My mother had great style and a certain elegance, but no self-confidence. In fact, she actively disliked her looks. She used to say she had the map of Jerusalem on her face. As a grown-up, I tried to disabuse her of this notion, but to no avail. She was a self-hating Jew. Nevertheless, she always had big walk-in closets, full of great clothing and accessories. I was a dreamy “girlie-girl” who loved to play dress-up with play clothes and whatever adult clothes I could get my hands on.

I spent long periods in my mother’s closet. She had a pair of clear, plastic dressy shoes to die for. I was sure these were Cinderella’s glass slippers. They were open-toed, sling-backed, with a great crystal bauble on each and I wore them all the time. Because they were sling-back, they sort of fit me and I pranced around the house in my overalls and the glass slippers. My mother did a lot of charity work and had occasions to go to fancy balls, so had wonderful ball gowns, which I loved to look at (I never tried them on). She also had a beautiful alligator purse (this was in the mid-50’s…we didn’t know any better). I loved the clasp on it and played with it often. I recently saw someone with a similar one. It is back in fashion.

I have a miniature version of my mother’s figure in every way. She was two inches taller than I am, she had bigger breasts, larger everywhere, so I really never fit into her clothing, except the slinky, bias-cut satin gown she wore on her wedding night. That I wore twice: once when I played the glamourous actress Irene Livingston in Moss Hart’s “Light Up the Sky” at camp in 1969. And to the New Year’s Eve party at the Playboy Mansion in 1981. That party is always a pajama party because Hef always wears pajamas and he likes his women in lingerie. I don’t own fancy lingerie, so I wore my mother’s beautiful nightgown. Here it is: it used to be pale blue, but since she wore it in 1946, it has faded. It remains gorgeous; something Jean Harlow would wear.

Mother’s wedding nightgown, 1946

As she aged, she cared less and less about the way she dressed. When I moved her from her independent living apartment to the skilled nursing unit, where she spent the last two and half years of her life, I went through her large closet for the last time. She had become so paranoid and demented that she didn’t let the offered cleaning service come in once a year. The moths had eaten many of her lovely wool skirts to shreds. I saved some of her best suits, in wonderful jewel tones. Perhaps I thought a costume shop would like them, or maybe they’d fit me? They weren’t my style and just this past winter, more than six years after her death, I finally gave them all away. But I discovered beautiful purses and more gloves than any woman could ever wear. Those I kept and love to carry her still elegant purses, which I tell people are truly vintage. They are so well-made, they will never go out of fashion. Her timeless elegance stays with me. I try to forget the rest.

In 1987, the neighbor’s cat roamed around and got knocked up. They gave us the last of the litter, a sweet little female. David was two at the time and had a few children’s books about kittens; in each the protagonist was named Kate so bestowed the name on her. I’d had a dog growing up, so this was a new experience. She was friendly, interested in everything, was quite personable and loud. We had to shut her in the basement at night so we didn’t hear the crying and yowling. She and David fought over his toys. I asked the vet about that. “You have to understand, you have two at the same age developmentally”. Oh dear! At one point she got up on a kitchen chair and took a swipe at his head. I grabbed her by the scruff. “You are now an outside cat!”

She took to the outdoors. I called her in by shaking her treat box. I knew if I didn’t get her in by sunset, I wouldn’t get her that night and I’d hear her crying under our bedroom window at 5am. I once asked a close friend who is a world-reknown vet why she liked being out at night. Debbie answered, “That’s when the critters come out”.

I told her frequently that she was there for the amusement of my children. Jeffrey was the one who really loved her. He sat in his high chair as an infant and went rigid went she walked by. He squealed with delight at everything she did. His first word was, “kitty cat”. No “mom” for my kid. He just adored her. She allowed him to stroke or torment her. He cuddled with her. When he went to bed, she cried outside the closed door, so again, I had to move her away, as he was an incredibly light sleeper. Jeffrey told us that calicos could only be females, due to genetic markers. He knew everything about her and loved her with all his being.

She still spent much of the day outside, hunting. She was good at it, often bringing home trophies for Mom (me), including birds and chipmunks, dead or alive. After having left her in the care of my men, while away for a few days, I found a striped tail on the foyer rug (a fancy beige, Frank Loyd Wright-designed number). “What’s this”, I inquired, mystified and horrified. My husband conceded that Kate had eaten a chipmunk and regurgitated it once inside the house…on the lovely foyer rug. He had tried to clean up, but had left the tell-tale tail!

On a lovely autumn day, I left the door from the porch to the house open to let in fresh air. The outside door was always open so Kate could come and go, and still come onto the porch for shelter and howl at the inside door when she wished to gain entry; sometimes often, as if toying with me. This day, I got laundry out of the dryer in the basement when I heard a thud on the stairs above me. I rushed up and saw our pet had brought a LIVE chipmunk into the house as a special treat for me! Good lord, what would I do. I had planned to go pick up the suit I was to wear to David’s bar mitzvah, only a few weeks away. I knew I couldn’t leave these two creatures alone together. It would not end well. Mine is a large, basically one story house; a few steps down to the living room, a few steps up to some bedrooms, but no doors on most of the rooms, just large open spaces and all beige carpets. I did not want critter blood anywhere. Kate seemed quite pleased with her offering and made no attempt to do anything more. She left it up to me to figure things out. The chipmunk was stunned but not hurt. Once it regained its composure, it ran. I got my oven mitts and decided to try to pick it up and get it out of the house. For a moment, I had it cornered in a bathroom. I picked it up. It screamed (who knew chipmunks could scream) and so did I, dropping it in the process. I hadn’t thought to close the door and it ran out of the bathroom, into the living room, which is down two little steps. The fireplace has a black marble surround. Evidently, chipmunks can’t see that well. It took a flying leap at the black marble, hit it and slid back down. It tired that a few more times. I am screaming obscenities at it…things like, “I am trying to save your f***ing life, you stupid creature.” I also wondered where “America’s Funniest Home Video” was when you really needed them. I finally had the brilliant idea to herd it. I used the potholders to swat at it, first one way, then another, getting it to move in the direction I wanted until I had it out on the porch. Kate followed all this with a certain fascination…”I never knew what a goof my human was”. She had already divined was I was up to and awaited us on the porch. What happened after that, I cannot say. I shut the door and went off to run my errand, regaling my children with the story at school pick-up. I suspect the chipmunk took a flying leap out the door and made its escape.

Kate remained an increasingly fat, happy fixture in our lives for almost 17 years. David went off to Stanford, Jeffrey relied on her companionship. In February, 2004, I noticed she wasn’t well and took her to her vet, who felt a tumor and immediately sent me to our wonderful large, local animal hospital. She had lymphoma. They assured me she could have surgery and still be with us for as much as another year. Jeffrey was in a very bad place in his life. He had just started a special education school, 18 miles from our house, was in emotional shut-down. He needed his cat. We went ahead with the surgery. And a blood transfusion. At every step, the news was bad and expensive. Jeffrey was home with a bad cold when I got the next call from the hospital. They wanted to start chemo. From the next room, I heard the plaintive cry, “Don’t let her die, Mom”. We did all we could. We were told that she would never have proper bowel function and I set up plastic sheeting in her room in the basement. We brought her, battered and bedraggled, home the same day David came home for Spring Break from Stanford. She had been his cat originally and it seemed, waited for him. She passed away at home that night. Jeffrey wanted her ashes, which are still in the little urn in our basement.

He was desolate. “She was the only one in our house who was never angry with me. When I was sad or crying, I buried my face in her fur. What am I going to do?” My heart broke for my special child. We started looking for a new cat the next day, but none could ever replace the special bond Jeffrey had with Kate.

Jeffrey with his cat

I must confess that I have never been very interested in science. Conversations on scientific topics tend to make my eyes glaze over.

My only good science experience was in first grade. We had a lovely teacher named Miss Garcelon, who had just graduated from teachers college, and we were her first class. She decided, for whatever reason, that she was going to teach a bunch of six-year-olds about the human body. So she borrowed a model from the local high school, since they apparently weren’t using it, a human torso that opened up and you could see all of the organs inside. Our first surprise was that a human heart wasn’t shaped like a valentine heart. Also, the heart wasn’t way over on the left, like where you put your hand when you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance — even though that is called putting your hand on your heart — it was actually right in the middle. Further discoveries amazed us. And she taught us a song, to the tune of Witch Doctor, that went “Esophagus and heart, windpipe, stomach and lungs.” Try it, instead of “Ooh eee, ooh ah ah ting tang, Walla walla, bing bang.”  It works!

In my seventh grade science class, we each had to construct a chicken skeleton. This meant going to the butcher shop, buying a whole chicken, cooking it, recovering all the bones, and then putting them together into a full skeleton. I don’t know how we fastened them together. I have a feeling everyone’s parents did most of the work. It was a grueling experience, and I have not liked eating chicken very much ever since.

In high school, I managed to take only one science class in my whole four years, which was Biology, and I didn’t do very well in it. My main memory of that class is sitting there looking at my long hair and biting off the split ends. (My husband, a Yalie, is amazed that I could have gotten into Radcliffe with only one science class on my transcript. I point out that I had five years of Spanish and four years of Latin, which surely made up for the paucity of science.) I loved math, as well as English, history, and languages, but science just did not do it for me.

In college, I foolishly decided to get my Nat Sci requirement out of the way freshman year. This was a bad decision because if I had waited, I would have learned about the various science courses that were geared to non-science types like me, such as “Rocks for Jocks” and “Physics for Poets.” My freshman adviser, who was pretty worthless, suggested taking Nat Sci 5, which was a biology course, since, after all, biology was the one science I knew something about. It was taught by George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize the previous year, and a lot of my friends were taking it, so it seemed like a good idea. It was a disaster. Wald spent as much time as possible reminding us about his Nobel Prize. For instance, when he was lecturing about Watson discovering DNA, he said “and he won HIS Nobel Prize for . . .” Also, it turned out the course was not just biology, it was actually biochemistry, and assumed some knowledge of chemistry. I had absolutely none! Help! We had to memorize the 20 amino acids, and the Krebs cycle, and god only knows what else. It made absolutely no sense to me. On the final exam at the end of the year, there were 10 questions, worth 10 points each. I only understood 3 of the questions. The other 7 might as well have been written in Greek, they were completely incomprehensible to me. So I answered the 3 questions that I understood. I also wrote a note in my blue book begging them to pass me, because if I flunked I would have to take another Nat Sci course, and that would be too awful to contemplate. I ended up getting a 29 on the final, and a D+ in the class, which was good enough. Actually, I was very proud of that 29. Since I only answered 3 questions, the highest score I could have gotten was a 30, so a 29 was pretty close to perfect!

After that I never had anything more to do with science. If the kids needed help with any of their science classes, I turned them over to my husband. And even now, if somebody starts talking about Higgs Boson or other such topics, my mind just shuts down. I don’t get it, and I don’t want to!

Whether Oscar Wilde or Chrissie Hind in “Message of Love,” said it, I have always found astronomy an escape into imagining the universe beyond our mortal realm.  I was able to get through physics and chemistry because of science teachers who truly loved their subject, but astronomy was the one that caught on for me.

Professor Andrew Franknoi, a Carnegie Professor of the Year, an Annenberg Award winner, and my community college teacher back in the 20th century, still teaches astronomy at Foothill College. He was (and obviously still is), passionate and easily excitable when teaching astronomy. Better yet, because he wanted his students to get excited, he accentuated the stories and the gee-whiz facts, not the complex math, physics and chemistry behind the subject. One thing he did to help us get through the hard science was allow a 3×5 index card “cheat sheet” for tests. I crammed everything I knew onto that thing and did really well on the exams.

Mr. Franknoi excelled in visual and verbal drama for the subject. He was constantly moving and his voice would get loud and soft as the story required. What I began to sense was the complex relationships between the stars and us, these insignificant life forms on a lonely planet. I learned we are all made of the same stuff.

The pleasure I still derive in looking though my fancy backyard telescope at the rings of Saturn, or the Orion Nebula or the Pleiades, or right into the craters of the moon – I never get tired of it. There’s so much at the edge of our vision! I thank Professor Franknoi in Astronomy 101 for that.

“If you believe in eternity, then life is irrelevant.” Gregory House
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My dearest camp counselor wrote this to me in 1966:

You call me friend, but do you realize how much the name implies?
It means that down through the years, through sunshine and tears,
There’s always someone standing by your heart.
And I would have you know, where ever you may go,
There’s always someone, standing by your heart.

My father once told me: “To have a friend, be a friend.”

Those may seem trite, but I like them both very much and have found that friendship must be based on common interests and values, shared experiences, trust and to some extent, history. There are several people in my life who go back many, many years. I may not see them often, but I know the friendship remains and we could pick up where we left off and nothing will have changed. We can still laugh about things that took place decades ago, worry about the state of things today, mourn the loss of loved ones, share great stories, soothe one another. That is true friendship.

I have this with Patti. We met in 1967 at the beginning of 10th grade. We were in geometry class and Girl’s Choir. We were also involved in the musical that year. it was “Bye, Bye Birdie”. She was the choreographer, I was Randi, Kim’s little “sister”, actually a boy’s role, but was changed for me…at least I got to sing “Kids” and “Hymn for a Sunday Night” (Ed Sullivan…we’re gonna be on Ed Sullivan). The man whom she would marry was the pianist. Quite a fortuitous ensemble. Patti and I went on through two more years of choir (by now the top choir at school), the madrigal group, chemistry class in 12th grade, more musicals, and became close friends. I spent long hours at her welcoming home. Her mother baked and cooked and was always happy to see me. She worked in management at Avon and gave me little gifts for Christmas. If I dig deeply enough in a bottom drawer, I believe I will find a hair brush she gave me one year. Knowing that I was always fascinated by Catholic pageantry, they once invited me to join them for Christmas Midnight Mass. Patti told me to follow her lead and do everything she did, so with wide-eyes, I took it all in and genuflected, and kneeled…until they went to take communion. “Don’t follow”, she warned me. This Jewish girl stayed on her knees.

We went East to college, I to Brandeis, she to Boston University, where she could be close to her boyfriend at Harvard. They came to see me in my shows, I went to their parties. Unlike J, we couldn’t afford to go home for Thanksgiving, so I went to Patti’s apartment in Boston both years she was in town. We had a great time together (as we always do). The first year, she cooked Cornish game hen, the second year, she made turkey with all the fixings. She is a wonderful cook. I have even learned a few dishes from her. I make a good pasta carbonara thanks to Patti. Following our sophomore year, Patti was intent on transferring to Mills College in California, this time J followed her west where they settled. It was more difficult to stay in touch back in the early ’70s, but we saw each other when we were home in Detroit. I attended their wedding, and one year later Patti was one of my two bridesmaids.

I settled in the Boston area, so it became more difficult to see one another, but we took our first trip to the West Coast in 1975 and stayed with them. Other visits followed. Harvard reunions provided opportunities for them to come East. My older son went to Stanford and my younger child moved to the Bay Area after graduating from college, so there have been many more opportunities to get together more recently. Still, between lengthy phone calls and email, the friendship has never waned. After singing the Brahms German Requiem with my community chorus 14 years ago, I couldn’t stop buzzing for days. I called Patti and we talked over an hour about the joy of the experience, something else we now shared.

Patti knows all my secrets, has been there for me during any crisis and I have been able to celebrate many joyous occasions with her. We support each other through thick and thin. We spent a glorious afternoon wandering around the Stanford Mall just last February. We gossiped about old friends, talked about important stuff and nothing substantial at all. Just as old friends will do.

Retrospective

Faith.  Do I have any?  I’m not a believer in an afterlife. I don’t believe in answered prayers.  I don’t believe that there is a higher power looking out for my safety and general well-being.  I wasn’t born for a reason or as part of a plan.

I tried for maybe sixty percent of my 70 years to be Christian and then gave up.  I slipped into Buddhism.  For me it is not a religion.  It is a way of thinking that is peaceful.  There are four truths that make perfect sense and an eight-fold path to follow.  I’m nowhere near the end of that path.  I don’t expect to be.  But I am content being on it.

My Christian path was through three protestant denominations:  church youth groups, college requirements, adult leadership positions, and then nothing.  I still know the words and melodies to a few hundred hymns.  I know the words to creeds, psalms, prayers, and confessions.  I’ve read the entire Bible and some of the possible parts that were rejected when the collection of writings that make up the Bible was assembled.  And I have read church history.

My Christian path was bumpy, but enough of it was good that I stayed on it. There were experiences, friends, lessons in morals and values. And beauty.   I always had questions, doubts, and rejections along the way. And in the end, no belief.

Grandma and the Baptist Church:  From age three to eleven, I went to church with Grandma. In Sunday School, I learned Bible stories. In eleven o’clock service I heard old standard hymns and fire and punishment sermons preached by men with no seminary training who got themselves worked up into rants.  They might start with calm explanations of God’s love, but they ended with shouts, slamming a Bible against their hands and sweating through their shirts after they removed their jackets.  During Sunday dinners, around 1:00 pm, my grandmother praised the inspiration of the preacher’s performance.  “He was feeling the spirit today!”  But I remember remarks such as “I was sure his pants were just going to fall off when he was dancing and stomping around up there.”  No talk of faith except the assurance that God was good and watched out for his people.  That didn’t seem true to me, but I knew not to say that out loud.

Becoming Presbyterian:  By age 12, I was living with my mother and going to church with my friends.  I was happy at the Presbyterian Church.  The church was beautiful:  mountain stone, dark wooden pews, lanterns, and sconces.  An organ in the choir loft, different music, quiet sermons and prayers.  An active youth group with weekly Sunday suppers, with retreats, camps, and theological discussions.  We talked about beliefs, responsibilities, love, kindness.  But, back then, Presbyterians were serious about predestination.  I didn’t like that idea.  Why were all the summer people in our tourist town rich, and we year-round people were not?  Was that the plan?  I said to one of my friends walking home from cheerleading practice one day. “Do you ever feel like an ant in an ant farm?  We are controlled.”  She got very angry and stomped off.

College at a Presbyterian school:  Late 60s.  We were required to take four religion courses.  My first professor seemed bored by the whole thing.  He gave us reading assignments, and we talked about them, but if we were not up to discussing them with any depth or insight, he would talk for awhile and dismiss us early.  At the beginning of the semester, he gave us a single-spaced page summary of the Old Testament.  I memorized it.  When he handed out the exam, it said summarize the summary.  I wrote it out, and he recorded my A.  My second semester professor made assignments in our Gospel Parallels book and insisted that everything was true.  Third semester was about the early church, including geography. The professor believed that the earth was 6000 years old.  The fourth semester was devoted to reading the works of significant church leaders.  I had to confess that I did not finish reading The Confessions of St. Augustine.  I do remember that Augustine was a bishop, and he wrote Confessions in Aleppo. Now Aleppo is destroyed.

We were required to go to chapel four days a week and expected to go to church on Sunday. First Presbyterian was not far away, but we had transportation.  We called it the Vatican, because the church was a huge structure.  The minister was like a very theatrical television preacher with an oily delivery.  One Sunday, I had, what I now know was an anxiety attack, during the sermon.  I slipped out of the sanctuary and then stomped across the school’s nine-hole golf course and back to the dorm.  I switched to Second Presbyterian.

First Marriage, no church:   My first husband did not go to church, and I was fine with that.  Then he met people from the Sunshine Farm, a community of, what should I call them, New Age Christians.  They sang songs they wrote, sometimes accompanied by guitar.  They swayed with their arms in air when they sang, and they spoke in tongues.  They believed that women should be subservient to their husbands.  The members had jobs and built separate homes.  Their leader did not work outside the farm.  I went with my husband a few times, but my resistance grew. One night I reached my limit. I stomped outside and would have gone home, but he had the key to the car.  He came outside to convince me to go back in, but I told him that if he said “Praise the Lord” one more time, I would start screaming.  There were many reasons why the marriage ended, but his religious obsession was a big one.

Graduate School and the Episcopal Church.  Growing up I often went to an Episcopal church with two of my friends.  I loved going there.  Beautiful American Gothic building, prayer books, kneelers, incense, stages of the cross, and short informative inspiring sermons or homilies.  I loved the Rector’s wife.  She and a member of the church provided a space and activities for us town kids every Saturday night for my four years of high school.  We grew up in the Parish Hall.  She was the most “good Christian” person I have ever known.

After my divorce my therapist asked me what I had done or wanted to do before I was married.  One of the things I said was “I wanted to go to an Episcopal church.”  He said, “What’s stopping you?”  So, when I started classes at my grad school located in one of the most beautiful towns in the US, I went to one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the country.  I loved it.  Usually I went to Evensong.  It didn’t matter that I was still an unbeliever.  No one there ever asked me if I were.  I went to confirmation classes and became an Episcopalian.

Married again.  This time to an Episcopalian:  I sang in the choir, I listened to excellent, thoughtful sermons.  I loved the beauty of the building.  I was very involved in the church to the point that I was asked to serve on the Vestry.  The first year I was in charge of social activities.  I loved planning the parties, the dinners, and the pageants. The second year I was asked to be the stewardship chairman.  That was painful.  Convincing people to give or give more was hard.  My third and last year, I was asked to be the Senior Warden.  That was harder.  Church business, church politics, encouraging the Rector, and dealing with concerns and complaints wore me out.  I stopped going to church after the new Warden took over.  Prayers didn’t help me.

New church in a new state.  My husband found a church with an excellent choir.  I lasted a few years, but the new building was half blond wood and half glass.   It reminded me of a restaurant near the town we moved from.  Some of the sermons were interesting, but the ones by the assistants and some deacons made me cringe.  I did not get involved with any of the activities.  I stopped going.

I read more church history and explanations. The Christian church was and often still is cruel, controlling, and cold. It left behind the teachings of a poor itinerant man, and become a grand business even after a reformation. Thomas Jefferson was Deist. I tried that.  I could make up my own religion.  That didn’t last. I read Christopher Hitchens and similar writers.  I know I am an atheist.  My husband accepts that, but it isn’t something I talk about with more than a few friends.

Buddhism and my breakdown:  I started reading Buddhist writings.  I tried meditation, and I started making Buddhist art.  Then I lost it.  I mentally fell apart.  Too many responsibilities, too many classes to teach, both English and art, a kind loving child with learning difficulties who was struggling to finish high school, and a demented mother.  Prayer didn’t help any of that.  When I left the hospital, the psychiatrist there sent me to an excellent therapist whose therapy is based in his Buddhism.  He gave me the Tao Ti Ching.  I knew that I was where I should be. I’m still there.  One wall of the Tibetian store in the closest city has a wall full of books and CD’s that I can buy when I need something more to read and to play when I meditate.  I make my Buddhist art as meditation and sell it in a shop downtown.

So, no, I don’t have any faith, but I do have peace, and what comes after this life is not frightening.

Though always a good student, the arts and literature were my bailiwick. I had to work hard at math and science to get good grades. Thus, when Mr. Perkins, who I had for 7th and 8th grade science, announced that we all had to do a project for the Science Fair, I struggled for an idea.  This was in 1965 and I was a mere 7th grader. We had to put together a visual presentation and report. This would represent a large portion of our grade for that card-marking period (three within the term). I decided to make a model of an atom from clay, wire and push pins with a report to go along. The nuclear age was upon us and this seemed like a good idea. I had never been to a Science Fair and really didn’t know what to expect.

While I am an avid admirer of the visual arts (and have been involved in art museums for years), I am truly not good at creating anything visual or craft-based. I am in awe of those who can. Still, I bought the necessary supplies, read up on the topic and began. It was actually much more difficult than I expected it would be to get the wire to stay in shape, the push pins to pierce the wire to give the desired effect, the clay to stay in shape to represent the nucleus. Nothing hung the way I envisioned it. And I chose hydrogen – a very simple atom. I finally got it all together, made the “booth” out of my father’s shirt cardboards, did my simple report and brought it to the school gym at the appointed time.

I looked around with astonishment. The other projects were much more elaborate. Humiliation seeped into every pore of my body, but it was too late. We left our projects to be judged. Ribbons were awarded. Mine took green; the lowest possible. Eighth grader Jon Polk had worked for a year experimenting with the thyroids of rats. His experiments, documented with the skinned hides of several of his specimens, tacked to the board with growth charts showing how the experiments with the hormone had affected the rats, not only took first place at our school, but went on to win at the district level in Greater Detroit. His was an outstanding effort.

Meanwhile, back in class, Mr. Perkins inquired what happened to me. This was not up to my usual standard and my grade reflected that. Accustomed to getting “A’s”, I was horrified. I acknowledged my error in underestimating the complexity and importance of the assignment (also, my total ineptitude at putting together a decent visual presentation) and asked what forms of extra credit could I do to bring my grade up, which I willing undertook for the rest of the semester. I don’t recall what forms those extra assignments took, but I know I did them diligently (as I always did) and managed to scrape out an “A” for the whole term.

My husband and two kids still talk rings around me. “Tech talk” is the norm when we sit at family meals. I smile vacantly, just pleased that we are all together, and strain to understand what they are discussing. It is a different type of intelligence, I once told my husband, and challenged him to sing an aria or recite a Shakespearean monologue. We all have our own strengths.

I’m writing this because somebody asked me about faith and I don’t have any.
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