Shortly after my divorce I signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon and at first paired off to train with a divorced and widowed man named Charlie, who told me he found divorcing his wife harder than losing his other wife to death, because he had to continue dealing with …
Last week, in the writing group I facilitate for homeless people, I suggested a pre-Thanksgiving exercise that got me thinking. Instead of the grade-school-type assignment of writing what you’re thankful for I suggested we come up with some things we are not thankful for and see if we can find …
During the first half of my fifties, I visited my parents in Florida a few times a year for a few days at a time. Then a friend, whose parents had died when she was in her early twenties, convinced me I should visit my folks every month. So I …
Though I have a fear of catching “other people’s worries,” I don’t worry about getting infected by my friend Baxter; each of us independently has come up with the same things to worry about. While gabbing over cappuccinos the other day, she mentioned fear of forgetting people’s names. This is …
Here’s how I came to fall in Kindle love (though, as you may come to understand, I am sympathetic to impatient readers, so if you want to skip ahead, scroll down to where you see Kindle in bold). In addition to a lifelong wish that my stomach were flat, I’ve …
Right after posting One Space or Two? I began to worry that readers would roll their eyes, wondering why I thought anyone would want to hear about the minutiae that hopscotches around in my head. It was wasted worry, because the views of my blog doubled that day and plenty of …
When, in the middle of my growing up years, I went to typing school, they taught me to type two spaces after periods, colons and semi-colons. So that’s what I always did, until very recently, when I began writing 2 articles a week for Home Goes Strong, where my editor …
Some worrywarts–me for example—dwell on the past, which often manifests as regret. I rarely saw my old friend Lou, other than at my annual New Year’s Day open house. Then he died and I thought, Why didn’t I talk to him more at my party? I immediately wanted to go …
1. I occasionally allow a fan to whir overhead in my bedroom despite a lifelong fear of decapitation by ceiling fan. 2. I eat in restaurants, even though there’s the possibility that a waiter (annoyed by my requests for tastes of wine, glasses of ice, dish of lemons, sauce on the side) …
I’m on a train where I just walked past a mom and, standing next to her, her little boy who has dumped on his seat an entire parking lot’s worth of toy cars. He is deep into a brrm brrm brrrm fantasy, which reminds me of traveling with my daughters when …
Before going out the other night, I headed into the living room, whose door I keep closed so my beagle-y mutt Casey can’t get in and dig at the rug. As soon as I entered, I glimpsed a twitch of a bushy tail by the window. It was a squirrel …
While writing a recent article for Huffington Post, “Worrywart’s 8 Stress-Reducing Things to Do in Beijing,” I began thinking about how much planning a worrier does before traveling in order to help assure things go okay. Yet the most fun parts of a trip can result from allowing serendipity to take over, …
At dress rehearsal with its stomach-turning surprises, like having to dance onto stage, I asked myself What was I thinking when I agreed to this? At first it sounded like fun to be one of nine storytellers in a Valentine’s Day show, “Sucker for Love.” But I had not signed up …
The splendid thing about being a worrywart with a blog is that you awaken worrying how you’ll come up with an idea for your next post, even though you know that one worry after another will pop up into your head all day long like a CNN ribbon winding itself …
A worrywart can benefit from a connection to God. If I believed prayers were answered, I wouldn’t need to worry anymore. Even though I’m an agnostic, I consider my relationship with God a pretty good one. Like those halfway-decent, parallel-play marriages between two independent sorts, God and I go into …
Recently, while visiting my daughter at college, I awoke in the night with the worst pain I’ve had since giving birth. In a way this suffering was more severe than childbirth, because the cannonball that was grinding inside my belly never let up the way contractions do. I thought I …
I worry about appearing frivolous or insensitive to my blog readers, especially those with real problems. A friend, whose daughter has cystic fibrosis, once told me, “When they find a cure for CF, I’ll worry about world peace.” Another friend calls the things I worry about “white girl worries.” Seven …
Sometimes I play a game in which I name an object and then try to associate a worry with it, just to see if I can stump myself. “Venetian blinds,” I say. “Peeping Tom!” I answer without having inhaled. “Tomatoes,” I try. “Salmonella poisoning!” Another way to play is to …