Goodbye, Aretha!
My tribute to the Queen of Soul The other day, I woke up to discover Aretha Franklin had died. The world feels different to me now. Whenever my life has needed a musical pick-me-up, I have always turned to Aretha and Janis. I can still turn to them, but they will never make another recording, just as Maya Angelou will never write another poem or William Trevor will never write another short story, Aretha and Janis have done all they are going to do. Aretha has been with me since the 1960s. I cannot remember the recording that first got my attention. If memory serves, it was I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. That would have been 1967, and the year of the Detroit riots, the year of tanks in the streets and fires burning, the year of abiding by curfews and...
Retirement Phase II: A New Relationship with Time
Finding good fortune in the company of my next novel, my husband, our dog Django and Proust As most of you know, I closed my private practice office in July 2017. But for the few remaining patients whom I thought might benefit from another year with me, and who did not wish to have to see another therapist, we continued by phone. As of December 2018, I will be ending these most precious relationships as well. For those of you who have had the experience of long-term treatment, or those of you who do long-term treatment as therapists yourselves, perhaps you can appreciate what this might mean to me. If only I had owned a shop where I might just close the doors and that would be that. We can become attached to shops or even their keepers, but this sort of...
Pondering Hatred
Why are we so deeply entrenched in our own ideas that we cannot understand others? This little fellow reminds me of myself today, as I ponder a quotation I heard the other day on news commentary. It isn’t the exact quotation, but the idea is simple enough: One cannot dispel ignorance with arrogance. This sounds easy enough, but our passion for our beliefs is strong. When we become heated in our arguments, filled with the zeal to convey our truths, we tend to disregard what the other person (or persons) is saying. We are too deeply entrenched in our own ideas to truly hear the thoughts of others. I watched a documentary recently made by a Pakistani Muslim woman journalist who came to this country to interview people and learn about white supremacy. Her interviews...
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