No, and Yes Live Together in The House You Build for Yourself. When I was younger I could say no without guilt, worry, or fear. In fact, at least once I not only said “no”, I also made a deal out of that ‘no.’ It was during my short stint on the track team where…
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I tell you everything because I know you don’t judge me. You aren’t a judger. I just gotta know. What kind of person are you when you’re sick? A. Stiff upper lip. Continues with life with a discrete tissue up sleeve. B. Takes a day off work but returns medicated, slower but still game. C. Sleeps…
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After losing my Thanksgiving Turkey my friend of thirty-five years called and said, “I have a story to tell you that will make you feel better.” I, of course, was ready to hear anything. I had just lost my turkey and my mother has Alzheimer’s. You do the math. So she said: “A year ago,…
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I lost my turkey. I did. I lost my actual Thanksgiving turkey. This is not a metaphor for losing my shit. Or an allegory or an idiom (don’t feel bad if you have to google these, I did). Here’s what happened. I left the Madison Women’s Expo where I’d just given a talk on how…
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No Sex Just Cuddling. I travel alone a lot. I like to travel alone. I can “vacation eat” without anyone raising an arched eyebrow and asking, “Don’t you teach Nutrition?” I can walk past museums without explaining why I don’t really like museums even though I know I should. I just don’t, okay? I can pee…
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Instagrams: In Loving Memory Memory is a confounding thing. I’m reminded of that every day as I sit with either my mother or my children. My mother has Alzheimer’s and can’t remember my name and my two teen girls have a kind of adolescent memory loss where they seem to recall only the worst parenting…
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My Brother, Jealousy and Getting Over Ourselves [Tweet “When my older brother Ray put his friend into a coma it changed my life but it took me forty-five years to figure out how.”] When I was twelve my family moved from one-hour outside of New York City to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and one-hour…
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I wrote this book about you. No? Well, here’s how it goes with my new book I Like You Just Fine When You’re Not Around. I’m holding the book and a person next to me reads the title and laughs. Then as if I’ve caught them doing something embarrassing like thinking something not so nice…
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Laughter and Alzheimer’s: Really? I write about Alzheimer’s because, it seems, I can’t not write about Alzheimer’s. This wretched disease shows up, one way or another in so many of my essays, even when I don’t plan on it. There are times that I’m clearly writing about Alzheimer’s and the ravages of its footprint on…
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Life isn’t fair. It doesn’t keep score, track, or have any kind of real give-and-take order to it. We lose jobs even when we are good employees, we’re nice but we still get sick, we stub our toes, fall down, and forget to zipper our flies even though we didn’t flip off the person who tailed us all…
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