Category Archives: education

Character Study: Karen

Instead of studying for her state CPA exam, her mother wanted Karen to do housework. After all, she was living at home and should contribute to the household.

Karen had used up all her savings during the first three years of college, paying for rent, tuition, and books. And the summer after her junior year, she took a group trip to Europe.

That trip had opened her eyes. She hung out with six other college students as they traveled from Italy, Austria, Germany, Belgium, to France for a whole six weeks. These students knew all about art and architecture, so they visited historical buildings and art museums in every city.

After the trip was over, however, Karen had to move back home to finish her last year. Since seven of her siblings still lived there, the house was noisy, even though she had her own bedroom.

She left home early for classes and used the university library for studying, coming home at 9:00 at night. When her head hit the pillow, she slept soundly until the alarm rang the next morning. Repeat.

On Saturdays, her mother asked her to fold a mountain of clothes. She needed to study, so she took her accounting books into the large laundry room and propped them open on the counter as she folded. She closed the door to silence the voices of her family in the rest of the house and memorized the laws pertaining to finance as she worked.

She was worried about passing this three-day, six-part exam. She had never taken any test like this before, and she had to pass it all to get her CPA license.

Even her father didn’t believe in her. He lectured her about how women were supposed to get married and have children. They didn’t need a career, and their minds weren’t geared for such intellectual pursuits. That was what men did.

But her parents’ lack of support was why she was so determined to become a CPA and financially support herself.

She was scheduled to graduate in 1978. Karen had wanted to major in journalism, but she didn’t think she’d get a job after she graduated. One day, she went to a lecture about careers and discovered that many women already worked in the accounting field. In fact, CPA firms came to campus every semester to interview graduating seniors for jobs, so she decided to major in accounting.

Karen got perfect grades in every accounting class, except one. In her junior year, she had taken Advanced Accounting and earned only a C. She had been horrified, thinking that she’d never get a job with such as low grade in her major. If she couldn’t get an accounting job, how would she support herself and move out?

She took the class over the next fall and earned an A. Whew! That felt better.

Whenever she could, she had lunch with the friends she had met on the Europe trip. They had all taken art and architecture classes for their elective courses, whereas Karen had taken Anthropology and Psychology. While in Europe with them, Karen had admired the sculptures by Michelangelo in Rome and the paintings by Leonardo and Raphael in the Louvre in Paris. But her favorites were the paintings by the Expressionist Claude Monet. His ephemeral depictions of flowers made her heart quicken.

Talking with these friends felt like a vacation all over again.

She couldn’t wait to graduate, get a good-paying job, and move out. She just knew a job was her ticket to freedom.

Freedom from the oppressive voice of her father. His limited hopes for her. His expectation that she would get married as soon as possible and have babies.

Freedom from drudgery.

She had babysat for years, saving money for college. She had cleaned people’s houses to save money. At home, she had washed dishes, swept floors, folded clothes, ironed tablecloths and men’s shirts, picked vegetables in the garden, made dinner, made cookies, scrubbed walls, and covered beds with clean sheets.

What she hadn’t done was experience freedom to do as she wanted.

When the schedule came out for the accounting interviews, she signed up for as many as she could.  

Character Study: Hazel

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

“You shouldn’t go to college,” said Dad, looking down at us kids. “There’s riots and immoral behavior. You’ll get brainwashed for sure.” Dad sat in his brown recliner with the foot rest down, his hands fiddling with a cigarette and match. The four of us, my two older sisters, me, and my little brother, sat cross-legged on the worn-out carpet in front of his chair, even though we were teenagers. We should’ve been sitting in chairs like him.

The news was on television. Dad had just seen pictures of students rioting at U. C. Berkeley for women’s rights. He had turned down the sound and called us into the room from our bedrooms that were right down the hall. I had been doing my chemistry homework, and I still had to finish math.

A wood-framed picture of the Last Supper hung on the wall right above Dad’s chair. To the side of it on the mantel was a porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary that Dad had bought Mom when he flew an Air Force mission to Portugal. A pile of rosaries filled a basket next to the statue. They reminded me of earlier years when we were ordered to kneel on the scratchy carpet to say the Rosary for 45 minutes. Thank God, Dad didn’t make us do that anymore. I’d never get my homework finished.

“Hazel, give your dad his ice cream,” said Mom from the kitchen. She stood at the counter, a box of vanilla ice cream in front of her. Jars of caramel and chocolate, too. Cherries.

I got up from the floor, happy to escape the lecture that I knew was coming. Whenever Dad got on his soapbox, we were stuck for at least an hour. Backpacks open on the floor in our dark bedroom. Homework books splayed wide on our desks. Pencil case contents spilled over half-used binder paper.

Dad put his cigarette and matches down. I gave him his bowl of ice cream.

“I need a spoon,” he said in his booming voice. A scowl made two deep furrows between his eyes on his sun-tanned face.

I jumped, turned to the kitchen, found a spoon on the counter next to Mom, handed it to him, then sat down.

While Mom finished scooping the ice cream into bowls, Dad, in-between his own bites, talked about how college wasn’t good for kids.

“They preach against religion,” he said.

I had heard Dad defend his religion ever since I was a little girl. The thing was, he didn’t seem to be a happy person, even though he went to church every Sunday, prayed at every meal, and raised money for new church buildings.

What good was it doing him?

I didn’t like how the parish priests treated women and girls either. We were treated like appendages of our fathers. No authority. No voices. No purpose except for one day having babies.

Luckily, our high school was run by nuns who were great examples of what women could do when men didn’t oppress them. The principal was a nun who had been educated in London in both education and school administration. My chemistry teacher was a pretty blonde married woman who one day wanted her own children. Our choir teacher was a nun who had a college degree in music. She taught choir, violin, flute, and piano.

But I loved my English teacher most of all. She’s the one who introduced me to the English and American poets and Edgar Allen Poe. Poe wrote such delicious horror stories. Murder. Psychological torture. Manipulation. People buried alive. So incredibly creative.

In Sister Elena’s class, I wrote my own poetry. She entered our poems in contests. I won first place once. We also read Shakespeare plays and acted them on stage for the whole school. Someday, I’d like to write a sonnet as good as he did.

What these nuns taught me was that my father had a narrow viewpoint when it came to education and women. He sent us to our high school to learn religion. But these nuns had taught us their version of Catholicism, and it had nothing to do with oppressing women.

Dad was still lecturing. His loud voice filled the room, but it wasn’t filling my ears.

Nodding my head “yes” every so often, I was far away. I saw myself walking through a university campus, my arms filled with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Emily Dickenson, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

I definitely was going to college.

Women: Six Sure Ways to Empower Your Leadership Ability

When I was a little girl, I wasn’t raised to be a leader. I was taught to be a follower, that women were supposed to be demure, passive, obedient, and silent. This early training manifested itself in numerous ways; for example, I expected men to drive, my dates to pay the bill, and males to make the important decisions.

This kind of thinking hindered my ability to grow to my full potential for a long time. Overcoming the inclination not to give my opinion, disagree, stand up for my beliefs, or lead others took decades. When I worked in the corporate world, I experienced discrimination which only perpetuated my lack of development. Finally, when I took a job in the field of education, I was encouraged to lead and to think with unlimited potential because my job demanded it.

In this post, I want to share some of the ways that I changed my perspective from being reluctant to lead to becoming empowered with leadership ability.

Adopt New Roles

Women can practice being leaders by adopting new roles within their personal lives. After I married my husband, he lost interest in driving. At first, I didn’t like taking on this responsibility, but when I associated driving with exercising my leadership skills, I felt positive about it, and now I’m comfortable driving all the time. This may seem like a small change, but it helped me adjust to being in charge in other situations as well. It’s easier to take one step at a time than to jump up the whole staircase.

Practice Speaking to a Variety of Audiences

Teaching is one of the best ways to practice speaking in front of an audience. First of all, teaching requires daily or almost daily speaking to students, and a teacher can become well-practiced at opening and closing lines which occur for each class period. Another advantage to practicing speaking as a teacher is that the teacher is considered the most knowledgeable person in the room, which automatically builds confidence. The teacher develops her lesson plans, practices them, and presents the information in ways for all types of learners to understand. This involves work and a lot of practice.

People who want to become leaders can take the opportunity to become a teacher for others. All disciplines and industries need strong teachers.

Speaking as a leader, however, involves communicating to a variety of audiences: peers, colleagues with different skills, superiors, or strangers. Each type of audience has different expectations and a leader must anticipate what they are and how to fulfill them.

Some women join a Toastmasters group to learn how to be comfortable speaking about a variety of subjects to a variety of audiences. Others speak up when they attend conferences with peers, and some volunteer to lead charitable groups that need chairwomen.

Admit Mistakes

One of the best ways for a leader to bond with an audience is to admit when she makes a mistake while speaking. She may misspell a word, forget a plus sign, or explain a concept incorrectly. Someone in her audience may point out her mistake, or she may find it herself while speaking. Audiences are human and they’ve made mistakes, too, so when a speaker confesses that she has blundered and admits it, the audience feels that she is more approachable, likeable, and believable.

Use Affirmations to Build Courage

Fear is the number one impediment in becoming a leader, and so I’ve found a way to build courage whenever I become anxious. On the bulletin board next to the desk where I write, I have pinned an affirmation that says I lead with grace and ease. This affirmation helps me remember that being a leader doesn’t have to be stressful. If I know I have the potential, I can approach leadership as if it is a natural expression of my personality. I keep my affirmation close by and recite it aloud whenever I see it.

Emulate Other Female Leaders

I am involved in a women’s charitable organization. One of the women in the group speaks in front of our meetings with confidence, talks loudly enough for everyone to hear, presents informative material, employs a sense of humor, and exudes a positive attitude. I admire her.

When I had to lead an important luncheon, I decided that I was going to try to emulate this woman. I spoke clearly, added a joke or two, and presented our honored guests with a gracious and optimistic manner.

After the luncheon was over, this woman sent me an email telling me that she was astounded with my leadership ability. How ironic that I was trying to emulate her. Of course, I let her know and now we admire each other.

Let Others Shine

A leader doesn’t always have to do all the talking. The best leaders give the spotlight to others so that they can shine. For example, teachers often ask students to explain a concept or to analyze a piece of literature. Directors ask their managers to update a team about a project’s progress, and chairwomen are expected to inform an organization about her committee’s work.

When I was leading a charitable luncheon during which the organization awarded scholarships to college students, I asked each scholarship recipient to share his or her story with the club members. Their stories were profoundly interesting and took up more time than I did in presenting them. The luncheon was an astounding success due to the fact that the club members felt a connection with the recipients after learning their stories. All I did was stand back and let them speak.

Women have so many talents to share with their communities, but many of us have been trained to take a back seat. It’s time for women to sit in the front. Both women and the world would benefit from more female drivers.

Learning a Language for a Better Life in Retirement

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I’ve been retired for two and a half years, and a month after I retired, I started taking Spanish lessons. I previously took French in high school and college and two years of Spanish in graduate school, but I hadn’t used either language much at all. Now, my goal is to be fluent in Spanish one day.

It turns out that taking Spanish during retirement is a great idea. It’s great for health and also enhances my social life. Here’s how.

Learning a Language Sharpens Memory

Because studying a new language involves absorbing new information and practice, it is good for retaining the brain’s memory capability. According to Carly Spence at Cambridge.org, “[language] students learn new words and grammatical constructs and spend time reviewing and building on their previous knowledge as part of the learning process. This . . . is . . . an effective brain workout and protects older learners against dementia and other degenerative neurological conditions.” My memory is just as sharp as it was thirty years ago, and I want to keep it that way, so I guess I’ll be studying Spanish for years to come.

Learning a Language Boosts Cognition

Learning a language can also make a person smarter or help her stay sharp as she ages. In The Sydney Morning Herald, Evelyn Lewin explained the positive effects of studying a new language as determined by a 2019 Italian study. The study “looked at the effects in adults aged between 59 and 79 and found that, after just four months, people learning a second language scored significantly better on two research-backed measures of brain health and acuity: global cognition (such as thinking, understanding and problem-solving) and functional connectivity.” Many elderly people take it for granted that they will lose their ability to think clearly or maintain their intelligence, but this isn’t true for people who continue to use the high-level functions of their brains such as in studying another language.

Learning a Language Makes Travel More Fun

I just traveled to France for almost a month, and everywhere I went, I had opportunities to speak French. A French friend suggested that I always greet a French person by saying Bonjour first as a polite gesture. This small habit helped me engage in many lovely conversations in which I learned about the area I was visiting and the wonderful people I was meeting. As I continued my trip, French phrases popped up in my brain from my old French classes so that I could extend my conversations in French more and more. I felt proud of my capability and had much more fun.

Learning a Language Improves Creativity

Studying a language promotes a student’s creative abilities. According to Carly Spence at Cambridge.org, “This could be the result of the thought processes involved in language learning. These include translation, language switching and disciplined study, along with a willingness to learn and adapt.” Learning a language takes courage and humility, which are two characteristics of a creative person as well. A language learner believes that it is possible to learn to speak and understand a new language, and a creative person believes in new thought processes or ideas, so learning Spanish and being creative are truly close companions.

One of my goals is to do something creative every day since creating makes me happy. I’m a writer, but I also cook, garden, and decorate my home and yard. When I retired, I started to write a novel, and now that novel is almost ready for publication. I’ve been amazed at my creative power during the last two-and-a-half years. I believe my study of Spanish has enhanced my ability to create in other areas.

Learning a Language Leads to New Friendships

I’ve been taking Spanish classes for two-and-a-half years now, and this fall, I’ll be in Spanish 4. Each of my classes has consisted of over twenty students, most of them being retired. Often, the teacher arranges students into small groups to practice verb tenses or other tasks. When students work in groups, conversations become more trusting and students learn about what they have in common with their classmates.

I’ve made two new good friends in my classes. One is a former chemist who is married to an Indian man and has adopted two Indian children. The other woman is a former physician assistant whose husband is also studying Spanish. In-between classes, I meet with these friends at a coffee shop or for lunch to practice conversational Spanish. We share favorite restaurants, talk about our vacations, and reminisce about our childhoods.

Studying a language is not only educational and fun; it makes retirement a happier and healthier time of life.

Before Revising My Novel

I’ve written essays, newspaper articles, poems, short stories, and more, but never a novel. People who have written several novels impress me since I’m writing my first novel and learning so much in the process.

Since I retired as an English professor almost two years ago, I started a novel. Now, I have a first draft and it’s time for me to revise it. Here are the steps I’m taking before I proceed.

I Found a Good Critic

I asked a writer friend to read my novel and give me her criticism and suggestions. She was worried that our friendship would suffer if she gave me honest feedback, but I assured her that I was open to any constructive feedback. I’ll refer to her as Lila for this post.

The reason I chose Lila as a critic was because she has published numerous children’s books and one adult book. In other words, she has experience at doing what I want to do. She also taught high school Spanish, so her language skills are strong. Finally, Lila’s criticism is clear and she gives reasons for her comments.

Even though I reviewed and edited my novel before I gave it to Lila, I found that I didn’t catch all my errors and I needed a fresh brain to show me inconsistencies and mistakes. My mind was so overwhelmed at the daunting task of writing a whole book that I needed support to catch mistakes. Lila found places where I had changed my point of view, and she identified sentences that were unclear or out of place. She taught me that prose written in past tense must never include this; instead, I should use that. Lila even found a few spelling errors and typos.

Lila also gave me positive criticism. She identified the two most interesting sections of my novel. One was when my character goes to work in a winery and the other was when she hikes to Machu Picchu.

The most important advice she gave me, though, was a book about how to develop a plot. She recommended that I read Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder. This leads me to my next topic.

I Read a Good Book about How to Develop a Plot

I started reading Save the Cat! but then I found out that Jessica Brody had written another version of Save the Cat! titled Save the Cat! Writes A Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need.  I opened the paper version of Brody’s book and read it carefully. I learned about a plot planning tool called Beat Sheet and I confirmed that my novel belonged to the genre referred to as Rites of Passage. I also read about how to write attention-grabbing loglines and alluring synopses to pitch my novels to everyone, including people at the dinner table, agents, and prospective publishers.

Wow, I learned so much! The last chapter, however, that discussed common plotting problems was helpful all the way to the last word. Still, I wasn’t ready to begin revising my novel.

I Read Books in the Same Genre as my Own

I didn’t have enough courage to start revising my novel yet, so I decided to read books that had similar themes as my own to see how their authors developed their plots. Sarah Dessen wrote The Truth About Forever, a novel about Macy Queen whose father died while he was waiting for Macy to join him for a morning run. In my novel, my main character’s mother dies. As I read Dessen’s book, I tried to identify the 15 beats that Brody says every novel requires. For example, at the beginning of a novel, Brody insists that the opening scene must engage the reader. Dessen’s opening scene did get my attention. Brody also says that the themes of the novel must be included in the early chapters. Dessen’s theme of there are no accidents appears on page 27.

I Watched Movies to Practice Finding Save the Cat!’s 15 Beats

I love watching movies because they are stories, too. Since Brody’s book is actually based on a book about screenwriting, the 15 beats apply to movies as well. I watched Michael O. Sajbel’s The Ultimate Gift, a story about a spoiled adult grandson who must complete a series of tasks in order to earn his inheritance. I successfully identified one of the beats called the catalyst in the movie, which is when the grandfather dies and leaves his grandson specific instructions he must perform.

I’m still reading examples of my genre, but soon I’ll have to gather my courage, plot out my novel on a bulletin board, and start rewriting.

Whew. Wish me luck and stay tuned.

How I Wrote My First Novel

I’ve been a writer my whole life. In grade school and high school, I wrote poetry and essays. In college, I wrote my first short story. When I became an accountant, I wrote financial reports and audit recommendations. I also learned how to eliminate “fluffy” words and overly-embellished ideas. While I was raising my children, I wrote newspaper articles and more short stories. Finally, I became an English professor and I spent most of my busy career writing lesson plans and college letters of recommendations; yet, I hadn’t yet attained my ultimate dream of writing a novel. I either had writer’s block, low writer-esteem, or not enough time.

Then I retired a year and a half ago. Immediately, I decided that one of my activities would be to write a novel. This project, however, had no requirements—except one. I didn’t promise to finish it, publish it, or be tied to any kind of working schedule. The only requirement was for it to be fun.

People started to ask me numerous questions. When would it be finished or published? Was it a personal story? What percentage had I written so far? My answers were always the same: I have no requirements and no timetable.

Meanwhile, I started and wrote my novel. I posted a few chapters on this blog and received positive feedback. I discussed my ideas with my writing-oriented daughter who got excited about the story. I researched and researched and researched the setting and background of some of my characters’ activities. That was fun.

When I got stuck, I buried my nose into books that I thought could help me with my own novel. Books that had female characters and writers that used imaginative writing techniques to propel their plots forward. While reading, I stopped many times and thought about writing practices. Since reading is my favorite hobby, this was sheer joy.

I wrote when my husband played golf and on the weekends while he was watching football and basketball. I dreamed about my plot and got up in the middle of the night to write down notes so I wouldn’t forget my new ideas. I wrote outside in the garden when the sun was shining and my flowers kept me company. I wrote after my Pilates class and after hiking 4 miles in the open space. I wrote blog posts, and then I wrote my novel again. The thing was, since I had no requirements, I found a comfortable way to fit writing my novel into my life. I didn’t worry about ever getting rejected by a publisher or poorly reviewed by The New York Times.

My opinion was the only one that counted. And you know what? Because I didn’t care what anyone else thought, I developed courage to create scenes that I never would have written otherwise. I also broke grammar rules to emphasize settings or to create tone for important events in the story. I’ve never written with such creative abandon, and I’ve had the time of my life.

I finished my novel a few days ago–after starting twenty months ago. I wrote the story’s epilogue, typed a dedication, and printed out my manuscript. Now I’m getting my daughter and one of my writing friends to read it. Whoa. This is a little scary, but I keep reminding myself that I’m still having fun and don’t have to do anything that I don’t want to do. That includes listening to all their comments.

I’ll read their comments though, and use my creativity to incorporate those that I like into the draft. Then I’ll have to decide what to do next. Get an agent? Send it to a publisher? Put it on a shelf in my library?

All I can say for sure is that my heart is all aflutter. I feel fulfilled at last.

Why Queen Elizabeth II Matters to Me

In 1966 when I was nine, my family moved to England. My father was in the United States Air Force and he was stationed at Mildenhall Air Force Base in Suffolk County, about one hundred miles north of London. Queen Elizabeth II had already been queen of England for fourteen years.

My parents sent my siblings and me to an English Catholic school named St. Edmund’s in Bury St. Edmund’s. I started in Junior 2, and every day I had to dress in a blue uniform and tie a blue tie around the collar of my blouse.

By the time I entered Junior 3, I had developed some strong friendships with girls in my class. Elizabeth invited Ann and me to spend weekends at her historical English home in the countryside where we slept together in her late grandfather’s bed and heard the grandfather’s clock chime every fifteen minutes during the dark night.

Ann invited me to spend weekends at her house as well, where I learned the English custom of having tea each afternoon. We also walked for miles around the town of Bury St. Edmund’s exploring the 11th century, ancient ruins of the St. Edmundsbury Cathedral and the dark nave of St. Mary’s Church. We visited Moyses Hall and found ancient instruments of torture that had been used by former leaders of East Anglia. In Bury, I learned that history was a long story about the human race and its complicated nature. I learned about selfishness, arrogance, faith, power, tactics, and greatness.

In class, beside studying math and English, we memorized famous English poems and old songs that had enriched the English culture for years. In fact, the first tune that I ever played on the recorder was “Greensleeves,” an old English ballad first recorded in 1580 by Richard Jones. This unforgettable tune was mentioned in Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Winsor, and also serves as a favorite Christmas hymn in England “What Child is This?” that I sang in church. Thinking about how I was exposed to ancient English ballads and Shakespeare at such a young age, it’s no wonder that I later became a college English professor who specialized in the Early Modern Literature of writers such as Shakespeare.

Since I attended English school during my elementary school years, I never learned American history until I went to college. Instead, I developed a deep interest in English history, all the way from the Anglos and Saxons who brought rudimentary English to the island, to William the Conqueror who established French as the language of English politics, to Henry VIII with his six wives, to Elizabeth I with her fierce independence which I admired, to Elizabeth II who I saw on television night after night shaking hands, breaking bottles on the hulls of ships, and opening parliament, dressed in regalia. I grew to know even more about her than John F. Kennedy who had been assassinated when I was in first grade.

Perhaps I was so attracted to Elizabeth II because she reminded me of my own mother, who was also calm and dignified. They both wore a fluffy, curled hairstyle, red lipstick, and pastel clothing. My mother liked to wear rings and she loved flowers and hats. If Queen Elizabeth needed a double, you could adorn my mother in her royal robes and priceless jewelry and put a scepter in her hand and no one would know the difference. 

But their real similarity was their endurance and generosity. I watched my mother give love to my father for over fifty years as a consistent and reliable spouse. I watched her endure the deaths of her friends and her sister with tenderness and strength. I admired the way she loved all of her ten children regardless of their talents, mistakes, and weaknesses. She lived until she was 92 years old, and the last year of her life, she called each of her children once a week and told them that she loved them. I couldn’t believe she could die.

I never believed Elizabeth would die either. I had felt her in my life like a steady light for so long. My parents loved her, and I loved her.

I don’t have any qualms about loving a monarch that represented a country once involved in colonialism. Elizabeth didn’t represent her country’s history. She represented its last 70 years, a time when Canada achieved full independence of Britain, a time when I grew up from an innocent, little girl to an independent woman who now possesses some of the characteristics of my mother. She ruled with grace at all times, during sadness, amidst anguish, and throughout the joyful times.

But most of all, Elizabeth represented a woman who accepted her role of service to her country. She served England with love and generosity; if everyone could lead with the commitment and humility that she demonstrated, our world would be a happier land.

Today, I’m English again, eagerly basking in her influence.

Why This Writer Reads Stories: Reasons 1, 2, & 3

I have 257 novels marked “read” on my Kindle and I also read books on paper. My six-foot-tall bookcases in my home library contain over 300 books, plus I have some on the shelf underneath my television, on my coffee table, and inside drawers next to my bed. I read every day—in bed, on the couch, in the doctor’s office, at the hair salon, in the rocking chair in the back yard, and at the dining room table. Everywhere, whenever I can.

I became a writer when I was nine years old and wrote my first poem. Since then, I’ve written more poems, short stories, articles, websites, blogs, recipes and essays. Now, since I’m retired and have more free brain power, I’m writing a novel and loving my increased writing time. 

But I read more than I write. I devour stories like they’re chocolate sundaes, loving every bite of their plots, characters, settings, and figures of speech. I read voraciously because I’m a writer; I love language, the power it has to convey information, emotion, and empathy. In addition to loving other writer’s stories, I read to improve my writing.

Here are three specific writing techniques I’ve studied recently from reading other author’s stories.

Reason 1: How to indicate who is talking without using “he/she said”

Dialogue is a dynamic technique to use to create action in a story, but a writer must make it clear which character is speaking. I’ve read stories where authors use tags such as “he said” or “she said,” and sometimes these tags create wordiness and take impact away from the dialogue; therefore, one day I chose to study how an author can use effective dialogue between two characters without including these repetitive tags. By reading The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers, I learned to identify the speaker of dialogue by describing what a character does right before she starts talking. Maybe she steps closer to the person to whom she is speaking and then she speaks. Another technique that Myers uses is to describe what a character thinks about the person with whom they’re talking right after she speaks; for example, she might imagine him playing a sport or eating spaghetti.

Reason 2: The effect of strong vocabulary on a reader

One thing I love about my Kindle is that I can underline a vocabulary word and get a definition for it immediately. I’m always looking up words, even familiar ones. I ponder about why the author might have chosen this word instead of its synonym. Is it a more accurate choice?

Or the word might be one I’ve never heard of before. This happens more often when I read authors who were educated in countries other than the United States. Recently, when I read Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams, I learned another word for altitude sickness, soroche. Discovering a new word feels a little bit like having a new baby. It’s a treasure and an opening to a bigger world.

Reason 3: How to move characters from one geographic location to another

In my current novel, my two main characters are traveling in South America. I was struggling with how to move my story from one scene to another. Should I describe what they can see outside the train window? Should I create a scene about how they pass the time on the train? Maybe one of the characters could be lost in thought as she crosses the border between Argentina and Chile.

Luckily, I began to read West with Giraffes: A Novel by Lynda Rutledge, a story about a destitute young man from Texas and an old man who must transport two giraffes from New York to San Diego.

Rutledge uses many techniques to move her story across the United States. The young man first steals a motorcycle and follows the giraffes’ truck. He watches the old man and his first driver as they argue. He notices a woman in red pants following behind them. He listens to the noises the giraffes make, and finally, when his motorcycle runs out of gas, he convinces the old man that he can drive the truck for him after the other driver quits. By the time he starts driving the giraffe’s truck, he knows the old man’s routine. While he’s driving the giraffe’s truck, he watches what the giraffes are doing in his rear-view mirror, he feels how their movements destabilize the vehicle, he talks to the old man, and he thinks about his childhood.

After observing how other writers use specific techniques, I then experiment with the same methods to develop my own novel. I can’t think of a better way to learn the craft of writing than to study writers—one technique at a time.

I Was My Own Best Student

I worked as an English professor for sixteen years. My average class size was 30 students and I usually taught four classes per semester. If you add up those statistics, I taught approximately 3,840 students over my career.

I remember so many of them.

Wilma smelled like marijuana when she entered the classroom at 8:00 a.m. every morning, and when it was her turn to answer a question, she looked up at me with glassy eyes. Once, when she came into my office to get some help on an essay, she told me that she didn’t vote because she could never make a difference, even though she cared deeply about global warming. She took two of my classes—fall and spring.  By the time she finished the second semester, she had given up smoking marijuana and had registered to vote for the upcoming presidential election.

Andrew was a hard-working football player and a lackadaisical English student. One day at football practice, he broke his ankle so badly that his football career was ended. He couldn’t drive to school because his leg was in a cast. He couldn’t take the bus to school because he couldn’t walk to the bus, get on the bus, or walk from the bus to his classrooms. No one in his family could help him since they were so financially strapped that they all had to work. He dropped my class. I emailed him to find out why, and then I told him not to give up. Football wasn’t everything; he had a lot more options. The next fall, he came back to class, worked hard, and told me he was going to transfer to a four-year college in a year to major in business. I gave him hope, he said.

But even though I have so many stories like this in my memories, none of these students were my best. My best student, by far, was myself. I was so invested in teaching writing, literature, and critical thinking to these students, that I spent thousands of hours researching and preparing for my lessons, and then I taught them. My students asked me questions that I didn’t anticipate, and I found out the answers. They came to class unprepared in skills and homework, and I worked hard to fix this. Here’s some of what I—my best student—learned.

Learning Takes Nothing Less Than Commitment

A teacher can present the most wonderful lectures or plan the most engaging activities, but students who are not committed to learning, still will not learn. If students don’t understand the benefits of what they’re learning, they won’t exert the effort. They’ll skip the reading, write their essays at the last minute with no planning or revision, and ignore the details that produce strong thinking and writing skills. I began identifying the students who were not committed to learning and worked to get them engaged. I learned that there are many reasons that a student is not committed including homelessness, hunger, thirst, anxiety, depression, trauma, or pain. Getting them support to mitigate these problems can transform their lives.

Success in Anything Takes Several Steps

Some students came into the classroom wanting an “A,” but not wanting to do the work necessary to get an excellent grade. Somewhere along the way, they had been taught that grades were more important than actual learning, and they didn’t understand that learning was a process, not the result of talent. As the teacher of an essential college skill like writing, I had to figure out how to change this misconception. I used the analogy of a staircase, and told them that if they wanted to get to the top of the staircase, the best way was to take each step, one at a time; otherwise, they would either get injured if they leapt to the top and miss the lessons of each step. Now, I’m using every stair on my own staircase.

Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, and Thinking Are Intrinsically Connected

Early in my life, I had been a good reader, but I hadn’t understood the intimate connection between reading and writing. While I was teaching English-As-A-Second-Language students, I learned that the most successful students engaged in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking in English. Later, I took this concept into my transfer-level writing and literature classes and taught it to my students. We analyzed readings for figures of speech, and then we practiced using them in writing. We scrutinized words for exact meanings in readings and then tried to use the best words in writing. We stood in front of the class and explained what poetry meant, and then used our speeches for essays. We learned that thinking is not the same as writing. Thoughts don’t come out of the brain in clear sentences, but they do provide incredible ideas for development.

Critical Thinking Can Be Learned and Understood

When I first was assigned to teach a critical thinking class, I had to try to define it for myself, but I didn’t truly understand what it was until I developed lessons for teaching it. Most students, I found out, didn’t understand it at all, and they had no idea why it was important. Finally, I developed a lesson which required students to evaluated websites based on criteria, and the students found out that not all websites were honest or credible. Their surprised faces showed their understanding of why a healthy skepticism was essential to navigating today’s unscrupulous society. Every time someone tries to scam me or sell me a product, I use this skill.

Writing Is a Slow Journey, not a Talent

Many of my students came into the classroom with a variety of writing skills, often deficient ones. My professorial pride would not let me pass students who wrote poorly, so I had to devise lessons to teach them strong writing practices. As I prepared and taught those lessons, I honed my own writing skills at the same time. I learned the importance of using consistent verb tense, active verbs, specific nouns, and focused verbs. To forgo adjectives for better nouns and adverbs for better verbs. To memorize the purpose of each part of speech and how their careful utilization strengthened my sentences. I learned how to deftly include quotations in my writing to improve my credibility, and, in class, my students and I practiced this until we were all much better. Oftentimes, students brought back stories of conversations at home where their parents noticed their improved vocabulary and speech.

Now I’m retired, and I’m writing a blog, short stories, and a novel. Fortunately, I was the best student in my classes for the last sixteen years and it’s paying off. I’m more productive in my writing than I ever have been, and I recently realized another lesson that I learned.

Happiness is a key ingredient to success. I’m certainly that.

A Town Girl on a Dairy Farm

I’m from a town—a suburbia in the San Francisco Bay Area–a place that is less densely populated than a city and bigger than a village.  My town has clean streets lined with sycamore and crepe myrtle trees, houses with front and back yards, barbecues, swimming pools, cabanas, patio sets, and walking mail carriers.  People walk their poodles and Labrador retrievers on neighborhood hiking paths and buy popsicles from the singing ice cream truck that meanders the streets on summer days. 

I own a tidy little home in my town.  Yards with manicured hedges, carefully pruned flower beds, edged lawns.  Clean and tidy. I sweep under my garbage cans each week when I take them out for collection.  My children are grown and have homes of their own, so my house is immaculate too.  I spray my shower down after each use.  I wipe the stove after each meal, and I own five vacuum cleaners, one for each type of vacuuming task.  You get the picture.  I’m a clean freak. 

I decided to visit my relatives in the country this last month.  They live on farms all around the city of Winona, Minnesota, in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. I also am lactose intolerant, and, when I was born, my parents bought a goat to feed me.  My mother grew up in Wisconsin, a state popular for milk and cheese.  Her whole life, she drank three tall glasses of cow’s milk a day, one at every meal.

I wasn’t one of those town kids that thought milk originated in the refrigerator case at the grocery store.  My mother told me where it came from.   After all, she grew up on a farm.  I’m smart enough to know that most milk at the grocery store comes from cows, not goats, almonds, coconut, or oats.  Sorry vegans.

When I visited my relatives in Minnesota and Wisconsin this month, my cousin Scott–a handsome man with a ready smile, who owns a 600-cow dairy farm near Altura, Minnesota, invited a bunch of us to visit his farm.  I didn’t mention to him that I was lactose intolerant since I didn’t want to feel ostracized.  I was confident, however, that his cows would like me just fine.  Really appreciate me, in fact. 

We got to the farm before Scott did, and his workers told us to wait outside.  As we walked through a barn full of teenage cows—some with the cutest faces, we found some pitchforks and posed for a picture like Grant Wood’s 1930 American Gothic painting, except both my husband Bob and I held a pitchfork since we believe in equality.  In Grant’s painting, the farmer’s daughter didn’t have a pitchfork in her hand.  I hate to think what Scott’s pitchforks were actually used for and what debris was on the handles that I touched, but I wasn’t going to pass up a great opportunity for a memorable photograph.

I was wearing a clean T-shirt and skort and a pair of running shoes, knowing that we’d be traipsing around in cow emissions of all kinds.  When Scott arrived, I gave him a cousin hug.  He recoiled away from me, and when I let go, I noticed that his Tshirt was full of dirt stains.  He didn’t want to get me all dirty, apparently.  He had already been at work on the farm the whole morning, and had had meetings with lots of females (cows) who never put on a suit or blouse.  That was a town-girl blunder.  I surreptitiously looked down at my T-shirt and skort to see if I was still presentable. 

I’m not at all a dumb person, but, living in a town, I spend more time thinking about the best hiking trails and restaurants than I do about the biology of animals.  This visit brought my knowledge of cows out of the back room of my brain into my frontal cortex.  I appreciated, too, that Scott was as informative as an agricultural professor at the University of California, Davis where they offer classes in dairy farming. 

The first thing people must understand about milking cows is that a cow has to have a baby before it produces milk; therefore, the process of milking cows takes patience and great skill.  Because the cows have to be impregnated, go through about a 280-day pregnancy, give birth, and then produce milk, a dairy farm is comprised of a fertilization lab, pregnancy dorm, maternity ward, nursery, elementary school, high school, milking station, and milk refrigeration tank. 

There’s a lot to learn about a cow’s life.  About half of the calves that are born are female and the rest are male.  I know this seems obvious, but Scott doesn’t need all those males so this statistic is unfortunate; he keeps a few males for breeding but sells off the rest to beef processing facilities.  What happens there is for another blog post, likely not written by me. 

At the back of his property, Scott raises his calves in individual pens, each one living in a domed shelter with food and water.  When the calves get bigger, they live in a barn—organized like a college dormitory—which has an insulated roof and fans that blow constant breezes through the building to keep the cows cool.  The cows are encouraged to spend as much time in the field as they want. I was intrigued that they actually had a choice in this matter; Scott talked about them like they were his valued students.  Their rooms were also much cleaner than most college dorm rooms I’ve visited. 

Pregnant cows also live in a barn dormitory.  A long building that holds several dozens of cows, organized into three rows that run the length of the barn, each row is divided into individual pens filled with a soft bed of sand.  The two outside rows are where the cows stay when they’re inside.  They can either stand up or lay down in the soft sand.  They face out, having access to fresh water and hay.  Their backsides face into the center row through which a stream of water flows, sweeping up the cow manure and any sand that is soiled and discarded by the cow’s movement. 

The dirty water, filled with excrement and sand is processed through a filtering system near some manure holding reservoirs.  The clean water gets recycled back into the barn stream, and the excrements are deposited into the holding reservoir where it is treated and used for fertilizer to grow alfalfa or corn.  A well-thought-out system that truly impressed this town-girl.

So many problems can occur with milking cows.  They can get sick, dehydrated, infected, or overheated—all of these situations affecting their ability to produce high-quality milk.  We saw calves that had spikes put through their noses to prevent them from milking on other cows.  We learned that new babies were removed from their mothers so they wouldn’t milk, and they were given milk that was tested to ensure good health.   We witnessed testing tools, pages of testing data and production statistics.

In the milking shed, the cows are milked twice a day.  They are led into the stalls and encouraged to turn around so that the workers have access to their relevant body parts–teats.  Some milking sheds, Scott informed us, have turnstiles that turn the cows into the right position.  Scott doesn’t have those.  His milk hands push the cows into the correct position, clean each cow’s teats and attach the milking tubes which automatically milk the cows for an average of 20 minutes.  When the milk hand punches the cow’s serial number into the machine on her stall, the machine measures her milk output and adds it to the farm’s data system.  See why math classes are so important.  Everyone uses math. 

Cows are insanely fruitful.  One cow produces about 60 pounds of milk a day—that’s 90 glasses a day for people like my mother.  The milk travels through pipes into a stainless-steel cooling tank that looks a lot like the stainless-steel wine tanks in Napa, California that hold sauvignon blanc or chardonnay.  These dairy tanks are expensive—one can cost from $100,000-$140,000.  What struck me was that the purpose of the tank was not just to store the milk, but to also cool it.  The milk is warm when it comes out of the cow.  Again, I might have figured this out on my own, but, secretly, I was surprised to hear about it. 

I asked Scott whether his farm was considered a small, medium, or large dairy.  “It depends on who you ask,” he replied. “I’m only one of three dairy farms left in the immediate area.  Smaller farms are disappearing due to the rising costs of operation.”

Scott now has a female manager at his dairy.  I can’t remember her name, but let’s call her Laci.  “Laci likes to be in charge,” said Scott. “She also fell in love with my one-in-a-million cow hand, married him and now has a child.”  Scott’s calls this cow hand one-in-a-million because of his excellent work ethic.  Apparently, One-in-a-million is also supremely savvy; he married his boss.

By the time we had toured the whole process, my T-shirt and skort reeked of cow sweat, dust, and hay and the treads on my running shoes were caked with a smelly, nefarious, brown sludge.  I found myself holding my arms away from my body in a desperate attempt to feel cleaner.

Scott invited us into his office where his hound was waiting.  When we sat down, the dog plunked his muddy paws onto my lap and slobbered my skort with drool. First, I looked down in horror, but, then, I quickly composed myself and left the drool alone, trying very hard to adapt my cleanliness obsession into an acceptance of the natural dairy farm environment.

Scott opened his little refrigerator and offered us frozen chocolate treats and push-up ice cream popsicles.  They were certainly welcome after a hot tour of his cow quarters.  I hadn’t had a push-up popsicle for ages, and I tried hard not to drive the whole piece of ice cream out of the tube and onto the floor as I struggled with it. 

Turns out, Scott gave the last part of his popsicle to the hound who licked it up joyfully on the floor.  This helped me relax a little, and when I had just a little of my popsicle left, I shared the rest with Scott’s hound too.  This was a remarkable development, you see, because a town-girl would have never put her popsicle down on the floor for a dog to roll around and lick up. 

That day, on Scott’s dairy farm, I proved that even town-girls can leave the town behind and have a little fun in the country.

Why I Like Old People

I recently came home from a vacation where I spent ten days touring Southern cities with twenty-four people over the age of sixty.  I had the time of my life with these people and the following reasons explain why.

1. They’ve Endured Hardships and Healed from Them

While sitting beside my new friends in a horse carriage or at several dinners, I learned about their lives.  One pretty, eighty-eight-year-old woman had raised two of her grandchildren after her daughter and son-in-law died.  When she smiled, her eyes lit up like stars.  Another woman, traveling alone, was married to a man who has suffered from Muscular Dystrophy for twenty years and is bedridden.   A tall, handsome mustached man experienced extreme pain one day when his gout acted up during a tour of a plantation when the tour required a lot of walking.  He was a sweet and endearing man, always kind to everyone.  A friendly woman walked with a cane, yet she was a fascinating conversationalist.  Despite having all of these trials in their lives, these individuals were traveling and living happy lives which indicates their strength of character and determination to be happy. 

2. They’ve Developed Long Careers

This group of travelers represented a broad range of careers.  One man, at seventy-seven-years old was still working as an ophthalmologist.  A blonde-haired woman, who was married to a former president of a silicone company, was a former cooking instructor.  Two women from Pennsylvania were realtors, and another was an English professor.  All of the travelers had decades of experience in working and lots of stories they could tell of their working years.  This made them interesting companions.

3. They Don’t Need to Impress You

No one had the need to impress anyone else.  No one was critical, either.  They accepted everyone, whether he or she used a cane, was shy, drank a little too much, or liked to be alone once in a while.  Perhaps, because they had lived through hardships and experienced numerous relationships with many different kinds of people, they didn’t feel they had to compete with anyone else’s achievements.  They had plenty of their own. 

4. They Love People and Relationships

This was an exceptionally friendly group of people, perhaps because they were old enough to understand that people and relationships bring the most joy into our lives.  The woman whose husband had Muscular Dystrophy made sure she dined with each and every person on the tour.  During every bus ride, we chatted together about our lives.  We took photographs of each other on beautiful, historic bridges.  We climbed to the rooftops of Revolutionary forts together.  We toasted glasses of wine, shared appetizers, discussed fish and steak, described our desserts.  So even though we were on a tour to visit the South, our emphasis was experiencing the country with new people and in developing new relationships.

5. They Can Relate to Your Experiences

After working for years in a profession, it certainly is rewarding for someone else to be able to identify with your years of working with students, clients, or patients.  If you spent years in human resources solving employee problems, it’s rewarding to tell someone else about your work and have them understand your accomplishments.  Since there were a few teachers on the tour, they easily appreciated the hard work of teaching.  The corporate attorneys and accountants could understand corporate work, and the medical professionals could share stories about special cases or patients.  People with different careers could appreciate each other since long careers all require hard work, problem-solving, and endurance. 

6. They Know How to Live in the Present

Old people know how short life is, and so they are better at focusing on the present moment instead of always thinking about the future.  Some mornings, my travelers took a walk on the beach at Hilton Head just to watch the sunrise over the bulging, grey Atlantic Ocean.  Sometimes, they put on their swimsuits and swam in the pool.  They sat in the hotel courtyard on warm afternoons to enjoy the balmy weather and blooming bougainvillea.  They lingered at dinner long after the dessert was served to talk with their new friends, and they asked each other to take pictures in the plantation gardens. 

Old people are a lot like good novels.  They have so much life to share.  After spending ten days with my over-sixty-year-old travelers, I’ve come home with much more than memories of places.  My life has been enriched with the strength, experience, confidence, humanity, empathy, and mindfulness of these incredible people. 

Feeling Better about America after Visiting the South

I just completed a trip to Savannah, Hilton Head, and Charleston and, now, I feel better about the United States. 

During the last six years, the news has plagued viewers with stories about racism, some of which were unfortunately true and others which were sensationalized.  George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who knelt on his neck.  In two different instances, a police officer in my own town killed two men who had mental health problems.  There are numerous examples like this.  Hearing that my country is full of arrogant white supremists who belittle, offend, and abuse minorities does not make me a proud American.  

I wanted to tour these historic areas of the United States because I want to understand the history of this country, not just the white-washed stories that many books divulge, but the complete histories of even the disadvantaged human beings who lived here before the Puritans and the African Americans who were brought here to be slaves on plantations. 

My trip taught me about a different side of Americans.  I met numerous Whites and African Americans who extended great hospitality toward me and my co-travelers.  They helped me make hotel arrangements, dinner reservations, and late-night taxi calls.  One 6-foot, 6 inch African American man, who was dressed in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit and a colorful bowtie, drove me to an appointment one day.  On the way, he told me how he met his Russian wife years ago, and, how, they were now best of friends.  I’ll never forget his funny story of how he didn’t even like his wife when he first met her and how his eyes lit up like candles as he told me.

An elderly White woman led a group of us around the city of Charleston, showing us how the mansions had slave quarters attached in back.  She described the opulent lives of the mansion owners, some of whom were plantation owners who came into the city in order to avoid the mosquito-infested plantations during the summer.  She also explained how the slaves had to cook and clean outside in the back yards even during the sweltering summer months.  Her mission, she said, was to tell the history of Charleston so that the mistakes of the past were never repeated.

When we visited the Gullah Geechee Museum in Pin Point, Georgia, a Gullah woman taught us how to sing a Geechee song by stamping our feet, clapping our hands, and singing.  She also shared details about how her ancestors worked as slaves before the Emancipation and then lived and worked at Pin Point in oyster and crab processing plants.  She was confident in her story-telling and proud to share her culture with us.

When we visited the Magnolia Plantation where we viewed slave quarters and a magnificent plantation home, the White tour guide told us that she tells the story of the plantation and its slavery so our country can heal from its lurid past.  At another storied place, the Middleton Plantation, we saw how the family of the owners ate from silver platters while the slaves lived in unheated wooden shacks. 

Every Southerner we met had a story—a personal one or one that had been created from the South’s history—and they all told their stories with clarity and friendliness.  Every community we visited exuded harmony and graciousness.  Most notably, Whites were respectful of African Americans; African Americans were respectful of Whites. 

When people experience harmony and hospitality, their moods improve and they feel better.  I feel better now that I’ve experienced the warmth and kindness of the South. 

My Epiphany: I’m not Retired, I’m Now a Full-time Writer

Last year, I retired from my English professor job. Throughout the years, I had always claimed to be a writer. Heaven knows, I wrote countless essays, paragraphs, articles, and lesson plans for my courses, but I also wrote poetry, articles, and short stories whenever I found free time–in-between semesters or during the summer. What I never wrote was a novel. I’ve had ideas on the table for years. Scribblings in pretty journals. Scratchings in lined notebooks. Never a complete draft or a completely formed plot waiting to be expressed.

When I retired a year ago, I looked at my retirement as a time when I would fill my days with hobbies. I even developed a list of hobbies and stuck it on my little bulletin board next to my computer in my library. That’s where I write, and one of the hobbies on the list is writing. I also wrote gardening, cooking, learning Spanish, and, of course, writing. The list was for whenever I didn’t know what to do. I would just read the list, choose an activity and proceed.

I made such glorious dinners for my husband and me the first six months of my retirement: chicken and shrimp gumbo, mushroom risotto, marinated leg of lamb, and grilled flat iron steak. I created recipes for healthy versions of pumpkin bread and blueberry breakfast bars. I experimented with turmeric and cinnamon in oatmeal and developed personal breakfast egg sandwiches with tortillas and flat breads. I filled my recipe blog with over a hundred recipes and attracted followers from all over the globe. My culinary prowess was astounding until I decided that eating out looked like a lot less work.

By summer, my garden was cleaned of weeds, pruned, fertilized, swept, and raked. The flowers grew like happy children and the fruit trees hung heavy with lemons, blood oranges, and figs. My pots of herbs provided me with lush clippings of thyme, parsley, mint, chives, lavendar, oregano, and basil. By the time fall came, I had done such a remarkable job at sprucing up the front and back yards that there was little else to do except to sit outside and enjoy my beautiful environment.

I started studying Spanish, but in the summer, I started taking classes every Wednesday at a local adult education school. Now, after a whole year of practice, I’m conversing with my classmates in conversations that span paragraphs.

The most difficult activity that I started, however, was to write a novel. I now felt that I had an overall plot in mind. I didn’t have all the pieces, but I was just going to start and see what happens. To ward away writer’s block, I decided not to make any rules or promises. I would write a novel even if I never published it. I would write even when I didn’t know what to say. I would write even when the words came out stilted and awkward. Revision is so much easier than a first draft anyway.

What’s funny is that I’ve just had an epiphany after being retired for a year. Cooking is not that important to me. Gardening is fine, but my little yard will not require much of my time to keep up. Besides, Alfred comes once a week to cut the grass and clean up the leaves.

Spanish is so much fun, but I’ve found that writing is really where my passion lies.

The other day, Valarie from the Alamo Women’s Club called me to ask if I would run for an office for next year. I joined the club last year to help them raise money for scholarships for college students, and I’ve done that. But run for an office?

No. If I became an officer, I wouldn’t have enough time for writing.

I need time to stir up ideas, time to catch up on sleep when I’ve gotten up at 2:00 in the morning to write, time to outline scenes, and lots and lots of time to write.

Next time someone asks me what I do, I’m not going to say I’m retired. They’ll think I have time to fill.

My time is full–of writing.

Retiring Is Hard to Do

I retired just over a year ago, and I’m just starting to figure out what “retirement” is all about.

I must admit, that before I gave my retirement notice, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I would do. I was, after all, still working as a college English professor, a job that seemed to require a 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week commitment. I knew, however, that I wouldn’t be lying around on a beach chair in Hawaii; I wanted to continue to make a difference in people’s lives. I just didn’t know what that would look like.

I spent the first month of my new life walking around like a zombie. I cooked elaborate dinners, went on long hikes with my girl friends, and spent hours and hours pulling weeds in my garden and making tiny changes in my front yard landscape.

But I didn’t really feel like I knew what I was doing. I was “just keeping busy” enough to fool myself that I “was retired.”

Finally. about two months into this new endeavor, I made some critical decisions. Not that I was sure of them. Not that I was confident that I’d continue to do them forever. I just felt like I needed to make some decisions in order to be productive.

I continued to create new recipes and post them on my recipe blog. That was fun for about nine months, and then, all of a sudden, I decided that the pressure of posting recipes every day was a bit like working again. Since the beginning of 2022, I’ve only posted one new recipe. I feel fine about that. Instead, I’m enjoying watching my older sister post gorgeous photos of her cooking on FACEBOOK. I like to think that I’ve inspired her to display her own cooking talent with confidence and pride.

During the summer, I planted an herb garden that tickled me to my very core. I had basil, thyme, oregano, chives, parsley and mint growing lushly in pots just outside my kitchen window. I used the herbs in my new recipes, blended them into pestos and herb sauces, and dropped them into pitchers of water for cool summer evening thirst-quenchers. Along the way, I learned some incredible secrets about how to enrich the soil with calcium and when to plant cilantro, an herb that doesn’t grow well in summer.

I decided to take up Spanish again since I hadn’t been able to practice much while I was teaching English courses. I found my old Spanish books and got to work. Every day, I wrote sentences, used a flash card app to practice vocabulary, and even told my Argentine son-in-law what I was doing. That, I thought, was brave.

I also started writing a novel that had been simmering in my head for a couple of years. I told people I was doing this, but I also explained that I didn’t have any requirements except to write it. As soon as you tell people you are writing a novel, they ask questions like, “When will it come out on Amazon?” “What percentage of the book have you written so far?” “Can I read what you’ve written so far?” I decided that, since I was retired, I wanted to experience complete freedom in my writing: no deadlines, no demands, no rigid outlines, just the sheer joy of being creative and writing from my heart.

I also took a giant step. I joined a women’s club so that I could help raise money and award scholarships to students going to college. This was my jackpot activity, I thought. By working with this club, I would continue to make a difference for college students; however, what a commitment it might turn out to be.

At one of the women’s club meetings, one woman said, “Retirement is a time when you keep reinventing yourself.” After about six months, I knew that was true.

My Spanish practice was fine, but, whenever I tried to speak it aloud, I forgot all my vocabulary. My brain fogged up and my eyes got buggy as I dug around in my head for words, so I signed up to practice with a tutor online. Jessica was fabulous, but, I noticed that after twenty minutes into an hour lesson, I was watching the clock and getting frustrated. Finally, a friend told me about some weekly, online adult ed classes which would allow me to learn at a less strenuous pace. I signed up for a summer course and found the right fit. I’m now taking Spanish 2 for this year, and I can keep taking these classes up to level 5. After that, I’ll reinvent my Spanish learning.

The writing of my novel has proven to be more successful than I ever dreamed. My main character has traveled across Argentina and into Chile in pursuit of finding out what she wants to do with her life. She’s gutsy, intelligent, and courageous, and, most importantly, I like her. I’m still getting those annoying questions from people about deadlines, but I’m more confident about asserting that I have “no rules or expectations.” What they don’t know is that when I get to the end of my story, I’m going to start at the beginning and rewrite it. They must think that my writing is so good that my first draft drips with eloquence and comes complete with sophisticated figures of speech. I’m okay if they think that. I’m just enjoying the writing.

I’ve given myself a break when it comes to cooking, and my husband and I go out to eat more often. My herb garden is dormant for the winter, and my freezer is stocked with pestos and herb sauces. And you’ll never guess what happened just nine months after I retired and only six months after I joined the women’s club. I volunteered to be the Chair of the Scholarship Committee even though the other women on the committee all have at least ten more years of philanthropy experience than I do. I’ll try to act like a student of philanthropy and listen as I lead a group that is much wiser than I.

One day, I sat down in my living room to take a break from all my projects. My husband was sitting in a big arm chair. His Kindle was on the table beside him, and he was staring straight ahead of him, his eyes and mouth relaxed and content. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I’m relaxing,” he said. “I spent my whole life working hard. I’m going to spend my retirement relaxing and having fun.”

Oh, I thought. I don’t know how to do that.

Hmmm. It’s time to reinvent myself, again.

Wisdom of the Trees: Chapter 1

Photo by DARIAN PRO on Unsplash

From ancient times, trees have symbolized physical and spiritual nourishment, transformation and liberation.

Chapter 1 – Oak

One more week and she was done.  Graduated with a double major.  College over.  More educated than most of the people on earth. 

And you know what?  She wasn’t going back home, even when this class was over.  Her father had paid for a round trip ticket to Buenos Aires, but she was going to cash it in and stay.

This was her chance to really be independent, to find out what her values were without her father’s advice about this job or that apartment, this guy or that outfit. 

She missed her mother though, but her mother wasn’t at home anyway.  When Leonie was supposed to be having the time of her life in college, her mother had contracted breast cancer.  After three surgeries, six months of chemotherapy that sapped her effervescent energy, and twelve weeks of radiation that burned her skin red, the cancer came back. 

Just before she passed away, Leonie and her mother had sat under the oak tree in the back yard, the shadows of its branches spreading like arms across the grass. 

“I can’t lose you, Mom.”  She had wept beside her mom, the shade of the giant tree darkening her tears like black pearls.

“You won’t feel the same, but you’ll never lose me.  You’ll just have to learn how to live with me differently.” 

Leonie had felt so confused.  She stared at her mother’s face so that she could remember it—her gray-blue eyes, silky skin, a mouth that always held the hint of a smile.  She stared deep into her eyes, holding on, wishing for more time.

“I’ll be with you,” said her mother.  “I’ll guide you from a new place, a place you cannot see, but that is nevertheless powerful.  You’ll feel me.”

Leonie clutched her mother’s hand.

“I want you to find your inner strength.  Emulate this oak tree.  Every time you feel weak or lost, visualize yourself as an oak tree, rising strong, spreading wide, enduring challenge and finding the sun.  You won’t be alone because I’ll be beside you, breathing my love into your heart.”

“But I won’t see you.  You’re my inspiration.  I’ll be lost without you.”

“My love will remain here.  When you can no longer physically see me, you can find other women to inspire you.  Choose many, in fact.  One to follow for leadership skills, another to learn the art of love, and another to learn how to live with joy.  She may be one of your professors, a co-worker, a girl friend, a friend’s mother, or a woman you meet only one time in your life. Whatever you wish to be, you can find a woman to inspire you.”

“How can you be so strong?  You’re dying!”

“I’m content because I know that I will continue my life in another form.  My spirit is not dying.  My soul will continue, and I’ll grow from its future experiences.  I have many things to look forward to.”

Leonie remembered this conversation as she held her mother’s ashes six months later, secured in a pearlescent urn shaped like a heart.  Leonie kissed the top of the urn before placing it in the niche at the cemetery.   “Enjoy your journey, Mom,” she whispered.

Later, as she sat in the back yard next to her mother’s chair, Leonie thought she heard her mother’s voice.  No, maybe it was the breeze rustling the limbs of the oak tree instead. 

“My journey will be right alongside you,” said the breeze.

Staying focused on her studies was impossible after her mother’s death, but her girl friends had helped, and then Leonie decided to go overseas for a change of scenery—a much needed distraction that she needed to survive.

So now, she was in Buenos Aires and hungry.  She lived in a shabby dorm room in the basement of the university and tutored students in English to make money, but it wasn’t enough. 

Leonie searched through her backpack for something to eat: an empty plastic juice bottle, a paper envelope from the bocadillo she had for lunch.  She poked her fingers deeper.  Something waxy.  She grabbed at it and pulled out an apple, a little bruised, but it was food.

The next morning, Leonie woke up with a growling stomach and the sound of traffic.  Engines racing, horns blaring, and brakes squealing invaded her tiny room through the high window that wasn’t even big enough for her to crawl through.  Leonie grabbed her shampoo and towel, opened the door, and paced to the single shower room. 

Whew!  It was empty.  The water felt refreshing on her wet head, rinsing off the humidity and sweat of her body from the sweltering night.

Today, she was going to meet a friend that she had met in her Spanish class.  Clarissa was a native Argentinian and Leonie wanted to ask her about traveling throughout the country. 

Upstairs in the dormitory lobby, a canister of coffee stood on a table next to a large blue box of sweet pastries.  Leonie poured the thick, viscous liquid into her own mug, stuck a pastry between her teeth, and whisked out the door.

Clarissa was sitting at a table in the corner of the café with her laptop open when she arrived.  A cup of mate steamed to the right of her computer, Clarissa wildly typing on the keyboard.

“Hey, how’s it going?” asked Leonie, grabbing the back of the chair opposite her, scraping it across the floor, flinging her backpack over a post, and sitting down.

“Hey,” murmured Clarissa, finishing a sentence.

“You know, this Spanish class is my last college class, and I’ve got to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.  I feel lost without my mother, and I don’t want to go home without a plan.  I don’t even know if I want to live there anymore.”

Clarissa picked up her mate, sipped it, and looked up at Leonie. “I suggest that you travel and meet as many people as possible.  They’ll give you new ideas, and you’ll learn that you have endless options,” said Clarissa.

“That does sound good,” said Leonie.  “How should I start?”

“Just go,” said Clarissa. “Don’t think too much.  Don’t plan too much, but be ready to make your trip work each step of the way.  I’m emailing my sister.  She works at the Belmond Hotel, a few miles from Iguazu Falls.  Maybe she can get you a free room.  Iguazu Falls is one place you should go!”

“Oh, I’m so nervous about traveling by myself.  Maybe I’ll just stay here,” responded Leonie.

“Oh, no you won’t,” said Clarissa. “You’re going, and that’s that.”

“We’ll see,” said Leonie.  I have a whole week of classes left.”

“Yes, a whole week to build up your courage and begin your new life.”

Hidden

Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash

Sylvia had a secret.  One that rolled around in her stomach like a marble in a maze, bashing against the walls until they bruised, swirling her energy into anxiety.

Sylvia’s friend Ruth told detailed stories about how her mother psychologically abused her during her teenage years.  When they were cleaning out her grandmother’s house after her death, Susan had wanted her grandmother’s wooden chest full of yarn.  Her mother refused to let her have it, and, instead, gave it to Susan’s older sister who didn’t even knit.  Susan wondered for decades why she wasn’t good enough to have such a treasured keepsake and why her mother had favored her sister over her.  Ruth told everyone about the hurts in her background, but she still walked around like a broken doll, permanently damaged, as if nothing could ever erase the scars she had suffered.

When Ruth talked about her feelings, Sylvia flashed her own memories across her mind about how her father had favored her sister over her.  “Isn’t she beautiful,” she remembered he had said.  Sylvia had looked in the mirror countless times wondering why no one ever called her beautiful.  She had clear skin, thick hair, blazing green eyes.  Weren’t green eyes as pretty as blue ones? 

Her friend Paul had told her about how his father was never around.  He never played sports with him, never sat with him on the couch for a game of chess, never even got to his high-school graduation until Paul had already walked across the stage and waved to his mother who was frantically waving back with both hands, as if she was waving for two.  Even today, Paul’s father didn’t act like a father, but like a distant friend who sent him an article once in awhile about a topic that never related to Paul’s life.  Paul had worked hard to build self-confidence, but struggling with a narcissistic father made that an up-and-down journey.

Sylvia’s friend Jen talked about her childhood, too.  She told Sylvia how a sixteen-year-old neighbor boy had raped her when she was eleven, luring her into his backyard shed one afternoon and slowly removing her clothes while he talked to her about the different birds in the garden.  Jen said that it was therapeutic to talk about it after so many years of keeping it hidden.  At first, she was embarrassed that it had happened to her.  What did she do to encourage that boy anyway?  Why did she let him get her into the shed by herself?  Didn’t she know better?  Sylvia didn’t see how Jen had let go of the trauma if she still had all these questions in her mind.

When Jen talked, Sylvia nodded empathetically: “It wasn’t your fault.  He took advantage of you.  He was stronger, and you couldn’t have stopped him.”  Inside her chest, however, Sylvia carefully drew a curtain in front of her own heart, shielding it from the memory of her own secret, stopping her from the minute-by-minute re-enactment of the scene, her shame, her acquiescence, her fear of exposure. 

Sylvia didn’t want her friends to know she had suffered so much, had been irreparably violated.  Maybe someone would use the information about her secret as revenge if they ever got angry at her.  They would expose her in front of people she didn’t trust, and she would endure more embarrassment than she could handle. 

Sylvia had spent years searching for her own self-esteem, her worthiness to be loved, her value as a treasured friend, her worth as an employee, her right to be happy at all.  She thought that she should go talk to someone about her secret so that she could get it off her chest.  Would that even work? 

Finally, she made an appointment with a female minister at a church she did not attend.  She told the woman about her secret, and asked her what she should do to heal from it.  

“First, ask God for forgiveness.  God will forgive anyone, even if you can’t forgive.  Once, you’re comfortable that God has forgiven you, then forgive yourself and anyone else involved.”

Sylvia had worked on forgiving herself and the other person involved for years.  Nevertheless, the memories, surfaced again and again like a nightmare when she least expected them.  Sometimes, she even invited them into her thoughts as if she could purge them out of existence by focusing on them one last final time. 

Nothing stopped the nightmares.  They came while she was sleeping in a vivid stream, and her fear rose incrementally during the dream until she would awaken all of a sudden, gasping for breath like she had been under water the whole time.  Her forehead was drenched with sweat, her heart tight with shame.

Sylvia did feel the pain of her friends, and because she did, she could listen to their stories and offer some solace just by suffering with them.  She also understood the pain that her students told her about. 

Samantha was a student in Sylvia’s college composition class.  Samantha’s mother had kicked her and her three-year-old daughter out of the house, and, now Samantha experienced anxiety that interfered with her performance at school.  Sylvia had counseled Samantha through several episodes of anxiety, and she had passed her English class in spite of her mother.

Van suffered from post-traumatic-stress-syndrome ever since he returned from Iraq, and his significant other left him right in the middle of the semester.  Since Sylvia knew what anxiety and poor self esteem felt like, she coached Van step by step until he, too, passed his writing class.

So many of her community college students needed emotional support in order to pass their classes.  Owen’s father beat him.  Misty lived with five family members in a noisy, two-bedroom apartment.  Monica’s parents wanted her to get married like a dutiful Islam daughter and give up going to school.  Randall had spent two weeks living out of his car during the semester until his uncle let him live in his garage. 

Sylvia knew that if she put in more effort to help these students, they could succeed and improve their lives through education and awareness of other opportunities.  Yet, sometimes, as Sylvia sat beside one student or another, she felt like a broken human being trying to help another broken soul.    

Was it true that people who never felt loved died of heart attacks?  Most mornings, she woke up with a tight chest.  She lay in bed breathing in and out of her nose until her chest relaxed a little, but the tightness never fully went away. 

Most people had a secret, didn’t they?  Weren’t most people walking around, hiding their secrets underneath their shirts, their polite manners, their rudeness, their abusive characters, their anxiety, their bullying, their surrender, and their repeated attempts at survival?

Yes, they were, Sylvia knew.  She was, too.  She had endured so many scars and affronts to her character, yet here she was, carrying her secret around like a satchel of wisdom.

Really, she thought she deserved a medal.

Taunting Mr. Kingsley

On Saturday, I went with my mother to Cornhill Market. We waited at the wooden bus stop for the red double-decker bus which arrived tardily after 8 a.m. Side by side, we sat for the forty minute ride to town, propping empty market baskets on our laps.

Up ahead in the old seats, I noticed a hat that looked familiar–a collard-green hat with a tuck on the top and a medium brim all the way around. The man wearing it wore a heavy wool coat. HIs big neck was lined with sagging skin and his hair was pewter gray. Mr. Kingsley, it was. I swallowed hard.

Mr. Kingsley was the man who monitored the children on the school bus. He was old, and when it was cold outside, he stomped his heavy, brown shoes on the metal floor in rhythm with the turning of the wheels on the bus. Every day, he wore a full length wool coat and beat his covered hands crossways against his chest to keep warm. Like a teapot, each blow on his chest released a burst of steam from his mouth.

As our market bus followed the rolling hills of farms and meadows, I watched the collard-green hat nod over the old man’s chest. Once in a while, I gazed out the window at the squares of empty fields covered in frost.

The children on the bus feared Mr. Kingsley. “Keep away from that door, you ragamuffins!” he yelled at the boys who wandered out of their seats.

We created stories about him. We told each other how he lived in a dark castle, dined alone at a long, wooden table, and ate the legs and arms of poor children for dinner. After dinner, he sat in a huge arm chair in front of a blazing fire, reading the gospel of Satan and blowing smoke rings with his pipe.

Soon, the frosty fields outside my window dissolved into the red brick factories and churches of the town Bury St. Edmunds. The bus would soon leave us off at the bus station near Cornhill Market.

I had never provoked Mr. Kingsley, but had laughed heartily at the boys who did. Some boys, those with a higher dose of daring, knocked off his hat when his back was turned, baring his baldness as if it were a hole in his armor. Kingsley would swirl around and swat at them while they tossed the dull hat from one seat to another.

Once, when his hat fell into my lap, Kingsley snapped it up and scowled into my face, “You’re naughty children, you are. Some day you’ll pay for this. Just you wait.”

The bus rolled into the station at the corner of Cornhill Market. In my haste to get off before Kinsley saw me, I dropped my basket in the aisle. I bent down, grabbed the basket’s handle, reached for my mittens which had fallen out, and hurried behind my mother to the exit.

“Meet me here at 11:30,” my mother said as she set out with both baskets towards the food stalls which filled the market. The stalls were covered in a kaleidoscope of colorful awnings which shaded slanted displays of farm vegetables, baskets of berries of all kinds, fish on ice, and jars of mincemeat, currant jellies, lemon curd, and pickles. I waved to my mother and rushed away before Mr. Kingsley appeared behind her.

First, I walked briskly to the shops surrounding the open market. In the chemist shop, I climbed the stairs to the second floor to smell the scents of the bath cubes lined up like tiny gifts. I closed my eyes and imagined gardens full of blooming flowers: violets, roses, sweet peas, and jasmine.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Mr. Kingsley coming up the stairs and heading my way. I dropped the bath cube I was holding and heard it crumble inside its wrapper. Some customers blocked his way, and I circled around several perfume aisles until I reached the stairs, skipped down the steps and out of the store.

My breath made puffs of smoke in the cold air. I must have left my scarf in my basket, so I swaddled my collar around my neck and looked for an escape. Curry’s Book Store was just around the corner of the market, so I decided to go there to hide and keep warm.

“Could you direct me to the young adult section, Sir?” I asked the man behind the counter.

“Yes, darlin’. It’s in the very back behind the dictionaries.”

I passed through the rows of best sellers with the big signs until I reached the very back of the store. Scanning the shelves, my eyes lit upon a section full of fairy tale volumes. Stooping down, I read the titles and slipped one out titled Old English Folk Tales. At the end of the bookcases was an empty space in the corner. I squatted up to it with my back and scrunched my body into its opening until I was hidden and began to read, raising the book to cover my face.

Every few minutes, I leaned out to see if Mr. Kingsley had followed me, but I seemed to have lost him. I read “Herne the Hunter,” a scary story about a ghost who haunts Windsor Park with a pack of hounds.

Suddenly, I heard Mr. Kingsley talking to the man at the front of the store. Soon, I heard his heavy shoes pacing toward the back, so I jumped up. Holding my breath and clenching my hands inside my pockets, I poked my head out, scooted, slipped behind the shelves of dictionaries, and crept along the rows at the edge of the store until I reached the door and escaped.

What would he do if he caught me? I imagined being stuffed into a black laundry bag, hurled over his shoulder, and carried on his back across open fields all the way to his black castle.

The market clock pointed to 10:30. Running into the stalls, I searched for my mother’s coat and ocean blue scarf. At every vendor, ladies in navy coats were selecting potatoes and turnips, tasting berries, and talking over codfish.

I dashed in a zigzag across the square to Moyses Hall, the town museum. Kingsley wouldn’t guess I was in there. Children never went to museums by themselves.

Moyses Hall, a massive flint and stone house, was the largest building surrounding the square. It was shaped like two huge but simple houses, connected by a thick stone pillar. At the base of the pillar was a smooth stone with the year 1180 carved into it. I had been inside during a school field trip and learned that it was once housed a Jewish family, and built as strong as a fortress. An air of mystery hid in its shadows as if the ghosts of the family were still there, witnessing the visitors who wandered in and around their former hearth.

I ran inside and caught my breath against the cold stone wall beside a life-sized suit of armor. After a few minutes, I wandered around the glass cases filled with cracked cups and bowls, fat statues of gnomes and dwarfs, hand shovels, coins, torture chains and screws. I read all the display descriptions waiting for the next hour to pass until I would meet my mother at Purdy’s, next to the bus station.

At 11:30, my mother was waiting. Two fat baskets leaned together on the ground next to her feet. I ran, anxious to hear the security of her voice. “Hi, Mom! Can we get some sausage rolls?”

“Claire, I already bought them from Purdy’s. Let’s hurry or we’ll miss the bus.” I didn’t tell her about Mr. Kingsley following me. She didn’t know how the children taunted him, and she wouldn’t like it. We boarded the bus and perched the heavy baskets on our laps.

Heavy shoes stomped up the back stairs. They sounded like Mr. Kingsley stamping his feet on the metal floor of the old school bus. I hunched my shoulders and bent my head down behind the basket on my lap.

A gruff voice bellowed right behind us: “At last, I’ve caught up with you.” Mr. Kingsley towered over me in the aisle. His eyebrow hairs stuck out like bent stickpins. Looking up, I saw the yellowness of his teeth and the gray hairs inside his nostrils, and I shivered as a chill swirled at the base of my neck and crept down the back of my coat.

“Mr. Kingsley?” my mother said with her eyes opening wide.

Mr. Kingsley thrust his gnarled hand into his oversized pocket. I squeezed my eyes shut. Seconds filled with silence. Cautiously opening my eyes, I saw that Mr. Kingsley was holding my red plaid scarf out to me. “Claire, I saw you leave the bus this morning. You dropped your scarf on your way out,” he said, a smile spreading beneath his salt and pepper mustache.

My mouth dropped open. I reached out a hand, took the scarf, and twisted it self-consciously around my hands. “Thank you.”

“Well, I have more shopping to do before I go home. I’d better get off this bus before it takes off. See you Monday, Claire.”

“Goodbye Mr. Kingsley. Stay warm,” said my mother.

The picture of Mr. Kingsley’s twinkling eyes lingered in my thoughts as I rolled the scarf around my neck.

“What a nice man Mr. Kingsley is,” my mother said. “and I’m glad he found your scarf. Get warm now.” My mother smiled and looked out the window.

The bus jerked into motion. Maybe Mr. Kingsley didn’t live in a black castle and eat children for dinner. Maybe he liked children instead and that was why he took care of us on the school bus.

The next time I saw him, I would smile and wish him a “Good morning.” Maybe those boys would get to like him, too.

Patrice’s Spanish Lesson

photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Every day after dinner, Mama sat with me at the dining room table to teach me Spanish. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to say “hola” instead of “hello,” “adios?” instead of “goodbye” or “Me llamo Patrice. Tengo ocho años.”

“Why do I have to learn Spanish?” I asked Mama.

“Grandpa lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, and we’re going to visit him this winter. You can speak Spanish with Grandpa when you see him.

Reading English was hard enough. Learning Spanish words only confused me more. Besides, it was silly to learn words that meant the same thing as the words I already knew. I wanted to play jump rope, not learn Spanish.

Mama taught me more Spanish words every day. She taught me how to say the colors of the rainbow. She told me that, in Mexico, children went to una escuela instead of a school, and they counted uno, dos, tres instead of one, two, three.

One day, Mama said she had a surprise. “Today, I’m going to teach you Spanish words for your favorite games,” she said. “‘¿Quieres saltar la comba?” means ‘Do you want to jump rope?'”

I loved jumping rope. If I had to learn Spanish, at least I could think about something I liked to do. Later, as I jumped rope outside, I made a song of the new words: “¿Quieres saltar la comba? ¿Quieres saltar la comba?”

When Grandpa met Mama and me at the Guadalajara airport, he gave us big hugs. “Hola,” he said. “Como estan?”

“Hola!” said Mama. “I missed you.” I just smiled and said nothing.

“I thought you were learning Spanish, chica,” said Grandpa.

“I don’t need Spanish. You speak English, Grandpa. I can talk to you in English.”

“I like speaking Spanish, Patrice,” said Grandpa. “That’s what people speak in Mexico.”

“It’s silly, Grandpa, and I feel silly doing it,” I said. I took Grandpa’s hand and told him all about the airplane trip on the way to the car.

Grandpa’s house was beautiful. It was surrounded by high walls, but inside, all the rooms opened onto a central courtyard filled with brightly, colored flowers. A yellow-tiled water fountain made into a fish and seashells trickled into a blue-tiled basin.

I stood with Grandpa on the steps to the garden. “I’ve never seen a house so pretty,” I said, looking at all the pots of flowers.

“In Mexico, you’ll see and learn many new things,” said Grandpa. “Come, let me show you your bedroom before my friends arrive for dinner.”

Soon, Grandpa’s friends arrived. In the dining room, Grandpa introduced Mama to the grownups, Ricardo and Mari. Beside Mari stood a girl with a long black braid and big brown eyes. “Patrice, this is Anana. She is eight years old, too,” said Grandpa.

Anana took a few steps away and leaned into her mother’s skirt. Her dark eyes opened wide as she looked at me. Grandpa smiled, said something in Spanish, and the grownups walked into the kitchen.

I felt small standing in the middle of the room with Anana and her big eyes. “Do you want to play hide and seek?” I asked nervously. Anana just opened her brown eyes wider.

“Do you want to play with puppets?” I asked. “I brought some with me from my home.” Anana inched around the other side of a pillar and hid one eye against its plaster.

This isn’t any fun, I thought. Grandpa invites friends over for me to play with and they don’t even talk to me. I looked at Anana hiding behind the pillar, then ran to my bedroom.

My jump rope was lying on top of the bedspread. I crawled onto the bed, wound the rope around my hands, and thought about Anana. What big eyes she had, so dark compared to my blue ones. Anana’s black hair was longer than mine, too. I wished my hair was long enough to braid like hers.

Things in Mexico were different than at home. Anana wore a fancy dress with ruffles and ribbons. I looked down at my shorts and Tshirt. Why did she get so dressed up to play, I wondered.

There was no one to play with and strange things to get used to. All my friends were far away.

I crawled off the bed with the jump rope in my hand. The brown tiled floor was perfect for jumping, so I swung the rope over my head and began to sing, “¿Quieres saltar la comba? ¿Quieres saltar la comba?” like Mama taught me. On the third jump, I stopped singing and slowly lowered the rope in front of me.

“¿Quieres saltar la comba?” I repeated slowly, over and over again. I opened the bedroom door just enough to peek through the crack. Anana was still out in the courtyard, leaning on the pillar. I inched my body through the door and slowly walked out to her.

When she turned toward me, I held out the jump rope and asked, “¿Quieres saltar la comba?”

The brown eyes smiled. “Si, si, yo quiero saltar la comba!” She reached out, took the rope from my hand, walked out to the patio, and started jumping. I followed her into the sun and sat down on a step to wait my turn.

The sun felt good on my face. Remembering the Spanish numbers Mama taught me, I began counting out loud in rhythm with Anana’s skips, “Uno, dos, tres . . .”

The Power of Helpfulness

My father didn’t want me to go to college.  It’s not that he wanted me to fail.  He just didn’t understand the value of a higher education.  He couldn’t appreciate my yearning to think smarter and be independent.  He thought that a woman’s role was to get married and have kids.  She didn’t need a college education for that.

My three best friends—Laura, Theresa, and Patrice—were all going.  Laura went to a private San Francisco nursing college.  Theresa went to a state college, and Patrice, well, she got a full scholarship to U.C.L.A.  When I heard about Patrice’s good fortune, my stomach fell.  My grades were better than hers, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

I registered at American River Community College since my dad wouldn’t pay tuition, and it was all I could afford from my job at the ice-cream shop. I also moved out of my parents’ house so I could concentrate on school instead of babysitting my little brothers and sisters.

My budget was poverty-level.

I worried about paying my rent and my tuition, stressed about my car breaking down, and ate frugally.  My parents let me take vegetables and fruit from their garden, so I lived on cheap colas and fresh produce, with an occasional slice of cheese and boiled egg.   What I never skimped on was school books and supplies.

When one day I visited a college counselor to plan my next schedule of classes, I must have looked hungry.  Mrs. Strol recommended that I apply for a Basic Educational Opportunity Grant to supplement my income. So, I did.  I filled out the form carefully and slipped it into a mailbox.  Six weeks later, the college notified me that a check was waiting for me at the Financial Aid office.

I needed to fill my car with gas, so I went to pick up the check the next day.  Once on campus, I walked up to the Financial Aid window and gave my name.  The assistant smiled at me, flipped through a file, and pulled out a business-sized envelope.  She was so friendly that I felt like lingering, but I thanked her and left instead.

When I got back to my car, I ripped open the envelope and took out an over-sized check.  Wow. The amount was high enough to pay my tuition for two semesters and my rent for six months.  Wow.

No. . . Wow.

Someone cared enough about my college success that they gave me money, and lots of it.  I hugged the check close to my chest and reflected on my good fortune.  I could do it.  I could go to college and someone would think that it was the right thing to do.

This government assistance was the gesture of kindness that I needed to climb over the wall between me and my personal success.  This single act of charity gave me more hope than I had ever dreamed of.  I felt appreciated.  This act of benevolence erased the chains of anguish that held me down and stifled my optimism.   It was empowerment, realization, strength, determination, liberty, and direction all rolled into one.

Here I am, decades later, teaching college students.  I have received numerous checks from various people since then, but this was the most important check of my life. Within its paper and ink was a life-time of support and approval—a lifetimes worth of support for my personal growth and success.

I look around me today and I don’t see anyone who succeeds alone.  Children learn how to walk and run and say “Please” by listening to their mothers.  Young workers get advice from mentors about how to get and keep a job.  Athletes receive guidance from personal trainers and game strategy from coaches.  Cancer patients survive with assistance from doctors.  Presidents are voted into office.

Both private and public support is important, even critical. No one succeeds alone.  But those who receive assistance can and often do learn how to give it to someone else.

They grow, they succeed, and they become the next generation of givers.  The practice of helpfulness originates from a true understanding of the power of generosity.

Helpfulness begets success, and I’m an example. My dreams came true because someone once believed in them more than I dared to dream.