sea salt

Moment of silence, April 22, 2013, 2:50pm On April 10 I was on a plane. Kevin and I were returning from a 2-week trip to the UK, where we had visited England, Wales, and Scotland. As we settled into our seats for the long flight home, I flipped through our guide book and itineraries, reliving each interaction, each long walk, each wonder that left us speechless, overtaken with beauty and history. One night I couldn't forget was the first night we spent in York. Famous for being the most haunted town in all of England, York seemed an exciting place for us to visit (Kevin loves all things haunted and spooky, while I shudder at night when the wind blows through the trees. We're quite a pair.). After a long walk through the city, we ate dinner at The Golden Fleece - the most haunted pub in York, with over 100 different ghosts reported through the years. The interior was dark and cramped, and the air was heavy. I got chills just looking at the photos on the wall, the "B...

J.J. was a skinny kid who moved to our neighborhood when I was in middle school. He was my age, but a lot shorter than me (most of the boys were). More importantly, he played basketball in his driveway. For a few glorious summers, there were enough kids in my neighborhood to have big games of basketball, dodge ball, and hide-and-seek. So one afternoon I took my basketball over to J.J.'s house and rang the doorbell. "A bunch of us are playing basketball at the end of the street. Wanna play?" After that he became a regular in our pick-up games, which we played most nights in the summer and every weekend. We didn't know each other very well, as we went to different schools, but my parents liked his parents, he was nice, and really good at basketball. Perfect qualities for a neighborhood kid. And because he was so much shorter than me, I never had a crush on him. When we reached high school, J.J. moved back to Milwaukee to live with his biological father, and I di...

On May 22, I felt an overwhelming sense of pity. Sympathy, maybe. As everyone knows, a fringe sect (some might say cult) of Christians believed the world would end on May 21. And they didn't keep it to themselves. They created websites, wrote articles, made t-shirts and paraded through the streets of major cities in buses with fear-mongering verses about hell and damnation. They were passionate, excited and yes, over-the-top. But they really believed the world would end, and for them, assured they would go to heaven, it would be the best day of their lives, the last day they had to live on earth (which for many people, for many reasons, is indeed a happy thought). But May 21 came and went. The Internet quickly became clogged with jokes, pictures of "rapture pranks" and articles proclaiming the absurdity of how fervently these people believed in something that never happened at all. I admit, I laughed at a few, and we jokingly texted our pastor to see if he was still ar...

  (in loving memory of Alison) Last week Kevin and I had dinner with some dear friends who have a 2-year old and a 3-month old. Their lives have changed dramatically since they had children, their world turned upside down. We had a pretty dramatic year ourselves. In the span of less than one year, we were engaged, married, transplanted to a new state, and homeowners. Each decision felt like the biggest of our lives. People do this every day , we kept reminding ourselves. But that didn't make it any easier. When we shared this with Brian and April, they laughed. "Wait till you have kids," they said. "To you, every moment is the biggest deal of your life. But everyone has kids. So you're saying, 'Guess what! My child is potty-trained!' but everyone has already gone through it. It feels like the whole world has changed, but it really only has to you." We laughed. We don't have kids, but we understood. Lots of people get married and buy hous...

On Sunday our pastor read from 2 Samuel, in which Araunah says to God, "I would not make an offering that cost me nothing."  The story shed light on the true meaning of any kind of gift - someone gives up something for the sake of another.  This is why the idea of re-gifting has such shameful connotations in our society.  It's not that you didn't appreciate what was given to you, but that you've sacrificed nothing in order to give a gift.  It's easy, convenient, and superficial - if anyone can do it for free, it means very little. My husband loves Henry David Thoreau, and we have adopted one of his adages as a guiding principle: "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."  The most important and valuable choices can cost a great deal of life, and the trick is knowing which ones are worth it. A cost I willingly absorb is the cost of keeping in touch - really keeping in touch - with extended family and far-away friends.  I a...

The past few days have been overcast. Boston has been gloomy, rainy, and grey. It is May, but there is a little bit of winter in every month in New England, and this month I am having a rough time. I have just completed five weeks’ worth of training for two different part-time online jobs, crammed for and taken the GRE, and adopted a dog for nine days while my friend and her husband are out of town. The dog and my two cats tolerated each other, but all three animals were on edge in my small apartment. I was stressed about their stress, guilty about leaving the dog in his pen at night so he wouldn’t scuffle with the cats, and overwhelmed by the major tasks still to complete: the wedding, the move, and the job(s) I’ll need to support us while my fiancé is in graduate school. Usually upbeat, my attitude was floating in a puddle of rainwater. I arrived home last night after spending some time with my fiancé, most of which I spent coughing and complaining about the new dog allergy I t...

 (published in word~river literary review) "What I love about our students is that there is so much to mine out of them.  They're not used to valuing education, or thinking that they have intelligent things to say, but it's in there..." This is my answer to the question I hear a lot these days: "What do you like about teaching?" It's true.  Our students are at a wonderful crossroads in their education, where they can decide to complete an associate's degree and begin careers, or they can transfer to a 4-year college and earn a bachelor's degree.  No matter what they choose, they are very often accomplishing more than they, their parents, and many of their teachers thought possible.  I'm not sure when I first compared teaching to mining, but I can't think of a more apt way to describe it.  What makes mining unique is that it's not a guaranteed success - you can fail.  This doesn't mean the precious metals or diamonds ...

Last night I peeled a pound of shrimp. It was a slimy task, tedious, and smelly. And I had to continually shoo the cats away, since the smell of fresh seafood drove them crazy. Standing over the pile of shrimp, peeling off their tails and legs, I had a bizarre feeling of power. I thought, "How pathetic that the part I'm peeling away is the shrimp's armor - its protection - and I'm just standing here, unaffected, peeling it away. Why even bother having a shell when it's this easy to take off?" And then I pulled too hard on the end of one and the whole tail came off, shell and shrimp. And the next one I squeezed too hard while peeling away the legs and I all but flattened the shrimp. And then I realized it wasn't an easy task at all. The shell has to come off - there's no way around it. But it has to be removed slowly, carefully, and gently. A tug too hard in one direction will bisect the shrimp; holding the shrimp too firmly while peeling causes ...

At the Lily Pad in Cambridge last Saturday, I was confronted with the power of music.  Three groups played; all three featured the deep, haunting voice of the cello.  I arrived at the show in good spirits - I hadn't been to the venue since it re-opened (Boston-based readers may remember the Zeitgeist, which previously occupied the space), my boyfriend was playing for the first time with a new band, and it had reached fifty degrees that day.  All was well in my world. And then the first cello played.  The cellist played with her eyes closed, moved by every note; I was on the verge of tears.  My heart tensed up, taut as the strings on the cello as the bow was pulled across.  I felt my body relax when the bow was lifted; the cellist closed her eyes again and I could barely breathe.  What was happening?  I kept reminding myself, Nothing is wrong!  You have no reason to cry!   And I believed it, and I kept my...

You know by now what's going on in Haiti... My company (Pearson Education) is extending its philanthropy to Oxfam's relief work.  They have made an initial donation of $25,000, and will now match ANY donation you make through the site. Please click on the link below to make a donation - no matter how small - and Pearson will send the same amount to Oxfam.  Small amounts add up quickly, so I have faith that the matching program will be a wonderful help to relief efforts. http://www1.pearsonfoundation.org/haiti_relief Even if you cannot donate, continue to pray for Haiti, and for every person involved - victims, families, and relief workers.  We cannot change what happened, but we can still do our best to help. **The painting is by a talented artist named Megan Wackes, who recently completed a series of paintings of Haitian children, which she then sold for charity.  Please visit her sites below and contact her! Haiti album Megan Wackes Art Me...

I've had a song in my head all day - actually, one line of a song: "Ooooooh, I keep crawling back to you..." This is the chorus of "Crawling Back to You" by Tom Petty (Wildflowers album).* He repeats this line twice between the verses of the song, and it's enough. The line is simple, the music is subdued, and the message is clear: I'm coming back. The idea of crawling back to someone is desperate, ashamed, and exhausted. We say it with embarassment - "I went crawling back to my old boss," or with satisfaction, "He came crawling back to me," or with anger, "Don't come crawling back here when you need something!” The action of crawling in adult relationships carries such tension, such weight, so much shame that we forget it's the only way to learn how to walk. We see it as regression, a place of weakness, humility, and powerlessness. A place so low we can only look up, but somehow seem able to move forward - beca...

At Government Center train station, where I transfer from the green line of work to the blue line of home, I am privileged to hear free performances by a few of Boston's growing number of train station musicians. Some of these are quite talented (a guitar player at Park Street who sings country songs, a trumpeter at Davis Square who plays Beatles and Van Morrison tunes); others simply play and sing because they know how. Either way, they are hard to ignore - they are singing to get your attention, and hopefully, your money. A few weeks ago someone got my attention - he was softly playing the guitar, looking down, not singing. Yet when I heard the notes my heart stood at attention, this familiar melody calling me to a deep peace that I'd known since childhood. The song was "Trust and Obey," a hymn composed by Daniel Brink Towner in the late 1880s. I have known every word of this song since I was a child, though I have never sung it in church. My mother used to si...

  (published in Evergreen Review, Issue No. 125) Last week I was detained at a border crossing in the Middle East. (1) I realize this sounds to many of you like the first sentence in an editorial that you might see in U.S. News and World Report .  And prior to my trip, I would have thought stories that began like this were rare, or isolated to tall, dark, bearded men foolishly trying to smuggle guns across the border.  This time, it's my story. (2) To get to the Israeli border in the first place, my friend and I drove to the Jordanian border check, where our bags were scanned for weapons, our passports were checked and stamped, and we boarded a bus where our passports were collected, inspected again, and returned once we reached the Israeli border.  At the Israeli border, teenagers in khaki pants and polo shirts held massive guns over their shoulders, talking to each other and texting on their phones.  When our bus pulled up they watched us, hands...

On Saturday, I had my fortune read.  I was part of a group celebrating a friend's upcoming wedding, and the bachelorette festivities included a reading at Regina Russell's Tea Room in Quincy.  I'll admit, this is not usually my thing.  As a child I was not allowed to own a Ouija board, I was afraid when girls at sleepovers wanted to play "light as a feather, stiff as a board," and I was told in Sunday school that people who read horoscopes were agents of sorcery and evil. However, I also made countless paper fortune tellers in school, with fortunes like, "You will get kissed this year" and "You will marry the class nerd ."  I had fun reading the daily horoscopes in the newspaper, which were featured on the page adjacent to the advice columns, which I also read daily.  I never thought these games and interest in the future were evil - it was fun to suppose what if...? So I agreed to a Tarot card reading.  It was fifteen minute...