Welcome to My Inner Life

Welcome to my inner life. Here, I will delve into what’s on my mind and hope that is an interesting way to connect with you.  As a writer, I do not always fully realize what is important to me until I let each word settle on the page.   

I prefer writing on paper, I am “old school” in that way.  I am writing this in my journal as I fly, but it will be translated to computer so it can appear on my blog.  I am someone who collects journals that speak to me and eventually end up using them.  I wonder if any of you do that too.   Recently, I invited a friend to choose one of my many journals for some grief writing that I hoped would give her some solace. 

As I write this, I am on a plane, flying from San Francisco, California to St Paul, Minnesota for my 50th high school reunion, which starts in two days and has several events throughout the weekend. It turns out that I find this milestone to be a prompt for me. What have I done with “my one precious life” in those years.

One thing I’ve done often throughout the years is to write poetry, mostly free verse. Recently, I pulled out a file from my 20s and read some poems, both privately, then aloud at a reading. For me, poetry has always provided a window into my subconscious mind.  As I will be doing a separate blog for poetry, I will go into more detail about my process, and share some of my poems with you.

I have met and collected people who stay in my life, many for decades. I give a birthday party each year, and there are many friends who met at one of my gatherings, over the years. I usually host a Passover Seder, sometimes collaboratively, sometimes not, though it’s always a food collaboration as it can get big and cooking. is not really my thing.  I am always intrigued by who bonds with who at these gatherings.  Many have met and dated, and some have even met and married from these gatherings. Sometimes I don’t find out for years, or even at all about all the various connections made.   For example, I found out, long after it happened, that somebody got a recommendation for a caregiver for their parent who turned out to be a real game changer for one of my friends.

I am in love with the life of the mind, thus I do a fair amount of reading, own an enormous library for my own edification and an equally large book collection for my career as an elementary school teacher, both in public schools and Jewish schools. I can literally spend endless hours in a bookstore, browse reading, maybe buying one or more books and never feel the urge to do anything else, especially if there’s a cozy chair I can settle into and read for a while.

I feel that reading is a window into worlds outside of my own experience, which is probably why teaching children to read is my area of expertise. I seem to have endless patience for helping children unlock the code of letters on the page. I was an early reader, myself, wondering why it was so painful for some children to crack the code.

I am so thankful that my teachers at Homecroft elementary in St Paul, had beautiful classroom libraries and talked up certain titles. I was especially intrigued by Helen Keller and read a book about her in second, third and fourth grade, until I mastered the ideas in the book and was able to read all of the words. I imagine that I felt a kinship to her as I have a special needs brother who couldn’t easily do what other children did, due to brain injury during his birth process. 

My plane is landing, so I need to sign off, but will continue to reflect here in the near future.   If you made it to the bottom of this entry, thank you for your time.   I would love to hear your thoughts in response to what I have written.