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This is Between Business Cards
I’m navigating life—one foot stuck in the mud, the other trying to pull free. Like you, I’ve held a lot of roles: sibling, employee, spouse, healthy person and one facing illness. Some of those titles even made it onto my business cards. But life has a way of editing our identities—whether we’re ready or not. Over time, my roles changed. I was divorced. My parents passed. I experienced painful estrangements and major illness. And through it all—showing up, struggling, transitioning—I found unexpected lifelines: family, friends, books, projects and small, quiet gestures that kept me afloat. This isn’t a self-help blog. It’s more of a help-yourself-while-I-stumble-through blog. It’s about the collective…
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Kissed by Paul Simon
The beveled glass of an empty Yoo-Hoo bottle sparkled under the fluorescent lights, spinning wildly as the eighth graders held their breath. Floorboards squeaked above us as we sat on cracked linoleum tile in the church rectory’s basement. We weren’t supposed to be down there. Our young Jesuit priest, Father Sweeney, fresh out of seminary, had organized a mixer of Catholic and Methodist junior high students. Vatican II declared that Protestants were not heretics, just separated brethren. Father Sweeney hoped a gathering might provide opportunities to better understand our new Christian friends. During the party, eight of us sneaked down the stairs and started a game of Spin the Bottle.…
