongue and let it sit; the cheese doesn’t dissolve, but it gets warmer, and creamier, and I mash it against the roof of my mouth. Flavor emanates – impossible to describe – a sweet saltiness that is somehow orange itself. Satisfying. It doesn’t take long before I’ve swallowed it, but its taste lingers within the cavern of my mouth.

I do this with the other two squares I’ve already broken off. Then I peel away more cellophane, fold another third and repeat the process until I’m left with the clear, weightless wrapper. Ed Sullivan continues; my father sucks the juice from his apple core. At the next commercial, I get up and toss the paper into the little brown wastebasket under my father’s desk.

~ Susan Hodara

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Journaling

12/16/2016

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I could no longer ignore my messy house. I began in the bedroom I share with my husband, with my shelf of journals and the tiresome chore of dusting. As I have been keeping a journal for over forty years now, this one shelf can take quite some time to dust.

The notebooks I’ve used vary in size, design, and color. The common marble school notebooks; small sketchbooks or more expensive handmade journals; loose sheets of paper that I bind together myself. Some of the older ones have yellowing pages that have become dry and brittle.

In these books I have recorded daily events while also wondering, questioning, and venting. I sometimes tease out ideas for short stories or poems I want to write. When working on a memoir piece I turn to my journals to help me remember. There are pages of doodles and drawings when words have escaped me.

I pulled out four notebooks, at random, and sat on the floor. I flipped through the pages, reacquainting myself with a past self, a younger self, a different self.

July 26, 1982: Jones Beach today. Billy dragged me into the water and I was glad because it felt good.

Billy. My husband, seven years before he became my husband, grabbing me by both hands, walking backwards into the waves, telling me it will be fun. I hesitate, plant my feet firmly, but he does not give up. “Come on! I’ll hold on to you!” he says. His light brown hair is wet and slicked back. His nose is sunburned. His smile is big. I know I trust him. I move toward him, he wraps his arm around my waist, and we are bobbing up and down with the waves. The water cools me, and I am happy. I call him Bill now; Billy is our older son.

November 1, 1993: I should give them to her. My sweet babies, my sons. She is so much better with them than I could ever be. Where does her patience come from? I cannot remember my mother being like that with me, although I imagine she must have been. When I was a baby. Before I became this selfish, miserable person. I feel I am damaging my children.

I am sitting on the blue and white plaid sofa in my mother’s living room. She is rolling around on the floor, my toddler playfully wrestling with her, my two-month-old lying on a blanket nearby. Billy is laughing. Steven is trying to turn towards the commotion, trying to focus and see what is happening beside him. My mother tickles Billy’s belly, kisses his cheeks. Then she tells him, “Let’s check on your baby brother,” and they look over to Steven. I am tired. I am hungry. I am wondering if I will ever be able to relax, if I will ever be what my sons need and deserve.

Mother’s Day, May 11, 1997: At times I feel I’ve left my mother. I’ve pulled back, a bit too far; it’s as if I decided she is already gone. I think it is because I just don’t want to be unhappy. I am useless.

She is not gone, not yet. One more month. But she is already so sick, weak, tired all the time. And I remember the look in her eyes; unfocused, and so frightened. I don’t know how to help her. I still feel like I need her to help me. I promised her, when she first found out about the cancer, that I would find a way to make her well. A promise I could never keep.

March 28, 1999: We missed Mass this morning. The second graders were to attend at 9am, to be part of a procession for Palm Sunday.

My mother has been gone almost two years. It is the phase of my half-hearted effort to be like her, to please her still, by holding on to her religion, by passing it on to my sons. I fail terribly. It makes me realize how much I failed her.

Four entries, and so many stories they can tell.

I met a young man who held on to me. We married and had two sons. In the way my mother did for me, I tried to care for them. When my mother got sick, I wanted to save her, but I could not. I could not keep her safe from all that can go wrong. I will never be able to keep my children safe. For everyone, everything, grows older, can be broken, can be lost.

I placed the notebooks back on the shelf, marveling at how much dust they collect. Perhaps some is the dust of their own decay, their slow decomposition. One day, years from now, all of it — the words, stories, images — will be blown about by the wind, millions of tiny particles floating in a sunbeam.

~ Vicki Addesso

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Dancing in the New Year

3/29/2016

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For the first time in a long time, my mother danced. It was on New Year’s Eve, at an annual celebration hosted by the senior residential facility in Bethesda, Maryland, where she has lived for a year and a half. They hold the event in what they call the ballroom, complete with live music, portable dance floor, instructors to assist the revelers, and, of course, champagne.

My mother attended the party last year, but was afraid to dance, worried she wasn’t steady enough and would fall. She was disappointed, she told me the next day. “Next year,” she said, a promise to herself.

Over the past 12 months, my mother has continued to exercise, but just shy of 89, she has come to rely more on her walker than her cane. Nevertheless, she kept her promise. She announced her victory first thing on New Year’s Day, when I called her from New York. “You’ll be happy to know that I danced last night,” she said. “I’m very proud of myself.”

I fired some questions at her as I tried to conjure the scene.

What did she wear? Her black pants, her embroidered red jacket, and her pearls, she told me. “What I always wear on special occasions,” she said. I knew the outfit; she had probably worn well-blotted red lipstick, too.

Whom did she dance with? First, one of the instructors. “I explained my situation and he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll hold onto you.’” Then she danced with one of the residents, someone she’d shared meals with in the dining hall along with his wife.

What music did they play? Jazz standards, old familiars. “I danced to ‘It Had to be You,’” she said, the song I’d heard her sing in the kitchen of the house she’d lived in with my father, and where she remained alone for seven years after he died.

There are two versions of that night that I picture in my mind. In one, my mother clutches the instructor’s arms as she moves her feet in tiny, tentative increments. She is small, a little stooped, and her skin is pallid against her short gray hair. She is concentrating, willing herself to stay upright, barely hearing the song.

In the other, she is gliding, her satiny pants flowing around her ankles, her pearls glistening in the light from a chandelier. Her lips form a rosy smile and her cheeks are blushing as she sings along with the music: “It had to be you, it had to be you…” She has forgotten her age, as have I.

~ Susan Hodara

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When Pinto Got Paroled

1/15/2016

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The last of the barred doors clanged shut behind me and soon I was standing in front of Sing Sing’s huge stone administration building, the prison’s main entrance. I was carrying a cardboard carton that held Pinto – a half-grown black-and-white cat – and his cellmate, Missy, an all-black little male named by prisoners confused about his gender.

As I turned to head for my car, I heard the voices of prisoners behind the bars on an upper level. “Goodbye, Pinto,” they called.

I was a freelancer for the New York Times, and also a volunteer in a Sing Sing writing workshop. The Times had assigned me an article about how inmates at two Westchester County prisons not far from my home – women at Bedford Hills and men at Sing Sing – were able to humanize their lives within the confines of a maximum security prison.

It was 1977, six years after the Attica rebellion, when prisons started opening their doors to reporters and volunteers. Restrictions had been loosened, and the media became more interested in what was happening inside the walls. The Bedford Hills women told me about how they altered their drab green uniforms to make them more stylish, how they rubbed Vaseline on red and blue magazine photographs and spread the colors on their lips and eyelids.

Some men at Sing Sing said they made paintings, kept fish tanks in their cells, and had pet cats. The cats had found their way into the prison yard through holes in the old stone walls, and eventually into the cell blocks, where prisoners lured them to their cells by offering tidbits of food. One prisoner mentioned he begged gefilte fish from the Jewish chaplain.

After I finished the article, the paper sent a photographer to Sing Sing, and when my story appeared it was accompanied by a picture of a young prisoner standing in front of the bars of his cell holding a small black-and-white cat. Coincidentally, this prisoner – the owner of two cats – was also in the writing workshop.

A few days later I received a letter from him saying he’d heard on the grapevine that a cat purge was in the works. “They say they will give the cats to the SPCA,” he wrote, “but we know they’ll put them in burlap bags and toss them into the Hudson.”

I got on the phone to the warden. “Are you getting rid of the cats because of my article?” I asked. He said no, the article had nothing to do with it. Cats had begun to overrun the cellblocks, creating a nuisance and unsanitary conditions. They had to go.

After more back-and-forth with the warden over the next few days, he finally said that I could take the prisoner’s two cats out of the prison after the next writing workshop.

Toward the end of the session, as the inmates and I sat in a circle of folding chairs discussing that week’s readings, the cat-owning prisoner left the room and came back carrying a medium-sized cardboard carton with the top closed. When the workshop ended he placed the box in my arms. The inmates filed down the corridor, back to their cells. I walked the other way, escorted by a guard. When we reached the locked bars at the end of the hallway the guard shouted, “On the gate, two cats, out on parole,” and the lock clicked open. One more gate and I was in the lobby and out the door.

I settled the box in my car’s passenger seat and drove the twenty minutes to my house, where I tipped the cats out of the carton and led them to their food, water, and litter box. Pinto was wearing a brown leather collar embossed with his name, which must have been created by his owner in the prison crafts shop. I went to bed, and in the morning the cats were nowhere to be seen. After my teenage sons had left for school and my husband went to work, I searched the house, and finally found the two crouched together behind the television set in the living room.

They gradually relaxed and we began letting them outdoors during the day. But a few months later, when my sons were returning from school, they discovered Missy’s body on the street in front of our house. He’d been hit by a car. From then on, when Pinto went outside he seemed more cautious; he spent his time relaxing under a rhododendron bush in front of the house, and we kept a close eye on him.

He grew into a solid, beautiful cat, loving, intelligent, and sweet-natured. But whenever a visiting man with a heavy tread walked into the house, Pinto cowered in fear, no doubt recalling the prison guards who had stomped around the cellblocks.

When Pinto was fifteen, my husband, Roy, and I retired from our jobs, sold our suburban home, and moved to a log cabin in the Adirondacks. We worried about letting our cat outdoors, fearing he would wander into the woods and disappear – captured by a coyote or becoming hopelessly lost as he tried to make his way back.

But he figured things out and seemed content with his rural existence. In summer, he sat under the pine trees and among the wildflowers, watching chipmunks and red squirrels speed past. On cold winter days he sprawled on the tile hearth in front of the woodstove. He was making a better adjustment than I was.

I often felt lonely and isolated, especially when summer ended and our downstate family and friends stopped visiting. I felt out of place in our small town, where the residents had lived for generations. Sometimes I cried with frustration, railing at my husband about our ill-conceived move.

Pinto was my comfort. When I sat at the kitchen table with my morning coffee, he hopped onto my lap and stayed there until it was time for me to start my day. In the evening, as I lay on the couch reading or watching TV, he curled up on my stomach. In bed, he stretched his warm body next to mine and purred me to sleep.

Two years after our move, Pinto developed a malignant tumor on his side. His vets, Diane and David, removed it and he recovered, but before long another tumor appeared, this time inoperable. He gradually became thinner and weaker. When we let him outdoors, he seemed bewildered. One day he wandered in the wrong direction, and I discovered him crouched on a fallen tree.

From then on when I let him out I followed him as he moved slowly across the grass, stopping now and then to rest in a sunny spot. Then I’d pick him up and carry him back into the house. In the evening I’d carry him to the couch, sit down, and gently lower him onto a soft blanket I’d folded on my lap. Soon even that made him uncomfortable; he chose to spend his days lying on a towel behind the open bathroom door.

Roy and I could see that he was suffering, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to choose to end his life. Some mornings as we watched him trudge into the kitchen for a few bites of breakfast, one of us would say, “He seems to look better today,” and the other would agree. But of course we were fooling ourselves.

The vets would only lay out our options, leaving us with the final decision. But one day David said,” Pinto has been kind and loving to you for eighteen years. Now you can do something kind for him.”

The next day, David and Diane helped Pinto die. Afterward, I wrapped his body in a soft cloth, placed it in a box, and buried it at the top of a small rise that overlooked the cabin. I collected smooth, grey stones from the woods and built a cairn to mark the grave. When our young granddaughters came to visit, they painted bright flowers on the stones, and on the biggest one they printed in brilliant red letters: PINTO.

A few years later we sold our log cabin and moved back to the suburbs. We left behind the chipmunks that ate sunflower seeds from our hands and the hummingbirds that darted past our faces on the way to their feeders. And we left Pinto’s decorated grave.
On trips to the Adirondacks to visit friends, I could never bring myself to return to our cabin to see if the new owners had preserved the grave or had dismantled the colorful stones and tossed them into the woods.

~Joan Potter
Memoir reprinted from Celebrating Animal Rescue,
  Splattered Ink Press, available on Amazon

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My Guys

8/31/2014

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When our book was published I gave a copy to my husband, even though I have rarely seen him read anything other than the sports section of the newspaper. I also gave a copy to each of my sons, despite some hesitation on my part.

In our book I reveal things about myself that may seem shocking. Being molested by an uncle as a child. Drug use in my teens and early twenties. Depression. Anxiety. I had wondered if it was a good idea to open myself up like that, knowing family and friends, and yes, my children, would be able to read it. But I knew I had to write my story.

At the time, a little over a year ago, Billy was about to turn twenty-two and Steven was nineteen. All three of my guys were happy for me, and I think proud. Did I expect any of them to actually read it? I hoped they would. But, it is a book about mothers and daughters, written by four women. For a moment I regretted not having a daughter to read my story. Would a man, especially a young man, be interested?

My husband read my section of the book. He said he cried while reading about my struggle with postpartum depression and the chapter about my mother’s death. He told me he thought I was brave to write some of the things I did. I said he should read the other three sections, and he said he would, but he hasn’t so far.

Billy claimed to have too much to do, and yes, he is very busy, with school and work and friends. Though I do notice he has plenty of time to read the Game of Thrones books.

Steven started with my section and then read the whole book. This was not unexpected; Steven is a sensitive and generous person. I knew he wanted to read it for me. Yet I was surprised at how interested he was in the stories. He would knock on my door, book in hand, and ask if I had time to talk. Of course, I’d say. We had many discussions that grew out of his reading. He was seeing me not just as his mother, but as someone’s child, as a teenager, as a young adult unsure of what she wanted from her life, or how to proceed once she found out.

As we talked I realized how much my son needed me to write this book. That revelation was bittersweet.

~Vicki Addesso

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Elusive Memory

7/24/2014

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Memories are elusive. Sometimes they come in broken pieces, like dreams; sometimes they’re confusing and you find yourself surprised that they happened.

One of the greatest challenges of writing memoir is the choppiness of memory. You might have a strong image of your mother cooking breakfast, but you can’t connect it with a particular event. You might remember that you had measles, but you can’t recall the details of the experience.

People often ask if it’s okay to make things up to fill in the gaps. The answer is no. One of the most basic and important tenets of memoir is that it’s the truth – your truth. It’s the truth of what you carry with you from your past. The minute you veer away from that – add a straw hat or make up a location or throw in a line of dialogue that you don’t really recall – you are breaking your pact with your reader, and with yourself. Memoir comes from your life. If you want to embellish, call it fiction.

There are ways to work with the slippery realities of memory. Often my starting point is a clear but isolated image – like a tiny movie that begins and ends abruptly. I believe it’s there for a reason; it holds some significance. So I describe the image: my mother is here, my brothers are there, the weather is warm, the wind is blowing through the window, I have a sore throat.

I’ve found that through the process of writing, more memories emerge. When we decided to write our book, one of my biggest fears was that I didn’t remember enough. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill my section with stories. But by sitting down and starting with the few distinct memories I had, other moments resurfaced, details unfolded, and new truths were revealed. It was like finding buried treasure, and I was finally able to tell the story I wanted to tell.

~Susan Hodara

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Just Write

6/2/2014

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Whenever we do readings, many audience members are anxious to tell us how much they identify with our experiences, and to share stories of their own mothers. In response, the four of us have been offering mother memoir workshops. After we’ve read from our book and talked a bit about memoir, the participants write about their own mothers. It might be for fifteen minutes, or even just five, the scratching of pens and the clicking of keyboards the only sounds in the room. Then one by one they read aloud what they’ve written.

Images of mothers materialize, this one in a wide-brimmed hat, that one sunning herself at the beach. Daughters idolize their mothers, or hate them, or can’t wait for them to come home from work. They watch their mothers reading magazines, preparing food, applying lipstick, and zipping up a fancy dress. One women wept as she read about her mother being beaten by her father and calling to her for help. In her story, she was a little girl; now her long gray hair was piled onto her head, but the memory still burned.

I am always inspired by the power of the details and the depth of emotion that emerge so quickly, so spontaneously. These snippets of memories culled in just minutes demolish the excuse of not having enough time or of not being in the right frame of mind. They are testimony to the long-running wisdom behind the craft: just write.

~Susan Hodara

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A Second Look

4/13/2014

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My father died in January. The house where he lived, where I grew up, where my mother and brother and sisters and grandparents and great-grandmother and great-aunt had all lived at one time, is now empty. Empty of people, that is. It’s still full of stuff.

My siblings and I have to clean it out and clean it up. We have to sell the old place.

I went there early this morning. I pulled a chair into the kitchen, climbed on it, and started taking down all the potholders Mom had tacked on the walls. I didn’t count but my guess is she had twenty up there. She used them as decorations. They were embroidered with flowers and vegetables. They’d been hung along the top of the wall above the cabinets for so long that they were dusty and grimy. As I was piling them on the dining room table my sister Debi walked in. She grabbed a trash bag, shook it open, and slid the potholders off the table into the bag.

“You don’t want these, do you?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said.

My mother was a clutterer. Knick-knacks everywhere. Shelves, windowsills, end tables, any flat surface - covered. Not one wall in that house has more than a few inches of naked space. She loved to go to garage sales, flea markets, and craft fairs and bring home more stuff. To her it was cute or pretty or funny, and that’s all that mattered. The only problem was all that junk collected dust, and Mom did not like to spend much time cleaning. The house always looked neat, and it was always welcoming and homey, but if you looked closely, you could see the layers of dust growing denser as time passed.

After Mom died, my father developed a schedule for his cleaning. But by this point, the crust of dust on all the knick-knacks had become a thick shroud, and my father’s efforts weren’t enough to wipe it away.

Debi and I laughed at the ghostly imprints left behind by all the things we cleared away. A donut where a wreath of dried flowers had been. When we removed a narrow shelf from the dining room wall, there appeared the silhouette of an erect penis. Flower pots stuck to the windowsills and had to be pried off. We’d hold up each object, like a game of show and tell, and ask, “Do you want this?” Nine times out of ten the answer was, “No.”

I did want the crystals Mom had hung with lace ribbon in the dining room window. Debi said, “Fine, they’re yours.” I had bought them for my mother. Going through the dining room and living room I came across other knick-knacks that I’d given to her. A birdcage, made of wood, Victorian-looking, painted a pale blue, with pink rose decals along the wider bars. I remember loving it when I bought it for her. I must have been a teenager. I don’t think she liked it very much, though she wouldn’t have told me that.

Many of the gifts I gave my mother were, in her eyes, strange. Like the crystals. Things I liked. One Christmas I gave her a huge box wrapped in newspaper. She looked so excited, like a little kid, as she opened it. But then I knew. I saw her face: her disappointment. Well, maybe it was puzzlement. I had bought her a model of a tall colonial sailing ship. I had thought she would go crazy for it, but when I saw her looking at it, I realized I had no idea why I thought she’d want something like that. It became the perfect dust collector. Mom put it on the corner shelf in the dining room, a prominent position, and it sat there for years. When my nephew Billy was a toddler he’d cry to play with it, and so she would take it down for him. Soon the strings holding the sails together were broken, the sails themselves in tatters, and now she had a good excuse. “I’m so sorry, but I think I have to throw this out.”

Debi and I were working away when my cell phone rang. It was my boss. “What happened?” she asked. I told her I’d stopped by the house and got caught up in some reminiscing. She was fine with that and understood. I have a very nice boss.

“I’m going to stay for awhile,” Debi said. “If I think there’s anything you might want to keep I’ll put it aside.”

“I don’t want anything.”

As I was driving to work I thought about all the stuff Debi and I had tossed into the trash. Were we pretending that it was easy? Easy to empty a house of things, perhaps. But what about the memories? I think about how it will feel to shut the front door for the last time and walk away.

Then I remember the giant duck cookie jar - or maybe it’s a goose. And the paint-by-number “tapestry” of a red barn that my mother had done. She wrote the year on the back, 1966. The frame is broken, but I could fix it. Maybe I should take a second look.

~Vicki Addesso

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Phoning Mom

1/5/2014

Growing up, I felt I had little to say to my mother. Now I speak with her on the telephone every day.

I don’t mean a quick hello-how-are-you kind of checking in; often we talk for nearly half an hour. And because we’ve spoken the day before, there isn’t much news we have to share. But I know the particulars of my mother’s life: the television programs she watches, the trouble she’s having with her Hebrew homework, the stir-fry she made with all the vegetables in her refrigerator that were getting old. I know about the books she’s reading, the floor she’s having installed in her kitchen, the walk she took or is about to take when we say goodbye.

It started a few years ago when she ended up in the hospital after a fall. Following a visit of several days, daily phone calls were the best way to alleviate my worries about her, and to offer her some distraction until she could return home. When she did, my calls became less frequent — until she fell a few months later and was back in the hospital once again.

I’m the one who calls her, usually late in the afternoons. And because I’m generally not one for prolonged telephone conversations, I prefer to talk when I’m doing something else. Sometimes I chop garlic or unload the dishwasher or fold laundry; if the weather’s nice, I’ll use my cell phone and go for a walk. I have to confess that there are days when I wish I could take a break — when the call begins to feel like an obligation.

Then the other day I got an early morning email from my brother, who lives with his family a few miles from my mother. On the subject line I read “Mom (she’s fine)” and my breath stopped. My mother had been in the hospital the previous night, I learned. She’d been feeling dizzy, something related to the timing of her blood pressure medication. “She was discharged about 3 a.m.,” he wrote. “She’s probably sleeping now.”

I waited an hour before I called her. She filled me in on the details of the episode; she was okay, she said, planning on taking it easy for the day. As I listened, it struck me that no matter how mundane our conversations, they have become a part of my life. They are a touchstone, a simple pleasure that I already know I will miss. It is a gift that I get to have them at all.
~Susan Hodara

Solo

11/17/2013

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I have a close friend who, in a span of seven years, lost her father and grandmother to cancer, her brother to lymphoma, and then her husband to a car accident over an icy bridge that should've been marked. Shortly before her husband’s death, she discovered she was pregnant. She and her husband already had a toddler, and she had a daughter by a previous marriage. Here my friend was, in mourning, and knee deep in motherhood, dealing with it alone.

Over the years, when my sons were testing my limits, I sometimes thought of her. When a difficult decision had to be made, I sometimes thought of her. When my husband offered to pick up the boys from a friend’s house so I could make dinner or I was simply tired, I sometimes thought of her.

At her daughter's wedding this past summer, after the ceremony, my friend was sitting alone in the front row, her curly blond hair framing her profile, the sun setting. My husband and I were seated behind her, and I was thinking of how far she’d carried her children. Then I noticed an ever so slight trembling, and I drifted over to hug her hard. Yes, we were celebrating her daughter’s joy over having found love, but I was also celebrating all that I valued in her, even the quiet tears. I thought: Look at what you’ve done. You’ve raised three bright children who are personable and caring. Later I told her these same thoughts, realizing that I could only imagine the challenges and sacrifices that she, or any single mother, had to face.

During the process of writing our collaborative memoir about mothers and daughters, I explored a mother’s role, my own as well as my co-authors’, and I followed the sweeping impact, the indelible fingerprint she leaves on her child’s spirit. For many reasons, I’m lucky to know my friend, but when it comes to motherhood, she has shown me another side of the story, a narrative suffused with an inimitable resilience and fire.

~ Lori Toppel

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Kraft American Singles

Journaling

Dancing in the New Year

When Pinto Got Paroled

My Guys

Elusive Memory

Just Write

A Second Look

Phoning Mom

Solo

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