Dear Nicholas, Who of the dead and gone would I most like to talk with? That was the question asked of the three writers on a recent panel at a local library. I hesitated for a quarter-second, though, pagan Christian that I am, I’d known instantly my answer: “Jesus and Daddy.” It wasn’t the expected […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, Yesterday in the hellish heat I ventured again into my jungle of a garden and found it overwhelming. Nature is winning on this little patch, a lot more vigorously than usual. The ground is squishy with vole tunnels. There must be thousands of the little creatures swarming under there, eating plants from the […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, Why should I or anyone have a lifelong fear of math? “Feel the fear and do it anyway” doesn’t work, at least not for me. Yesterday I included two bills with a bank deposit, a twenty and a ten. The teller at the drive-through had to tell me that twenty plus ten does […] Read More

  Dear Nicholas, Good conversation today–face-to-face in person! Your coming to town only a couple of times a year does encourage focus in the therapeutic hour. Lots of good take-away especially about getting to sleep faster.   My notes:   For getting to sleep faster at night… Paradoxically, use a morning ritual. Start the day […] Read More

Nicholas, Doing some window-shopping today, I suddenly realized how many new and not-so-new trends I don’t take part in. I started making a list and I’m shocked. Am I old-fashioned or simply being particular? Not that I begrudge others the pleasure, but there’s a lot of very popular stuff I don’t do, including: *blue or […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I fell. I’m refusing to think of this as an “old person thing,” though I do know that physicians like to ask their more mature patients, “Have you fallen in the last three months?” as if that were significant information. Gardening in the Dark I was out doing some late-night watering and inexplicably […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, A man I talked with on a bus in 1970 emailed to tell me that something I said on that ride kept him alive in a life raft decades later in brutal cold 400 miles east of Gander, Newfoundland.  You can imagine how flattered and stunned I was. One of my most troubling obsessions […] Read More

  Dear Nicholas, Thanks for the sneak peek at my whole adult life. It was a rare and enlightening opportunity–turning through the notes you made in our sessions from when I was twenty-four to when I hit sixty-four. “What my psychotherapist wrote about me” is not something I ever expected to read. Reading these notes was […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, We went to visit the wee lass, my newborn step-grandbaby, in her hometown of Krakow, Poland. Now I have a very extended family and a faraway baby to visit on Skype. The arrival of Annabella has widened the reach of my roots in the world in a way I hadn’t expected. We don’t all […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I rode on a plane. Came home and got sick. I feel awful. I’ve caught a nasty airplane bug, I’m guessing. And I am freshly awed by the power of a wee microbe, making a short visit, to bring body and spirit to their knees. It doesn’t take a monster illness to briefly […] Read More