The Late Arrival

I work for a nonprofit. More specifically, I raise money for the nonprofit by writing grants, mailing solicitation letters, making calls and tap dancing and singing, if asked. It’s a challenge, I mean, let’s face it: my nonprofit’s not helping puppies, kittens or another awwww-so-cute-invoking constituency. The people coming to us have alcohol and/or drug problems, or struggle to put food on the table, or are unemployed, or have been abused, or are abusing, or are on public assistance, or fall within any range of broke, struggling and searching for a lifeline. Sometimes one person has all of those issues, but more often than not, they’ve got a combination of a few. Issues like those never thrive in a vacuum. We see and hear a lot of the ugly, seedy side , and it isn’t just the ugly seedy people from the ugly seedy side of town who need help. The well-dressed professional from the burbs is just as likely to ring us up or walk through the door as is the tattered person from the slu...

This is mom at about five years old. It was long before she made the vow that changed her name, before balanced meal moderator duty, before matching five different people's multiple pairs of socks post-laundry, and before preventing four kids from strangling each other daily. Even as an adult, it's still hard for me to imagine her as something other than Mom . Maybe she had those days when it was hard for her to imagine it too. I wonder if that season seemed a distant memory as she was elbow-deep in cloth diapers, or waiting at my brother's hospital bedside while he recovered from one his many surgeries at Children's Hospital, or realizing that every thought, every decision she would ever make would be tied to our best interest. I wonder if she giggled at herself amidst the chaos of four children, absent mindedly signing her maiden name on a permission slip, quarterly grade report or some other piece of paper that we kids always seemed to be pushing...

It’s been raining here for about three hundred years. I’ve turned these days that aren’t even colorful enough to be considered gray upside down and tried looking at them from a grateful perspective. You know... sunny thoughts like “This is God’s way of getting us to appreciate little things like sunlight” or “You can’t have rainbows without the rain” or “April showers bring May flowers.” That worked for about two days. Turning on the nightly news didn’t help either. I can’t exactly remember what the "Up Next" teaser was. It might’ve been something about someone killing someone else and how they did it; or maybe it was about what war might break out next, or it could’ve been about a senior citizen getting scammed, but then again maybe it was just something about politicians being at each other’s throats in between filibusters. I frantically switched the channel in search of something lighter…like the Weather Channel . The weather guy, who was donning a stove pipe hat,...

One-third of a woman's life is spent in menopause. One-third . I heard this on a daytime newshow from a "Ladies' Doctor" who works at one of the nation's most respected hospitals. So it's true. Knowing this, and knowing I'm living in some fraction of the dreaded third, you'd think the last thing I'd have done was purge my closet, otherwise known as the Multi-Decade Crypt of 80's and 90's Beloved Relics. Which is the very thing that makes the one-third statistic problematic. My body won't stop changing. I figure I'm in the first third of menopause, which means I'm in perimenopause. My body's doing weird things. Stuff is shifting. Things are flattening out and increasing and decreasing in unpredictable zones at will. The cullling of the jeans made that apparent: some were the Skinny size and some were the Ah-What-the-Heck-I'm-Just-Expandin g Size. Jeans of Broken Dreams I remember buying the Skinny  sizes quit...