Looking for Peace on Memorial Day, 2014: PeaceTrees Vietnam
PeaceTreesVietnam, a Seattle-based humanitarian organization, is one of the rare and extraordinary responses to the consequences of war that makes us believe that humans might have a chance to survive on our planet. Since 1995 they have been working with Vietnamese people in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam (a small area that received more bombs than all of Europe in World War II). They find and defuse unexploded ordinance before innocent adults and children are accidently killed or maimed. When the mines are removed, they plant indigenous trees. They provide land risk education, survivor assistance, civilian diplomacy trips, and a range of other supportive activities.
As of 2014, they have:
Cleared more than 559 acres of land
Removed more than 69,000 items of unexploded ordnance
Built more than 100 family homes, 11 libraries, 7 kindergartens, and the Danaan Parry Landmine Education Center
Provided mone risk education for more than 85,750 people
Planted more than 43,000 indigenous trees
Provided assistance to more than 950 landmine survivors
Hosted more than 633 participants on more than 45 citizen diplomacy missions to Vietnam
Visit them at www.PeaceTreesVietnam.org.
Making Health Care Decisions for Aging Parents: The Baby Boomer Dilemma
“Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.” Eleanor Roosevelt
What Mrs. Roosevelt says is true, but life has unquestionably become more complicated for one age group today. People between the ages of forty-five and seventy are often referred to as the “sandwich” generation because of their dual roles as helpers to their own children and grandchildren, and also as caregivers for their aging parents who are living longer. Baby boomers have become, by necessity, important health care decision makers on both ends of the spectrum, from child care to elder care. Sometimes even more responsibility can arrive in the blink of an eye: What do you do if there is a sudden change in your parent’s health status? One minute they seem to be holding their own and the next minute – disaster.
My friend Marilyn knew that something had changed dramatically with her mother when she arrived one morning to find mom sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Until that moment, her mother had seemed increasingly frail, but still independent. At age 86 she still ironed her pillowcases and prepared her own meals in the house she had lived in for forty years. That morning life seemed different and scary for both of them.
“What happened,” asked Marilyn as she tried to check for broken bones.
“I don’t know. Do you know where we are?” Her mother gazed up from the floor with a faraway look.
A trip to the emergency room revealed nothing unusual according to lab tests, but Marilyn realized that her mother’s ability to live on her own had changed.
This sudden event marked their entry into the tricky passage towards total dependence in which her mother would need a […]
I’m a Lucky Mother
With Mother’s Day coming up soon, I want to express my appreciation for my son, Noah Bean. He has been immensely helpful with my book and has even created an excellent book trailer which will be revealed soon. He is my main muse for writing, always providing support and unconditional regard. I’m a lucky mother!
Noah was a shy, quiet kid growing up, but he was also kind, friendly, humorous and an excellent listener. In fact, he listened and observed so well that he could do an instant impersonation of almost anyone (but never in public). He blossomed as an actor in high school and says that acting gave him a voice in front of other people.
Many have asked about his next role on television and I’m happy to say that he will be starring in an adaptation of the 1995 science fiction classic, 12 Monkeys.
The US cable channel has ordered a 13-part series, including the pilot, produced by Universal Cable Productions and Atlas Entertainment.
12 Monkeys follows the journey of a time traveler from the post-apocalyptic future who appears in the present day on a mission to locate and eradicate the source of a deadly plague that will eventually decimate the human race. The pilot episode was filmed on location in Detroit, home to some breathtaking post-apocalyptic looking spaces and scenes. This awe-inspiring series will premiere in January 2015.
Along with Noah, it stars Aaron Stanford, Amanda Schull, and Kirk Acevedo. Noah and Aaron worked together most recently in the TV series, Nikita, on CW network.
In June and July, 2014, you can also see Noah onstage as Cassio in San Diego’s Old Globe […]
Story Circle Star Blogger
Story Circle has been celebrating women’s writing for more than 10 years. I’m honored to be recognized as “Star Blogger” for January, 2014.
An Essay’s Journey – From Rejection to Pushcart Nomination
In December, 2013, I was notified that my essay, What the Dog Understood, published in O-Dark-Thirty (the journal of the Veteran’s Writing Project) had been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I had submitted this piece to more than twenty journals before it was accepted by the editors at O-Dark-Thirty. The lesson here is – perservere. Besides honing your writing skills, you must believe that there will be a home for your work and your light will shine – sometime, somewhere. Certainly it has to do with crafting your best work, but timing is another essential ingredient. This particular essay began more than ten years ago. When I felt it was ready, I sent it to journals whose contents seemed sympatico with my style of nonfiction writing. Rarely do editors tell you why a piece is rejected, but those who did write words of encouragement on the rejection letter alluded to something like, “not right for us at this time.”
If you’re like me, you might ask yourself: “What does that mean? Am I too early or too late?” The other thing I did was to pull out a tiny volume entitled, Rotten Rejections, edited by Andre Bernard with an introduction by Bill Henderson, the same Bill Henderson who created the Pushcart Prize in 1976. Reading a few lines from Rotten Rejections always makes me feel better. For example, in 1931 Pearl Buck received these words from a publisher about The Good Earth, “Regret that the American public is not interested in anything on China.”
Or – how about this note from a publisher after receiving the manuscript for Mastering the Art […]
What prompted that? Looking for inspiration in the writing process
Recently – as I tried to jumpstart another essay – or at least get a few words on the page, I felt that familiar numbness spreading down my shoulders and arms and paralyzing my fingertips on the keyboard. Instead of writing I was listening to the little voice from writer’s hell that likes to play with my common sense. Some writers call it monkey mind. When it happens to me, I feel confused and drained of ideas at the same time.
Of course you have ideas, I prodded myself, but my genius moments were just wisps of smoke – amorphous, intangible, lost in the jungle undergrowth of my mind. Accessible only to the chimp in my brain. When I reached up to snatch a thought, it was nothing but air. Not even a gnat’s wing of substance.
Dr. Beatrice Hinkle, who opened the first psycho-therapeutic clinic in the United States at Cornell Medical College in the 1920s and specialized in treating artists, wrote, “ Every writer, …suffers from periods of drought, in which not a trickle flows. He is in full command …carried along on a flood of creation.”
I love her generous sprinkling of adverbs. Hinkle is certainly not the first or only therapist who has tried to understand artistic temperament and productivity, but I like the simple way she describes what is fundamentally an indescribable process; the torturous road of creativity where putting one foot in front of the other seems like an Olympic […]
Why I Write
A recent issue of The Writer magazine featured writer Alice Hoffman speaking about how and why she writes. On the subject of reading and writing she says “Writing serves the purpose that reading used to serve for me. I always feel like reading save my life because it was a place for me to escape. I feel like quitting all the time, but the act of writing is like being in an ecstatic state. It’s like being high because you are not there. You’re experiencing something on a different plane.”
I feel what she means about writing, but what exactly do I feel? Making a list is always a good thing to do when this kind of question comes up. Here is my list of eighteen reasons why I write:
To understand what I’m thinking.
To revisit places and people of the past via my imagination.
To entertain myself.
To feel the magic triangle between ideas, the pen on the page and the written result.
To dig for buried treasure.
To reflect on common things.
To reflect on extraordinary things.
To approach an understanding of human nature.
To contemplate death.
To open a window in my brain.
To translate experience into understanding.
To be with others through language.
To discover my childhood.
To describe.
To play with words.
To find lost worlds.
To remember
To forget.
Sisters Among the Gold Stars
It was a muggy July evening in 1946 when five women whose husbands had died in World War II traveled to Hyde Park, New York, to meet with another war widow, Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her news column, My Day, that they, “…came for supper, and then went to Poughkeepsie the Lafayette Post of the American Legion had given them permission to use a room for a meeting. It was a small meeting, though the casualties among servicemen from Dutchess County were pretty high.” In fact, more than 175 men from Dutchess County alone were killed or MIA by 1945.
The five women who met with Mrs. Roosevelt had grown from an original group of four widows who had first met together in Marie Jordan’s apartment on West 20th Street in New York City in 1945 to talk about how they might band together to support the needs of war widows and their children, and to participate in memorial and recognition ceremonies for the war dead. Their appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt to join with them after President Roosevelt’s death was auspicious. She became one of the original signers when the Gold Star Wives of America was chartered as a non-profit organization whose purpose was to do any and all things to benefit the spouses and children of persons who died in war or as a result of service connected illness.
Today there are more than 9,000 active members of Gold Star Wives and potentially 80,000 more survivors who are eligible for membership. It is not a group that one covets simply because of the very fact of how you become eligible. But, […]
Writing Down the Ham Bone: Healing the Griever Within
I borrowed part of the title of this essay from Natalie Goldberg whose generous craft book, “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within,” offers great sustenance to writers. Her’s is a healing book to encourage writers to get on with life, to feed the writer spirit, to be attentive to place, to memory and experience.
I’ve been grappling with writing about healing from grief, specifically how I survived the death of my husband in Vietnam in 1969, and then the tragic death of my father after a construction accident in 1981, and my younger brother’s death from AIDS in 1989.
I’m not special in my experiences. It is rare to meet anyone who has not experienced a generous helping of tragic events. But, my question is: How do we share these experiences among ourselves? How do we decide what to do and what to say? Can we pinpoint things that are helpful?
Being a lover of cooking and the sharing of food, some old culinary memories bubbled up as I thought about living through tough times. I can’t say that I desired anything to do with eating in the aftermath of learning that my husband had been killed when I was twenty-three, but I do remember the presence of food in that difficult time; I remember people gathered around me at the dining room table and in restaurants where others ate and I sat in stunned silence.I remember kindness and encouragement without pressure to participate and eat.
When my grandmother died in 1972, a basket arrived on our doorstep even before the funeral. It contained a […]
Nutrition and the Stress of Tragedy
Naomi appeared lean and fit, although a bit pale, when she arrived for her appointment in the Nutrition Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. At first glance, before taking her history, I thought she might be a long-distance runner, an ice skater, or a gymnast. I had counseled many elite athletes over the years. They usually wanted to know what kind of foods would enhance their performance and if it was true that some nutrients or supplements made it easier to build muscle. Sometimes they had an eating disorder brought on by the constant competition to be strong, but look thin. As soon as Naomi began to speak, I realized that her nutritional challenge was completely different.
“My mother thought I should see someone,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears. “I can’t eat – I have no desire to eat – in fact I feel full all the time – but also empty.”
She described a feeling of heaviness in her chest, lack of concentration, restlessness, difficulty sleeping and frequent tears. Further conversation revealed the source of her emotional and physical state: Three months before, her fiancé had been killed in Iraq. Many people don’t realize that learning terrible news – being suddenly and powerfully aggrieved – triggers an automatic physical response. It’s not a sign of weakness or inability to handle emotion, it is the body’s way of trying to stay safe.
Both the physical stress of athletic training and the emotional stress of a sudden tragedy can create the same reaction in the body. As we battle to survive, stress hormones are released from the adrenal glands located just above the kidneys. As these hormones surge throughout the body, they enable us […]
