Author: Kathryn Atkins

Leave Room in Your Suitcase

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins
apple book break color
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So, did you think this post was going to be about travel? Great. It is. But, it’s not.

Hopefully, we are all going somewhere. However, we are not always going on vacation. Or going out of town. Or going on a safari, per se. We are, however, traveling through life. We need to have our suitcase packed, our selves ready, open, and available to step, fly, jump, and fall forward into the next place. Our metaphorical bags should always be packed, as in why slow down to throw in a toothbrush when the next adventure may have toothbrushes waiting for you at the other end? Or better yet, we won’t need toothbrushes there at all. Our teeth will automatically be cleaned by busy nanobots grinning as they scrub, singing happy tunes, and making you happy to boot.

So while the suitcase should be ready to go, it should have room to add stuff. We want to leave space in the suitcase of our minds to put in cool new ideas, experience an image in a way we’ve never done so before, or taste a new aroma, or savor a different apple with a cool name like “Jazz” or “Envy.”

We save a spot for experimentation.  We can pause in the quietness to read an author we wouldn’t have tried without the clarity that white space in a suitcase brings. We can “hear” a not-my-usual color; “wear” a not-my-kind of music. (Not typos: Hear a color and wear music were on purpose.)

I invite you on your next journey to leave room in your suitcase. In fact, I will leave room in mine, too, and maybe we can meet in the middle.

 Always keep a bag packed!

Add A Brick

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

I stood up in front of the small crowd of people last night. Naked.

brick building with stairs
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Kidding. I might as well have been. Two other authors and I were reading from our work, and I was the least accomplished of the trio by far. So, I can choose to engage in self-flagellation . . . or I can view it as a brave opportunity to add a brick to the building I’m constructing. The building of me.

Notice… the building at left has fire escapes! That’s me, too. I’m a building with what I hope are little escapes to help me exit the building when I need to save myself. OR they can equally be ladders or steps for when my wonderful friends and family come up to the floor I’m on that day and chat. Solve problems. Hang out. Are you ready for a climb?

If I’m not building (or being a building), I’m backsliding. I’ve stopped growing. Stopped trying. Stopped embarrassing my self — when that by itself is a lovely (albeit painful) way to get better. Immersion. Hanging it out. Hearing and seeing other people do it differently.

I was not horrible, no. But I am not “there” yet either. Which is silly. We’re never going to get there until we’re dead. OR until we stop trying.

So add a brick today. Or as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.”

*

Here’s the event, by the way. If you want to come by, we love audiences… even if it scares us! And here’s a photo of me at the event. With clothes on.

“JOMO”

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins
yellow plush toy
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You’ve heard of FOMO… Fear Of Missing Out. I just heard of “JOMO.”

JOMO = Joy Of Missing Out.

That means forgetting Facebook, turning off Twitter, and ignoring Instagram. And evading E-Mail for a block of uninterrupted time. Call it what you will, it’s a way to decrease our addiction to the 24/7/365 bombardment of noise and distraction simply because we’re afraid we won’t know what our neighbor knows. We’ll miss the client’s email or an agent’s answer. They can wait.

JOMO is about allowing ourselves the joy of being in the moment.

Jason Fried, co-founder of 37Signals and maker of Basecamp reads a newspaper now! In a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Jason said that knowing what’s going on in the world once a day is enough. Imagine.

The universe will continue without our seeing and hearing what happens every minute of every day. We’ll have more time for meditating, writing, painting, making music, reading books and lots more. Let’s call it Anti-Social Media. How’s that for a new term?

Unplug and enjoy life!

Boardwalk

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Steven took my hand and looked into my eyes. “Trust me, Heidi, I know where the car is for sure this time.” I saw the beads of sweat on my brother’s forehead and knew in that instant that he was still guessing. I hated him for how forgetful he was. He had just started driving last week. Our parents were stupid to let us out alone.

ferris wheel underneath cloudy day
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As we walked along the boardwalk at our city’s beachside amusement park, I could see the Ferris wheel turning in slow motion in the distance. We passed the bumper cars, and I could hear the electricity sparking against the metal ceiling atop the funny long hooks. The smell of cotton candy mixed with the unmistakable aroma of hot dogs and greasy French fries reminded me of how hungry I was. But we had no money for food. We passed the huge churning arms of the saltwater taffy machine as the sun dipped into the ocean, stealing daylight and casting the park into a burnt shadowy tapestry for the short time until the lights came on for the evening.

“Can’t we go home?” I said.

“I told you. We’re heading to the car. It’s right over here. I’m sure of it,” Steven said. We pressed on. I could see Steven was trying to get his bearings. When Steven sensed my concern, he added, “We’ll be there in a minute. Promise.” Just then, a man emerged from out of the funhouse doorway to our left.

            “Come with me,” the man said to Steven. “And bring the girl.”

I started to tell him we were brother and sister, but Steven squeezed my hand and shook his head imperceptibly.

The man had one continuous eyebrow, dark glasses, and wore a black leather jacket with grimy, dried splotches of mustard on his sleeve, which disgusting as it was, made my stomach rumble with hunger almost as much as it twisted with apprehension.

“I am taking you to the end of the boardwalk. There you will see a very tall woman wearing black silk stockings held up by a satin garter belt. She will have on a red sequined vest, and matching red sequined high heels. You must go with her,” the man said, reeking of sweat, stale cigars, and maybe beer. I don’t really know.

Steven was holding my hand so tightly now that I began to lose feeling in my fingers. The prickly sensation started crawling up my arm, and I tried to wriggle free, only making Steven hold my hand tighter now, his class ring cutting into my hand because he always wore it turned around backward.

The man in the sunglasses peeled away as we approached the tall woman. She, too, had dark glasses on. At night. And her hair was big. Big and black. Like a witch. I thought we should run. But we were not free. Something drew us to the woman. Something we could not see and something from which we could not escape.

“How do you do?” she said, looking down into both of our panic-stricken faces. “We have been waiting for you.”

We looked at her purse with a big F on it, and she told us to follow her past the end of the boardwalk, around the side of the brightly lit Ferris wheel, and out to the place where she said something was waiting for us. Oh, God. What was it? Who was it? We had been holding hands, but now, our hands became gently disengaged.

We would see each other again, my brother and I, but on that night we bid our childhoods and each other goodbye. We were no longer those kids, holding hands, my brother trying in vain to protect me from harm. No. He could not protect me from this.

When we walked away from the boardwalk that night with the big-haired woman wearing dark glasses and red sequined high heels, we were leaving behind our childhood. We would become adults. The hunger I felt was more accurately a profound emptiness stemming from the premature loss of my youth. And so, we entered the next stage of life with that woman as our guide. For it was our fate to grow up. Like kids do. In fact, that was her name. Fate.  Even then, I wondered what the garter belt meant. It worried me, and I am sad to say, it was indeed a sign of things to come. For our fate is not ours to know in advance, but ours to look back upon, and wonder why.

Mrs. B

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

IMG_7947Mrs. B didn’t own a computer. She had a cell phone for three months but never used it.  She told her daughter to take it back.  She had time to take long walks at the park, read, do crafts, and go to lunch with friends. She attended live lectures, went to the library, enjoyed museums, picnics, and face-to-face conversations with squirmy children who weren’t used to ‘talking’ without a keyboard, a cell phone or a computer— even the little ones.  She could see the kids’ expressions, and help them understand social interplay the old-fashioned way. Sometimes she wore a clown nose. I want to be her.

Mrs. B doesn’t need a computer and doesn’t use email or instant messages. She writes notes to people, does her banking inside the bank, visits friends, and has the bridge club at her house once a month. The book club is on the third Thursday of the month, bridge club on the second Tuesday, and baby quilters on the fourth Friday.  Mrs. B. volunteers at the local hospital stuffing envelopes and helping the cooks put little white cups on the trays for the patients.  She wears a hairnet, gloves, and an apron for this job.  The apron comes down to the floor, and the extra small gloves hang off her tiny hands like a four-year-old dressing up in her mom’s clothes. The hairnet is covered by a big blue surgical hat of which the hospital purchased tens of thousands at a huge discount, making Mrs. B look like a cross between a blue mushroom and a midget chef. Her died red hair pokes out from under the blue hat, clown style. I still want to be her.

She laughs easily. She has a razor-sharp mind and an expanding heart, especially for children.  Her favorite volunteer work is reading to kids in hospitals, schools, churches, and libraries.  It is becoming a lost art, and she cried when the safety laws required that she wear a badge, get fingerprinted, TB tested, and background checked all so she could be a chaperoned “aide” in the room while she read to the kids. 

“All I want to do is entertain and teach the children,” she said. The laws have changed, the world has changed, the people have changed.  It became too much of a hassle for her and eventually, she had to cut way back because they couldn’t find a chaperone. It was a loss for the kids and left a huge void in Mrs. B’s wonderfully abundant heart.

One day, all the cell phones on the earth stopped working, (Let’s pretend. Okay?) and the Internet coughed and blinked out for a 24-hour period. Mrs. B’s life did not change at all, except that the people in the retirement home where she lived came down to the central meeting room for a change. At first, it was a trickle. Then walkers and wheelchairs arrived in a steady (if slow-moving) stream. Finally, they flooded the room. The area was awash in blue hairs, and the chattering and laughing brought life back into the home that usually served as the Grim Reaper’s waiting area. 

New acquaintances became friends. The next day, cell phone service was restored along with the Internet. The newly connected oldsters brought homemade, wobbly-lettered placards to the dining area. “INTERNET GO HOME!”

The real Mrs.B is gone now, but I’d still like to be Mrs. B some day. Maybe I can. Just turn off the phone. Turn off my computer. And step into the world where ferns and rocks and leaves wait patiently for me to saunter by. My phone? What phone. Nope, it is Mrs. B now. You may call me Mrs. B if you’d like. 

Life’s a Crapshoot

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Did you watch it? The storybook Royal Wedding? What did you take from it? That there’s no predicting life. No one would have thought a Hollywood starlet would marry an honest-to-goodness prince. Well, not in real life. In stories. In movies. On TV. But not for real. But it was. Real.

Rolling the Dice

crapshoot2Back in 2006, I was becoming increasingly aware of egg donors facilities. Yes. I was pretty amazed that people were picking characteristics they wanted for their children and were buying eggs that they thought would make little people with those traits. What’s cool is that it doesn’t work that way. At least not yet. Thank goodness. For instance, neither of our children plays the piano by ear, but I do. On the other hand, I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag, but our younger son is crazy-good at drawing, painting, sketching, shading, faces (for gosh sakes), and composition. How nice a surprise. Right? 

Is life a game of chance? I think it is deliciously so. In fact, I say throw all the eggs and sperm in a piñata and do a free-for-all blindfolded party burst. Then grab the gametes and zygotes that lie on the ground, smash them together and you’ll have a kid — any old kid, and the future means nothing, the past means nothing, and lineage has no meaning whatsoever. Birthrights mean doodly squat. The Kennedy clan has had more than its share of problems, right? 

You can be born and given up for adoption. You can be born into squalor. You can come into the world with an affliction. You can start your life in a palace. And sometimes that, too, can be bad luck! What. Dee. Heck?

People that are born of two parents bring recessive and dominant genes to the party. The randomness of the different permutations produces hugely disparate kids of the same two parents, no matter how many kids they have. It’s the scary-wonderful, elegant and inelegant magic of it all. We keep doing it through the centuries, and sometimes we make a mess of it, and sometimes, it’s a beautiful thing, this life.

Life’s a crapshoot right from the beginning, and that’s all there is to it. There should be more, somehow, but there isn’t.

Purpose

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

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Someone in the audience asked, “How do you know you’re living your life’s purpose?” Good question!  How DO we know? Here were the answers from others in the room:

“No other place I’d rather be.”

“I’m happy.”

“I’m in a state of flow.”

“It feels like I’m being me.”

The women’s group in our neighborhood met to share business ideas and to talk about ourselves. Our SELVES. What do we fear? What do we seek? What do we need to feel like we are living our life’s purpose? How do we say “no”? As in NO. How do we protect our obliging, pleasing selves (many women fall into this category because of our role model moms) so we can live our life’s purpose on purpose?

Mark Twain said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Sometimes the way we can be our best selves and find our purpose is to set boundaries. So sometimes we have to say “No.” Or say a qualified, controlled yes. “Tuesday after 3PM for thirty minutes.” We want to give our gifts to the people who will grow from our knowledge, our skillsets, and our experiences. This is another quote:

The meaning of life is to discover your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. ~ Pablo Picasso.

We are here to do unto others. But not at the expense of our selves. Or we will have nothing to give. We must find out why we are here, per Mark Twain. Then we need to give our gift — perhaps it is our purpose  — to the rest of humanity. One at a time, or in a group, or through blogs. Like this one.

The same woman asked, “Can you have more than one purpose?”

I believe we can have more than one purpose. What do you believe?

Temporary

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Dandelion_20windWe just dropped off our twenty-year-old son at the airport. He is so, well, twenty. After raising two boys to manhood, I know that Kahlil Gibran was probably right: Our children are only on loan to us.

I had heard it, but I didn’t have a clue of what that meant. When they were little, I fooled myself into thinking they were mine. But now I’m not so sure they ever were. Yes, they pretty much did what they were told—most of the time— because they didn’t know any better. However, those times didn’t last. And the boys often made their own decisions and mistakes, because that’s how they grew up. Childhood is temporary, as are many other things. The speed of our children’s progression to adulthood from the womb makes my head spin. Why is this?

 If our children are on loan and temporary, then so are marriage (‘til death or divorce do us part), our age, our highs, and lows. The seasons come and go. Winter fades to spring, which yields to summer and on to fall. There is no constancy in life except the fluidity of movement of one moment to the next. There is never a time when everything comes to a screeching halt. Never. The idea of it is so unfathomable to humankind, that most religions have an afterlife. Good or bad, heaven or hell, it’s a continuation of now into the future. We are almost never here and now, because now is like a freight train with “then” before it and “someday” after it, and “here” lasts only until that freight train leaves the station.

That means that there is no real past when you’re in the present. We cannot retrieve our children as they once were. We cannot ever again feel them inside our bodies, in our arms, or on our backs. That was temporary—a phase that is no more. I am convinced of the temporary nature of the past. Why, then, can I not see that the future is a fleeting, unattainable bundle? How insane am I that I do not see this? We project forward as if there were a way to control the future. There is none. We prepare for the future, we save, we worry; we think we can control outcomes, but alas, the future has no bearing on the present. It will be what it will be. That does not mean we don’t try to achieve our goals. No, rather, it means we try to plan our lives so that we must live only in the present knowing that any other form of living must negate the thing of life itself. It is so rudimentary but almost impossible: many people spend more time outside of now than in, and it is no wonder that the passage of time blurs on its way through life’s train station.

If there is no “present thread” (maybe because it is invisible) holding this day together, then it pulls apart, like a sweater unraveling, and the fabric we think we’re wearing is naught but a tangle of yarn on our mind’s floor.

Because life is temporary, my kids are on loan, my mom, brother, and spouse are fleeting, and everything is but a smearing of consciousness. I must stop. I should grab the hands on the life’s clock, hold onto them like the devil, and slow them way down as if my life depended on it. Why? Because it does. It just does.

Kathryn Atkins 2006

What Comes Next?

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Note to reader: This is a story with no end . . . yet. You can finish this story however you would like. How does the sentence end? What will happen? Who comes in the room? Who leaves the room? Would you like this kind of chance? Can you relate? Enjoy!

The principal of the school sat in her office pondering the student— a girl who had been referred to the office for yet another dress-code violation. It was Thursday morning.

“What?” the girl said in a slouching stand, her hand on one hip as attitude permeated her skinny little half-dressed 15-year-old body. The girl’s makeup skewed toward prostitution, and her spiked green and blue hair looked hideous.

The principal knew better than to say anything about how the girl looked. Instead, she said, “This is your third dress-code violation in three days, Maddy. What would you like me to do about this?” The principal had already decided the girl’s fate, but she was always interested to see a student’s take on the situation at hand.

“Call my parents. Have them come and get me. They hate that.”
“So, that’s what this is about? Angering your parents?”

Maddy slouched the other way, put her other hand on her other hip, looked the principal straight in the eyes and said, “Yeah. That’s what this is about.”

The principal, Mrs. O’Reilly, knew this all along. It happened all last year and the year before. She knew Maddy’s parents. They were both attorneys, very bright, but very stupid when it came to their daughter. All Maddy wanted was some attention and the easiest way for her to get it was to get in trouble. She had tried the good grades route. She hadn’t been able to arrive on their radar with good grades. She tried pleasing them with clarinet lessons when she was younger. She hated the clarinet, which was okay because that hadn’t worked either. Finally, one day, she got a “C-” in a French class. Well, the whole bloody earth stopped spinning at Maddy’s house. Her mom and dad became enraged, engaged parents, and Maddy had finally found a path to success: failure.

Mrs. O’Reilly knew the pattern. She had seen it a hundred times before and told Maddy she was not going to call her parents, but rather that Maddy was to meet her at an address on the slip of paper she handed her. She knew from previous run-ins that this would be okay with Maddy’s mom and would handle the details in the next few hours.

“Saturday morning at nine o’clock, I will be waiting for you at this address. Don’t be late.”

“But…”

“No. Just be there.” Mrs. O’Reilly frowned and added, “And put on that T-shirt by the door for the rest of the day.”

The shirt said ‘Busted by Mrs. O.’ Mrs. O’Reilly had one hundred made at the beginning of the school year. This was the last one, and it was only December. They were a drab shade of gray, extra large size with white lettering. She bought them with her own money and tried vainly to get them back from the students the next day after they had worn them. But they had become popular with a certain section of the student body, and the parents of those students didn’t care anymore about their kids’ returning the shirts than they did about what they let their kids wear to school. She would have to buy more, and maybe make them cheaper, uglier, or with a reward attached for returning them. She knew that wouldn’t work, however. These kids had more money and less love than any other spoiled student body she’d ever worked with, and she had been a school principal for over 25 years.

* * *

 Connie O’Reilly waited until 9:15. Maddy finally arrived.

“What happened? I told you to be here promptly at nine o’clock.”
“I know, but I had to take the bus. I didn’t tell my parents where I was going.”

“Well, they should have known. I sent them an email telling them you were going to be with me today. I will call them so they won’t worry.” She pulled out her cellphone and started to dial.

“Don’t bother,” Maddy said. “They’re out of town this weekend like most weekends.”

Mrs. O’Reilly decided she better tell the truth. “Your mom does know, actually. I called her at work on Thursday.”

Maddy shrugged. “She didn’t mention it to me. Usually, she tells Dad, and they both yell at me.”

“Hmm.” Mrs. O’Reilly was a little surprised, too, and she wondered what was going on, though this was not strictly her problem. She only needed one parent’s permission at this point. She was a school principal, not a social worker, and not a marriage counselor. At this very moment, however, she wanted Maddy to see what she brought her to see.

It started to rain as Mrs. O’Reilly moved down the stairs. It was six steps down from street level to an old door taking them through a narrow hallway. Dim bulbs screwed directly into bare light receptacles made the passage most uninviting, but managed to hide the dirt (of questionable origin) on the walls. The two women seemed like intruders in a foreign country.

Maddy couldn’t stand the smell either and finally asked, “Where are you taking me, Mrs. O’Reilly? This place doesn’t feel safe, and it stinks.”

“It’s safe alright; it’s just dirty, but one should never allow appearances to keep you from experiencing new things.”

Maddy wore jeans and a T-shirt. Mrs. O’Reilly had jeans on, too, which Maddy had never seen her wear, even to school picnics. They got to the end of the scary hallway. The carpet was shabbier, and more stained than near the front door if that were possible.

“Room three. Room two. Room one,” Mrs. O’Reilly said looking at cast-iron numbers nailed to the wall over the narrow doors where they had finally arrived. “This is it. Go on in.” She smiled widely as excited as she always was to see the expression on a student’s face when they saw what was on the other side of the door.

* * *

The paint-peeled door opened in. Maddy had no idea what to expect. After the dark corridor, the lights blinded her. The light streaming in from skylights and high rain-spattered windows made it hard to see as well. Her eyes darted around quickly, and as they became accustomed to the brightness, she started to see forms.

Colors started to come together and became people; people became faces; a face became eyes, and many of the faces turned to smile at the newcomer. Maddy wasn’t sure what she was even looking at, nor why they were smiling. There were easels everywhere, with people in aprons holding paintbrushes sitting or standing in front of the easels. And there were heavy, paint-stained canvasses draped here and there. Maddy’s face held the confused look of every person who had ever walked through that door.

The room was three stories high. Balconies and stairways connected some of them to others; a few were separate alcoves. On some platforms, two or three people were busy with paintbrushes raised in thought or actively painting; the painters’ eyes skipped back and forth to hanging monitors showing drawings and paintings that the students appeared to be reproducing. A couple of the people were working in clay, and one group had marble forms in front of them.

“Mrs. O’Reilly. Why did you bring me here? I can’t draw or paint. I have trouble drawing stick figures.”

“These people can’t either. Or couldn’t. This is a place to learn how to get in touch with yourself.”

Maddy, short for Madeline, rolled her eyes and made a face. She shook her head and still didn’t understand it at all. A man with dreadlocks broke from his easel on the ground floor and came over to where they stood. By this time everyone else had gone back to work. There were thirty or forty people, spread around the space, and Maddy couldn’t fathom why she was here.

“Hi,” the man said. “My name is Raul. Welcome to the Artist’s Loft.”

“Hi,” Maddy said, turning to Mrs. O’Reilly for help. Mrs. O’Reilly did not say anything and just stood there smiling.

“I guess you’re here to learn to paint,” Raul ventured, winking at Mrs. O’Reilly.

“I can’t paint,” Maddy said. “Or draw, or sculpt, or do any of that stuff. There’s been a mistake.” Maddy was starting to feel very uncomfortable. She felt light headed and asked to sit down for a minute. “Are you all right, Miss?” Raul had seen this before. He’d seen everything.

“I think I might be coming down with something. Perhaps I should come back another time,” Maddy said.

Raul said, “I think you might be hungry. Why not come with me and I’ll get you a bagel and a spot of Earl Grey tea. I’ll wager you’ll be ready to start right after that. It works every time.” Turning to Mrs. O’Reilly, Raul said, “Thank you for bringing Madeline to us. I think she’ll be just fine.”

Maddy looked to Mrs. O’Reilly for help, but then realized something and said to Raul, “Wait. How do you know my name?” She was becoming more anxious by the moment. “We never told you my name,” she said.

Mrs. O’Reilly said, “I made an appointment for you, dear. You’ll be here every Saturday for the next ten weeks.” Waving her arm toward the area around her, Mrs. O’Reilly said, “This is your new job.”

“A job? I don’t need a job. My parents give me all the money I need. Besides, I told you, Mom doesn’t know about this, and really, I cannot paint. I told you.”

“You will learn how to paint, and I did get written permission from your mom. She emailed it over. I can show you if you’d like.” She pulled out a piece of paper from her pocket and offered it to Maddy, who looked at it and knew it was real. Her mom signed all her stuff with ESQ. (for lawyer) all in caps with a period at the end.

“It’s her signature, all right. But I will still need money for the bus to get here.”

“Yes, that’s been arranged. Here’s a bus pass. And every day that you come you will get paid. Like a job.”

“A bus pass? I hate taking the bus. I only did it today because I had to.”

Raul interrupted. “That’s part of the deal. It is about seeing and then painting subjects from what the world offers you. Busses are great places for inspiration.”

Maddy made a face accompanied by more eye-rolling. Mrs. O’Reilly said, “I wish I could do my life all over again. You’re lucky your mom and dad have the money to help with this. Your mom made a nice donation to the Artist’s Loft, and you’re signed up for the ten weeks. You’ll like it. You know, I hate to tell you this, but I’d rather be here than running the high school.”

Maddy’s eyes opened wide with the repetition of ten weeks, but also with that last statement. “REALLY? I thought you liked being a principal.”

“I do, but I would like being a painter more,” she said smiling at her and then at Raul.

Maddy said, “Sounds like my mom just paid you to get me out of her hair. So that’s par for the course.” Raul looked at Mrs. O’Reilly who made it clear that Maddy should stay. Maddy saw the exchange, and said, “So I don’t have a choice, as usual. What am I supposed to do?”

“Just follow Raul’s lead. Do exactly what he says, and you’ll be fine. If you don’t, he’ll kick you out, and you won’t get paid by anyone. Not your mom or your dad. Don’t try that one. Your mom promised me. She’s part of this. So it’s totally up to you. You can do what you want. See you at school on Monday.”

Mrs. O’Reilly left. Maddy turned to Raul. “What did you say your name was again?”

“That’s okay. This place is a lot to take in. I get it. My name is Raul. One syllable. It rhymes with tall, which I am not. But now that I’ve told you, don’t forget it. Okay?”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“No. Not whatever. I need for you to pay attention and start to focus on people. Show respect for everyone around you, please. This is an awesome opportunity for you. Mrs. O’Reilly doesn’t do this for just anyone. She must think a lot of you. She’s putting her reputation on the line, and she doesn’t do this lightly.”

“I don’t understand. Who are these people and what are they doing here? Why am I here? What is this place?”

She and Raul have moved toward the food area. Raul said, “This is a privately-funded, experimental re-hab program. It’s not for everyone. The people you see around you are here for similar problems that you have – minor inabilities to fit in, whether it’s at work, school or home.”

Maddy looked around as she picked up a bagel and took a bite. Then she glanced out at the people scattered about the space. “Well, I don’t have a problem. I am in the wrong place. Thanks for the bagel. I’m leaving now.”

Raul looked at her, knowing she was testing and baiting. “You don’t follow your school’s dress code, and your grades suck, but you used to get straight A’s. Don’t tell me you have no problems. I also know you’re hanging out with the wrong people.”

Madeline raised her eyebrows. “How do you know all this about me? Did Mrs. O’Reilly tell you?”

“Hah. She didn’t tell me anything. I know the kids like you who come in here. You might as well be wearing a sign around your neck.”

“I hate my mom. I hate my dad. I hate Mrs. O, and I don’t even know you, and I hate you already.”

Raul said, “I did too. Mrs. O’Reilly showed me this place when I was a little older than you. But I hated everyone you just mentioned.” He paused. “Including myself.”

“Really?”

Raul offered Maddy the Earl Grey tea, made himself a cup, and sat down. After they talked for ten minutes, Maddy stood and said, “Okay. I had the bagel and the tea. I’ll stay for today.”

Raul smiled and said, “Great. Mrs. O’Reilly will be happy, and I think you will be, too.” They walked out to the work area. “Here’s an apron. Come with me. I’ll introduce you around.”

Maddy put her hand out to take the apron, which was stiff with paint and clay. Chips of muddy brown earth and blue and yellow paint fell on the ground between her feet and Raul’s. She looked down at the mess and paused. Then she looked around the room and then back down at the debris on the floor.

She looked at Raul and said, “I . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flip

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Death Calendar ImageThe calendar doesn’t care.

Its pages flip. The new day comes into view. If it’s a plain daily calendar, it’s not much fun. The best calendars are those big monthly calendars with images that take your breath away. The ones that make you smile, even sigh at how beautiful they are. Some are sweeping vistas of romantic places. Some are such unique animals that you question if they really exist. Calendars do this on purpose, so you don’t have to suffer as much with your life’s passing.

I have a favorite calendar. It’s from Paper Source, and I buy one every year. Without looking at the summary of images on the back, I carefully hang the calendar on the wall directly across from my work desk. Like a little kid, I wait to the first day of the new month before turning the page. Never do I look ahead. In fact, it’s like peeking at Christmas presents before it’s Christmas. As in,”Mom, tell me where the Christmas presents are hidden, so I don’t find them by mistake.”

This tiny ritual aims to keep me from the frustration I feel with the swift passage of time. “The days are long, but the years are short,” says Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project. It’s crazy how right she is.

But alas, I am feeding my own angst. I look forward to flipping the page so I can see the new image. As I view the same image every day for three weeks, and then four, I almost will the month to be over. But then when I flip the page, I see what has transpired.

Time is slipping through the continuum.

The calendar looks me in the eye and starts asking the hard questions, “What did you accomplish last month?” or  “What do you have to show for the first three months of this year, not that it is one-fourth (!) over?” Or “This time last year you said you would have ____________ (fill in the blank) done. Did you do it?”

The calendar doesn’t care.

I told you that already. But it certainly has a gift for asking the profound questions — the questions that drive you nuts.

So as you flip the page of your calendar, pause to see what you have accomplished. Keep your fingers crossed. Maybe next month, you will have some good news for her. If not, there will be a pretty picture to greet you, and you can smile, sigh, carry on, and either gird yourself for self-recrimination or prepare yourself for joy when you reach to do next month’s flip.