Musings

Revisiting 9/11

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Presque Isle Beach in Erie, Penn.

Presque Isle Beach in Erie, Penn.

This week, I travelled back to the place I was thirteen years ago when 9/11 happened. I didn’t have much of a choice – the travel was for a work conference – the same event I was attending on Sept. 11, 2001. It was a regional conference held in Erie, Penn. At least we are at a different hotel this time. Even so, the idea of going back there made me irrationally worried that a similar disaster would happen.

Back on 9/11, we were in the middle of our three-day conference when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center building. The organizers stopped the meeting. Some of us watched news reports in the hotel bar and lobby. Others went to their rooms. Several colleagues from New York made frantic calls to their loved ones back home.

I was in my room with my roommate watching TV when the second plane hit the second tower. After the horror subsided and our brains started functioning, we thought about the implications. Not having loved ones in New York, our worries revolved around “How are we going to fly home tomorrow?” Realizing that flying was going to be impossible, I got on the phone to see if we could rent a vehicle. They were already all reserved.

We had five people from Minnesota who needed to get home. I had young sons and a husband who needed me. Intermixed in the newscasts was the report of the Pentagon plane crash. Then came the news of the downed plane in Stonycreek Township, Penn., only 200 miles south of us. That made us much more nervous – the site was so near.

The moment I heard about the Pennsylvania plane crash, something clicked in my head, and I told my roommate that the passengers must have heard what had happened to the other planes. They weren’t going to let the hijackers crash their plane into some significant national site. Turns out, that’s indeed what happened.

Like everyone else, we ran through a lot of feelings in the next few days: incredible heaviness of heart, fear, and a sense of desperation mixed with the desire to help others and make it through. (I find myself shaking just writing this.)

We made it home the next day, with the help of some colleagues from Ohio who drove us to Cleveland, where a rental van was available. Then came the long haul home (15 hours? 17?)

During those first few days after 9/11, I felt like I was living in an apocalyptic Stephen King novel – no planes in the sky, gas at a premium, uncertainty running rampant among the populace. It’s not fun living in a Stephen King novel. Things eventually got back to “normal,” but of course, we and the rest of the country were changed. But here I was, thirteen years later, going back to Erie for a conference again.

It didn’t help that I watched the movie “Gravity,” the night before leaving for Erie this time. If I had known beforehand about the sense of desperation and peril that pervades that movie, I would not have watched it. A woman alone, trying to make it back “home,” hit too close to home. (Pun intended.)

Things went well at the conference, and I thought the new events were erasing the 9/11 strangeness until it came time to go back home. Like Sandra Bullock in “Gravity,” it took me several tries and different modes of transportation to compete the feat, which put me right back into those 9/11 feelings. However, unlike Bullock, at least I had a breathable atmosphere.

The weirdness started after the conference when a group of us decided to spend several free hours at a nearby beach on Presque Isle. A friend and I separated from the rest of the group to hike to a bird observation platform. The hike through the woods was hot and muddy. Once reaching the platform, we decided to return to the others by walking on the beach. We soon discovered that Lake Erie beaches are not like the beaches we are used to in Minnesota, where you can often walk unimpeded. This beach was eroded in many spots. Fallen trees and brush blocked our path, which necessitated inland bushwhacking forays — sometimes following deer trails, sometimes left to our own devices. The bushes had thorns, and our progress was slow.

We began to worry that we wouldn’t make it back to the others by the appointed time to leave. Having no map, we weren’t exactly sure how far we had to go or where we were in relationship to any civilized outposts. We started second-guessing our decisions, but that subsided once we saw familiar landmarks. Bramble-scratched, we made it back to the group in time to head for our respective planes.

The group dropped me off at the Erie Airport and went their merry way to Cleveland to catch their plane. As I stood in the ticketing line and looked at the flight departure schedule, I noticed the word “CANCELLED” next to my flight. Not good.

The ticketing agent explained the flight had been cancelled due to bad weather. They couldn’t get me out that day or the next from Erie, but if I could make it to Cleveland, I could take a flight tomorrow. I called my colleagues who turned around and rescued me from being stranded in Erie. With four of us smooshed in the back seat, we made the 100-mile journey to Cleveland.

Dropped off at the Cleveland Airport, my next goal was to find a place to stay the night. Because my flight was cancelled due to weather, the airlines said they were not required to pay for my extra night’s stay, so I was on my own. Like Sandra Bullock, trying to reach the Chinese space station on the radio, I desperately called different numbers, trying to find a hotel. No luck. The city was booked for the night (if one can believe the five places I reached).

By this time, it was 7:30 p.m. I was tired and hungry, having only an apple to eat since breakfast. Unable to reach my home office for help with a reservation due to tornados knocking out the phone system, and with my cell phone battery dying, I made a reservation with a place about 40 miles away in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

After a $90 cab ride, I sank into a soft bed and ordered room service. I awoke at 4:15 a.m. to catch a cab back to Cleveland. My flight left with no problems, until we got to Minneapolis. Lightning strikes kept us from taxiing to the gateway for about 20 minutes – the very time my connecting flight home was supposed to leave. After sprint through the airport (okay, more like a computer-and-book-laden trot), I discovered my home flight was still at the gate, also delayed by the storm.

I made it home, and better yet, so did my baggage. Will I ever return to Erie again? Did Sandra Bullock’s character ever go into space again? I don’t think so.

Night Bird

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Graduation
As I watched my oldest son walk across the stage and pick up his college diploma last weekend, an image from memory flashed through my mind. It was a tiny sparrow, fluttering outside a window in the middle of the night at the attic apartment where we lived when my son was born.

If you’re squeamish, you might not want to read this next part because it deals with things that new mothers do. One last chance not to read. Okay: I had arisen to pump milk for my son, who, after a difficult birth, lay in an incubator in the intensive care unit. He had experienced some “dusky” episodes, where he turned bluish due to lack of oxygen. After a long (and screaming) labor, he had been born about ten days before his due date – just early enough that his systems needed extra time to kick in. I had recovered enough to be sent home, but had to leave the hospital without him.

The night of the sparrow was my first one home — my first away from my new son. As I pumped, the bird hovered outside in the dark, pecking at the window as if trying to come in. In my post-partum midnight haze, I felt like the bird was the spirit of my son, trying to come home. I can’t explain how that made me feel except to say it was a strange mixture of desolation and joy.

I was an emotional wreck for the next few days. Eventually, our son came home, but not before we learned infant CPR and how to attach the tentacled wires of a heart monitor to him, which he would wear for several months. Even though I was awake with him many other times in the night, I never saw another bird behave like the one that first night home.

Twenty-one years later, as I watched my son walk across that stage, I thought about all we’ve been through. He’s come so far from being a helpless infant in an incubator. He’s grown so tall and strong, smart and stubborn, determined and thoughtful.

I couldn’t be prouder of him, my little night bird.

Happy International Migratory Bird Day from a Recovering Birder

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Birders on the shore of Lake Superior, Wisconsin Point.

Birders on the shore of Lake Superior, Wisconsin Point.

No, I’m not writing about Mother’s Day, but about a lesser known and newer commemorative event that celebrates birds. Yesterday, I participated in the second annual International Migratory Bird Day, held in Superior, Wis.

White pines on Wisconsin Point.

White pines on Wisconsin Point.

I haven’t been to a birding event in years, partly on purpose and partly due to other demands in my life. I like to think of myself as a recovering birder. I took up bird watching in seventh grade and was active in the birding community through my twenties – even participating for a year on the Audubon Expedition Institute, where I travelled across the country in a yellow school bus for a year with 24 other people interested in birding and the environment for master’s degree studies.

It was during that experience that I overdosed on birding. I came to realize that people stopped looking at birds once they had identified them. I rebelled against the obsession to name everything with feathers that I saw or heard. I rebelled against using eyesight aids like spotting scopes and binoculars – wanting to view the birds instead as part of their surroundings.

But I still feel an affinity with birds. My upcoming novel is about them, after all, and this event seemed a good excuse to get outside on a rare warm spring day. We met at Wisconsin Point, a long sandbar just outside the city. A small group of us spent three hours birding. We didn’t see very many birds but there were bald eagles, chickadees, scaups, red headed ducks, lots of blue jays passing through, and the requisite ring-billed gulls. I do admit to looking through a spotting scope (and the world did not end!), but I tried to keep it to a minimum to allow others the opportunity. After birding, we went to a local inn to listen to some presentations about migration.

My camera isn’t built for bird pictures, but I do love the lighthouse and the white pines on the point, so I thought I’d share photos of them with you.

Wisconsin Point Lighthouse

The Wisconsin Point Lighthouse.

Wisconsin Point Lighthouse and log

Connecting (or not) with Pets

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RIP Sparky, 2007-2014.

RIP Sparky, 2007-2014.

Sparky the Guinea Pig died a few days ago. Actually, I had her euthanized. Her back legs stopped working. She didn’t seem in pain or anything – was still eating and drinking as usual. She just couldn’t move very well.

Sparky is a girl piggy that we bought almost seven years ago at the insistence of my youngest son, who wanted another pet. She’s been healthy and sweet for all that time, except for her recent development. Since Sparky was ancient for a guinea pig, and because I am the one who has been caring for her all that time, I wasn’t keen on going to heroic measures to save her. I did spend time doing Internet research on her condition and discovered it could be caused by many factors but a calcium deficiency was the most likely in our case. By the time I discovered that, she had been ill for about four days — it took a while to figure out what was going on because she didn’t move around much to begin with.

The instructions described use of a liquid form of calcium designed for human consumption. I called around all the local pharmacies, but couldn’t find any available. I found some through mail order, but that would have taken several days to arrive, and I wanted something soon. I described Sparky’s plight to a friend and she found that Pet Co had liquid calcium, so I went there the same day. But when I got to the store, the supplements they had for guinea pigs didn’t have any calcium in them, so I ended up buying one designed for lizards. I mean, calcium is calcium, right?

We did the three-day course of treatment, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. And now, Sparky was moving around even less, so that she wasn’t getting enough water to drink unless I moved her over to her bottle. That’s no way for her to live, so, call me heartless, I made the appointment to have her euthanized.

When the time came, I packed her in a box filled with a deep comfy layer of bedding and went to the vet. I filled out the paperwork and handed her over without a fuss or any desire to see her through the procedure. The experience was markedly different from when I had to have my cat of 14 years euthanized. For that, I was a blubbering pile of Marie goo. It got me thinking about what made the difference.

I suspect one reason is that I never really connected with Sparky. I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t “get” guinea pigs. I had never had one before, and although we read books about them, the emotional connection wasn’t there. The cute “popcorn” jumps they do just seemed spastic. In the beginning, we took Sparky out to cuddle and let her roam around, but she had a habit of peeing in one’s lap and she nipped hard with her beaver-like teeth. So that didn’t help. About a year after we got Sparky, we got our dog, Buddy. We were worried about his reaction to her, so we took Sparky out less often after that.

Another reason is that she was my son’s pet, so I felt like it was his responsibility to connect with her more than mine. And he did try, but as he got older and busier, that fell by the wayside and Sparky’s care fell to me. She became an obligation, not a joy.

I feel bad that I never connected with Sparky. I can connect to dogs, cats, birds, and even fish. (I taught my catfish to wink at me.) We had a hamster once, and I never connected with him, either. Maybe I’m just not a rodent person. Have you ever had a pet you didn’t connect with? Do you think there are just some types of pets you aren’t designed for? I’d be interested to hear.

This Blog: A Retrospective

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Image

I’ve been writing this blog for well over a year now, and it feels time for a retrospective. I didn’t want to do it in January because every other blogger was doing that, and I’ve never been one to follow the crowd. Besides, with the spring thaw, it finally feels like a new season and a safe time to look back.

I started this blog in late January 2013 to keep my creativity alive through a record-cold winter and as a way to escape the mental and physical cage such cold presents. But I also began it because I wanted a more personal outlet for my writing – one where I was freer to express myself and describe some of the weird things that happen. My day job (of science writing) and my night job (of novel writing) don’t always allow for that.

I did not start this blog to make friends (although that is a nice side-effect) or to inspire legions. If that were the case, I’d have more than 76 followers and 3,000 views. Actually, I do have a rather devoted following among my Facebook friends, which is where I get most of my feedback and conversations about the stories. For that I am grateful and appreciative. It’s always nice to know someone is paying attention! Between Facebook and my blog followers, each story has the potential to reach 240 people.

Although most of my readers are from the U.S., I’m amazed by the foreigners who find this blog. Word Press (my blog hosting platform) offers a statistics page where bloggers can see the countries of origin that have visited their site and which stories are popular. Every few weeks my son puts up with reports like, “Someone from Serbia visited my blog today.” He just rolls his eyes. But the tally is impressive: Portugal, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, Australia, the Philippines, India, Lithuania, Ireland, etc.

The most popular posts have been:

Living for the Dead, where I wrote about former friend Matt Link after going to a presentation about him. I think its popularity is because his father and stepmother shared the story on Facebook, and they have a large following.

Cold as a Cage, was my first entry, which I shared widely by email and Facebook to publicize the start of my blog.

Minnesota Nice Meets Hollywood, which was based on a church sermon that I shared with my fellow-church-goers through Facebook.

Why I’m Giving up Bottled Water, is popular perhaps because many others are considering doing the same thing, and they found my story through web searches.

and

Old Wood: A Love Story, Part 1 and Part 2, which told the story of some local folks who were on the television series Ax Men last year. Every time the show aired, people did a slew of web searches for their names, and my blog popped up.

I intend to continue Marie’s Meanderings for the time being. It’s fun and it doesn’t take much time. I hope you are enjoying it, too. Please feel free to comment. Since I am so famous and important now (smirk), it might take me a day or two to reply, but I am paying attention.

Thank you.

Marie

Adventures in Diner Decor

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OldManPrayingI embarked on a lunchtime adventure today at work. I forgot to bring food from home, so I decided to visit a nearby bar in Superior, Wis., owned by a friend of a friend. I discovered the bar didn’t serve food. Since I wanted to be able to think and continue working during the afternoon, I opted against a liquid alcohol lunch. I visited a diner a few doors down.

I love diners. They each have distinctive personalities and they’re always very “human”—reflecting the local culture. This one was no different. Mickey Mouse memorabilia provided the main décor theme, with a few other classics thrown in, including the “old man praying with bible and bread” picture (I think it’s called “Grace” or “Daily Bread,” or something like that). An interesting combination, I must say. I remember the old man artwork from my youth. I suspect one set of my grandparents displayed it in their home. I would never have thought to hang him next to Mickey Mouse.

MMouse

A respectable number of people filled the booths. They were older and had the look of locals – casual dress, boots, and warm winter jackets. They looked like people who had been coming to this diner for a long time; people who could go elsewhere – to a franchise eatery or a fast-food restaurant, but they chose this place because it’s familiar and it’s in their neighborhood. They rested in their seats like birds home from a long migration.

The waitress looked like she’d seen better days. She was skinny with graying hair, a hangdog look, and walked with her hands stuck stiffly into her fleece jacket pockets, elbows locked. The food was good, though, as it usually is in such establishments. This diner served breakfast all day, so I got my favorite two eggs over-easy with sausages and hash browns. Hold the toast. What I liked most is that the hash browns were fluffy – not bogged down with grease. It proved to me once and for all that local diners do not survive on their décor alone.

 

 

Minnesota Nice Meets Hollywood (and it isn’t pretty)

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HollywoodSign

The minister at my church gave a sermon on “Minnesota Nice” last Sunday. When he read the Wikipedia definition of it, my mouth almost dropped open. (If I wasn’t Minnesotan, my mouth would have dropped ALL the way open.) He was describing a great deal of my personality:

Minnesota nice is the stereotypical behavior of people born and raised in Minnesota to be courteous, reserved, and mild-mannered. The cultural characteristics of Minnesota nice include a polite friendliness, an aversion to confrontation, a tendency toward understatement, a disinclination to make a fuss or stand out, emotional restraint, and self-deprecation. It can also refer to traffic behavior, such as slowing down to allow another driver to enter a lane in front of the other person. . . . Some traits typical of this stereotype are also generally applied to neighboring Wisconsinites and Canadians. Similar attributes are also ascribed to Scandinavians, with whom Minnesotans share much cultural heritage.

I never knew Minnesota nice had its own Wikipedia entry. I’ve read books and watched the movie (“How to Talk Minnesotan”), but I’d never seen the personality type spelled out so clearly before. The minister went on to explain what Scandinavian traditions could have inspired this behavior and how they are rooted in “the good of the group” mentality. In general, people were supposed to work together and not call attention to themselves for the betterment of everyone.

Although not Scandinavian, I am a fifth-generation Minnesotan. The Minnesota nice philosophy has had plenty of time to seep up into my ancestors and me from the soil. It’s been absorbed into my family from neighbors and community. I’ve found I have to work to overcome it in a greater society that values individualism and charisma. Self-deprecation, after all, makes it difficult to find a job, sell a product or attract a mate (unless that mate is also into Minnesota nice and recognizes it for what it is). I’ve also found I measure people from the perspective of Minnesota nice. I mistrust anyone who is too confident or self-promoting. I suspect they do it to cover up insecurities, but it also goes against the code of Minnesota nice.

I and another co-worker once took a news producer from Hollywood on an overnight trip up the North Shore of Lake Superior to the famed Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to film a spot for “Good Morning America.” That man could talk, and self-promote.

By the next day, when we were driving back to civilization, he could tell he was out of place. He complained that I and my coworker (also a Minnesotan) didn’t talk enough. “Maybe we don’t have anything to say,” was the reply. He didn’t know how to deal with that. We weren’t trying to be mean — we had been worn out by talking over the course of his tour and didn’t know how to relate to his foreign personality type. He gave up after that and we rode along in blissful silence — blissful for us, awkward for him.

Back to the sermon. The point of it was that Minnesota nice isn’t enough. It’s too constricting and confining – allows for too little self-love. There’s got to be a happy medium between self-sacrifice for the good of the group and self-love that promotes a fulfilling life. I’d like to think that I’ve learned this during my life, sometimes the hard way. Although it goes against my nature, I can brag when I have to, and I’ve learned how to appreciate certain traits and aspects of my personality. But I doubt I’ll ever feel comfortable around people like Mr. Hollywood.

I’m Somebody Now!

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Web ImageI just finished creating my author web site. I’m so excited – I feel like Steve Martin’s character Navin in the movie “The Jerk,” when he finds his name in the phone book for the first time:

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!

Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.

Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

I have my own web site! I’m somebody! Whether or not things start happening because of it depends, I guess, on my efforts to make it visible (hence this blog posting, heh heh).

I’ve been my own Realtor, divorce lawyer, tax preparer, and now web designer. Of these, I am most proud of the web designer title. Creating the site was my New Year’s resolution, and it took this long for me to decide what to say and to work through all the technical difficulties associated with it.

But it’s up, it’s out in the world, even better than the phone book! If you’d like to know more about me and my writing, please take a look at http://www.marieZwrites.com. You can even pre-order my new eco-mystic romance novel, “Plover Landing,” due out this summer.

Living for the Dead

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Matthew Link

It’s easy to spot Matt among the groomsmen in this photo.

So I’m going to write about another dead person. I’m not trying to be morose or anything – it’s just that the events honoring these two men happened back-to-back. The previous event honored journalist Larry Oakes and was the subject of my last blog. Last night’s event was in memory of Matthew Link, a friend who died twenty-five years ago.

Matt’s father and stepmother gave a presentation at the Duluth Pack Store as part of its Tuesday night Outdoor Adventure series. They spoke about their trip to New Zealand – both the sights it provided and the closure it gave them regarding Matt’s death. He died in a kayak accident while participating in an outdoor pursuits school there.

Matt was my then-husband’s best friend. Four months before he died, he was best man in our wedding, and we ended up naming our son after him. A modern-day Viking, Matt was big, blond, and strong. He was always ready for adventure, sociable, and he was a good friend to my husband. Matt grew up at a nature center his parents directed in Minnesota, so he was no stranger to the outdoors, and he sought that type of life as a future profession.

The phone call in the winter of 1989 telling us that Matt died was surreal. It was one of those events that mark your life; there was the time when Matt was alive and the time when he was not. The world would never be the same for his friends and family. Many of us have struggled to find a way through life without his commanding physical presence. Making things more difficult was the postcard we received from Matt a week after he died. He must have mailed it from New Zealand just before his fateful kayaking trip.

Matthew Link

Matt and his girlfriend Beth discuss the confusing intricacies of my marriage certificate.

His father and stepmother couldn’t afford to go to New Zealand at the time, which is what made their current trip all the more meaningful and necessary. Instead, Matt’s ashes were flown back and his family, including his biological mother, hosted several ceremonies for him. I recall a bonfire and Ojibway pipe ceremony on Park Point in Duluth, and a church service. After the service, we trudged through the cold snow to free his ashes into the St. Louis River, one of his favorite kayaking waterways.

Matt’s funeral was the first one I attended where I was emotionally invested in the person who died. The service befitted him, which made it all the harder not to bawl. After a point, I just gave up trying to hide the tears. And when they played one of Matt’s favorite songs, “It’s a Wonderful World,” by the gravelly voiced Louis Armstrong, I just totally lost it. To this day, that song is my trigger – tears for every occasion. So if you’re ever in an airport when a Wonderful World comes over the Muzak system and you notice a woman sobbing as you walk by, that’s probably me!

On their trip, Matt’s dad/stepmother visited the school he was attending and met some of the people who knew him. They got to see his dorm room and Matt’s father even had the guts to visit the site where he died. His father explained that the hole that Matt left is too large for total closure but that he did find partial closure through their journey.

His parents, including his mother who lives in Alaska now, strive to live lives worthy of Matt’s spirit and I guess that’s something we can all do to honor departed loved ones. Assuming your departed was as cool as Matt: would they be happy with how you are living now? Are you living up to your best potential? It’s something to think about. If living for yourself isn’t working, consider living for them.

Remembering Larry Oakes

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Larry Oakes

A few days ago, when most of the rest of the world was watching the Olympic opening ceremonies, I joined about seventy other people at an evening tribute for a noted Minnesota journalist. Larry Oakes was a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and before that, the Duluth News Tribune. He covered the crime beat and northern Minnesota stories.

Back in the 1980s, he was a few years ahead of me in journalism school. By the time I became the environmental reporter for the college newspaper (the Minnesota Daily), he had already moved on to an internship with the Minneapolis paper, and his name was legend among the Daily staff.

I didn’t meet Larry in person until I ended up back in Duluth working as a water science writer for the university’s Minnesota Sea Grant program. I was on the other end of the journalism profession now – a public relations hack who was trying to convince journalists to write about my organization’s research. We had lunch a few times as colleagues to talk over story ideas. Every time, I came away bowled over by his experience, not to mention his square-jawed good looks.

Some of my story ideas worked for him, some didn’t. That’s the way it goes. I do recall that Larry and a local radio news director, Mike Simonson, were especially helpful with one of the most popular stories of my career (so far!), which involved organizing a taste testing event for Great Lakes sea lamprey. We got the mayor together with the university chancellor and some other notable locals to taste dishes prepared by a volunteer gourmet chef who cooked lamprey several different ways for ratings.

After Larry married, he showed up at the same birthing class that my former husband and I were taking. Unfortunately, his wife was too sick from her pregnancy to attend, so I never met her. I felt sorry for him going through the classes alone, so I stood in as his partner sometimes when the activities required one. As the years passed, we also met at funerals and other local events. I recall thinking that Larry looked really rough at some of these events. I wondered if he had an illness or some other problem.

As it turns out, he suffered from depression and he also ended up having a stroke. Although he recovered enough from the stroke to resume his writing career, friends say he was never the same after it. In the end, the combination of factors and other things that perhaps only he knows were too much, and he took his life a year ago.

A journalism scholarship was created in his name at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The event I attended (instead of watching the Olympics) was to celebrate the creation of the scholarship and its first student recipient. I had mixed feelings watching the recipient (who wore the requisite gray vest of a journalist for the event). I was excited that he has this opportunity to help with his schooling, also scared for him. Starting out in anything is so hard. There’s always the conflict between what you want and what society will let you do. The process of figuring out your place can be terrifying, and well, depressing. But society has given him this chance, and hopefully, it’s what he really wants to do with his life.

The weird thing about the event was that I ended up sitting next to Gail, who was Larry’s hairstylist of over twenty years. I didn’t recognize her at first until I remembered I sat next to her at Larry’s funeral, also. It says something about Larry’s character that he went to the same stylist for so long — something about loyalty, friendship, and respect. Gail was lovely to talk to, and she and her friend kept me company until my friend for the evening arrived.

The world lost a great writer when depression took Larry. Although he sought help, it didn’t work for some reason. The heavy hands of depression have molded my family, my friends, and me. I lost my adopted sister to it; my father suffers from it and even at ninety-five is on depression medication. I have experienced bouts of situational depression, mainly tied to the impossible personal relationships that seem my specialty.

For me, depression is a signal that something needs changing, and that I either need to figure out how best to do that, or I need to let things run their course and just hang in there until they change. Some things I can handle myself. Some things the world needs to handle, and I need to have the wisdom to let it happen. It’s sort of like starting out in your career. There are things you want and things society wants. Finding the balance between the two is the trick.

I can’t stress how much reaching out for help is important if you have depression. It doesn’t necessarily have to be help from a professional. Sometimes friends can be better. Don’t worry about burdening them. Keeping it all locked up inside you is what kills. Sharing the burden makes it lighter – spreads it around. The world has lost too many talented people to depression. Please don’t let yourself be the next one.