Stockett’s novel, sent in early nineteen-thirties, Oxford, Mississippi, is hardly just for Mississippi-philes, however. If you love historical fiction, great narrative, and indelible characters, do yourself a solid and read this book. Like a good portion of the other reads I have enjoyed this year, I listened to the audio ebook through the Libby Library service.

My one mistake in listening to The Calamity Club was trying to finish all twenty-nine hours at normal audio speed. It took my friend Mary to suggest that I amp it up to one-and-a-half. I eventually worked my way up from one-and-a-quarter to one-and-a-half speed, but only because there was a long line of library patrons waiting for me to return the book. Otherwise, given the chance, I would have listened to this story-telling for months.

Last evening, after an unexpectedly gusty sailboat race, the skipper and a few crew sat recuperating in the cockpit back at the dock. Darkness closed in. Suddenly I panicked.

“What time is it?” I asked Hank.

“Eight-thirty.”

I had about fifteen minutes left of The Calamity Club, and the library audiobook was slated to be automatically returned at nine-forty-five. The book would soon disappear from my shelf.

I quickly excused myself, walked back to the car, drove away from the marina, and caught the book’s final credits in the underground parking lot of my local Trader Joe’s.

Afterward, I knew I would feel bereft—sad that Birdie, Meg, Frances, Esmerelda, Tom, Lucille, Polly, and Picador were no longer part of the fabric of my days. I would miss the Tartt’s residence, the bank where Jack worked— even “The Orphan” which is how the characters referred to the orphanage. I’d miss the cow mooing to the backyard dance-band, and Virginia running her basement lab testing for STDs.

Now that the story has ended for me, all I can do is to yell at the top of my lungs:

Read this book.

You will like it.

And if you listen to the story, you will be astounded to learn that only two voice-actors breathe life into all those characters. My favorite voiced characters were Picador and Polly, but a certain gal from South Dakota never ceased to make me break out into a smile, too.

Brava, Kathryn Stockert.

This one was worth waiting seventeen years for.

Have you read The Calamity Club? Is it on your list? Did you listen to the audiobook?

What other recent reads have knocked your socks off?

Please leave a comment, and if you enjoyed this piece, please drop a ❤️, or if inclined, consider ♲ (restacking on the app.) Thanks for reading and for spreading the word.

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This is all very strange. Very wonderful, I think. We arrived Featherpipe Ranch about an hour ago. Western Montana is the setting, a weeklong Iyengar yoga workshop the plot. The cast is twenty-nine students with master Iyengar teachers John Schumacher and Patria Walden co-starring.

This is my first time at the ranch. It recalls the joys of summer camp, birch trees whispering in a cooling breeze, boats pulled ashore, magnetic leaders, dinner bell, a like-minded tribe. Unlike Girl Scout camp, the linens are provided, hammocks seem to abound.

Ever been? Western Montana? Camp? A retreat of like-minded souls? On vacation?

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Muhammad Ali died ten years ago yesterday, and in tribute, NPR ran a story on one of Ali’s most famous fights and how it reflected the politics of the day.

I’ve always been a sucker for anything Ali, but what makes this story especially sweet, is that Frank Sinatra, another of my great loves, plays a bit part in it.

More than half a century ago, in March of nineteen seventy-one at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Ali lost to Joe Frazier in a boxing match known as the Fight of the Century. It was the first of three between the two previously unbeaten champions. Although Ali lost at the Garden that night, he went on to beat Frazier in the two subsequent encounters.

I know only a little about Ali and am certainly no fan of seeing men bash each other in the head, yet despite the violence of his sport, I nonetheless feel drawn to Ali the man. He was heavyweight champion of the world, yes, but he was so much more than that. Bright, full of fire, and exuding magnetism, Ali’s wit dazzled, his poetry delighted, and his friendship with the sportscaster Howard Cosell especially endeared, as it bridged differences in age, religion, and race during a time when these were not trivial factors.

Among many celebrities in attendance at the Ali-Frasier fight that March was another cultural icon, Frank Sinatra. That Sinatra was at the Ali fight comes as no surprise. Sinatra’s father was himself a bantamweight boxer, and right up until the end of his life, Frank Junior relished watching professional fights.

What surprised many were the lengths Sinatra went to be at the Ali-Frasier match.

The story goes that Sinatra had difficulty getting tickets (hard to believe, I know) but being Sinatra, he of course ended up with a ringside perch, astonishingly, as a press corps member, snapping photos of the Frazier-Ali matchup for Life magazine.

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Sinatra and my mother were both born in Hoboken, New Jersey within five years of one another. Both were born at home, the Chairman in nineteen fifteen, my mother five years later. Sinatra, who was skinny for much of his early life, incongruously arrived in the world weighing more than thirteen pounds. Forceps used to deliver him during the difficult birth scarred his face and damaged the hearing in one ear, making his success as a singer especially remarkable given his hearing loss.

Revered for his phrasing and ability to inhabit a lyric, Sinatra was a complex man— beloved for his artistry and generosity but notorious for drinking and womanizing. His audience banter was charming, but he was a demanding perfectionist in his art.

Outside of the spotlight, Sinatra cherished his friendships, some of which crossed the racial and religious divides of the time. Throughout his career Sinatra fought hard to break down racial prejudice and Anti-Semitism in his industry long before it was popular to do so.

These days I listen to Sinatra because I can’t tune into the news very much. Few of my people have a similar bond with the Chairman (they feel a greater affiliation with The Boss), but that’s fine with me.

It gives me great solace that my friends’ musical icon, Springsteen, is taking brave political stances while some of us are simply hardwired to XM Radio’s Siriusly Sinatra channel, numbing ourselves and trying keep up our spirits.

Today we have a new “fight of the century” with regards to our democracy. We need a couple of heavyweights to take on this threat. Once again we have a musician with a ringside seat at the fight. The Boss, like The Chairman, is a Jersey boy. I only wonder what Ali would have to say about the current White House occupant.

What poetry his thoughts would generate.

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Fan of Sinatra?

The American Songbook?

Ali?

The Boss?

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For several summers after I turned sixty I travelled to Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center to work on writing. That first year I enrolled in two fiction workshops, one with the best-selling novelist Ivy Pochoda, the other with National Book Award winner Julia Glass. I walked out of both workshops resolute in my conviction that I should stick to writing nonfiction.

Before that, however, toward the final day of Glass’s six-day workshop, I had a moment of joy connected to a fiction writing assignment. On that Friday during class, Glass passed around a bag containing the first lines of a handful a published works. Each writing student closed her eyes and reached in to pick a random first line.

My was: I never actually killed anyone before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being. It’s the opening line of The Ax by Donald E. Westlake, a novel published by Warner Books Inc. in the late nineties, a book I’ve never read.

Our assignment from Glass was to write a short fiction based on the first line we selected. After class I drove from Provincetown to Wellfleet, where my old dog waited for me in a damp motel room. I hopped onto the bed and went on a wild ride.

I’ve never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being. I won’t tell you who the victim was, although I did know him well. Nor can I tell you how I did it, just that I remember each step I took to complete the task.

I can, though, tell you where the killing took place. The year I will not reveal. Where I lived at the time is significant, but to tell you that would be to say too much. The people I called my friends; the music I liked, the food I ate, the causes dear to my heart, those I cannot share with you.

I can tell you that I sailed a boat on my journey there. I hauled a forty pound pack on my back along a trail for two days. I boarded a train in the dead of night. Later a man met me on a tarmac with a private jet. We flew for hours before touching down at dawn. He refueled and then took off without me.

I did not know the language of the place I landed. Even the alphabet was unfamiliar. A woman met me at the landing strip. We walked for miles down a steep and rocky path at high elevation. My head pounded; my lungs burned. I was thirsty but dared not pull the half-empty canteen from my pack, for my guide was fast, and who knew if she would wait.

She took me to a village and showed me a motorcycle which she filled with fuel, demanding dollars, which I freely gave in exchange. I had a map of the area. There were few roads, so little chance of wrong turns. I was within days of my quarry.

It had been a decade since our paths last crossed. He had grown his hair long but shaved his beard. He no longer had glasses and therefore did not see well. This would be to my advantage.

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You wanted to know where the killing took place. I said I could tell you that. The victim was in the dentist’s chair. His eyes were closed and a lamp shone brightly above his mouth. I had come into the room in place of the hygienist, who was down the hall consulting with the receptionist, the dentist busy with another patient.

My deed was quick.

I had no remorse, and if necessary would have given myself up to the authorities, but as it was, those in charge had other matters at hand. There had been a recent volcanic eruption. Air traffic ceased for days, and the sky was thick with raining ash. There were fires. People were stranded in shelters. No one knew what the fallout would be.

I do not know if the dead man was later missed. He had been a son, a brother, a father, a husband, and an uncle, but it wasn’t clear what, if any, ties remained.

I decided to stay in the place where the killing took place. I had heard that the indigenous culture revered people with ginger colored hair.

Before any of this, I had been a teacher. The unoccupied landscape of the north had always beckoned me. There were plenty of jobs in the bush in those days. No one wanted to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the geography: the bugs, for one– hordes of mosquitos and black flies that would cover any unclothed body part in a matter of seconds.

No one wanted to deal with the months of darkness, the days when the sun rose at nine thirty in the morning and set at three in the afternoon. No one wanted to deal with the isolation, the alcoholism, the poverty and the domestic violence that permeated a community cut off from the rest of the world for months at a time. If a qualified teacher came along who wanted the adventure of living north of sixty degrees latitude, that teacher was pretty much guaranteed serious consideration.

“We cannot offer a position in a road-system district to a first timer,” Bill explained, “but we have a job for a special education teacher in one of the villages outside of Bethel.

I ended up taking that job, and what they said was true. There was nothing to do in the village, so I spent all my time at school.

My favorite teacher there was a woman with coal black curls and ice blue eyes. Tall and slim, she had a funny gait, almost as if a pogo stick emanated from her crotch. It was one of those things you wanted to ask about—inquire if there had been an injury—but you couldn’t ask because maybe there hadn’t been one; perhaps it was only you who found her walk peculiar.

She was a good teacher. She cared about the kids and had a fiery spirit that brooked no nonsense from anyone-- the kids, the parents, the other teachers, the principal, or the district officials. She was kind and reasonable when she spoke, always direct and articulate.

That young woman, Kasia, I’ll call her, became the man’s first wife. He was an Alaskan bush pilot at the time. Kasia ended up needing to fly out for her grandfather’s funeral down in the Lower Forty-eight that first November she taught in the bush. The pilot instantly took a fancy to her, and who could blame him? She had a spirit that burned like a fire in a wood stove in a cold cabin—warm, hot, and crackling.

They ended up having a son together. I don’t know whatever happened to Kasia, but the son, whom they called Paweł, ended up studying elephant migration in Northern Kenya. You will find people like him riding around in Land Rovers, tracking male elephants in musth, the heightened aggressive state elephant bulls display when flooded with testosterone during the mating season.

Paweł listened to the radio transmission announcing the coordinates of Django, the biggest tusker in the migration. Django was forty-five years old and had been traveling for seven days straight in search of a female in estrus. Django approached the herd, his long trunk inspecting the spots where eighteen-year old female, Pipe, had urinated.

He’s only got a few more days before the herds disperse, Paweł thought. Pipe would make a good mother. She’s already an excellent mama to Fiddle.

Django, however, moved on. Pipe was not fertile. Django would have to keep searching for a suitable mate. The migration lasted only twenty-one days before the herds dispersed back to their home range. Outside of the reserve, the odds of Django being poached for his valuable tusks, were stacked against him.

This might be one of Django’s last opportunities to pass along his genes.

Paweł was worried, and later greatly relieved to see Django return after the migration. Last year twelve of the tracking collars in one herd had gone still after poachers had slaughtered the elephants for their tusks. The research team had gathered the collars and placed them together on the ground. When Django encountered the collars, he swept one up with his trunk, trumpeting, somehow mourning the dead beast’s passing.

Paweł, meanwhile, had lost track of his own father. In those days people in the bush could easily disappear. After Kasia had married the bush pilot, the couple stayed together only a few short years. Kasia ended up leaving the North, returning home to New Mexico, where she raised her son on her own, although Kasia’s parents often helped. Kasia’s father was a composer and the son of a famous Russian ballerina. Paweł’s grandfather was happy that Paweł followed this passion for preserving the African bush elephant, the world’s largest land mammal.

I don’t know what warranted the execution of Paweł’s father. My job was to follow orders, and I had every reason to trust the higher ups. (If you’re wondering how a former special education teacher turns killer, let’s just say that I had a parallel career.)

Whether Paweł or his mother Kasia ever learned of the bush pilot’s fate, I do not know. My assignment was complete, and I knew that I would never accept another.

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“Tell somebody who cares,” is the line that reverberates through my head when I consider self-involved writing topics. (The ninth grade students continually dissed one another with that line.)

“Tell somebody who cares.”

You know what?

I don’t care if nobody cares.

My knee procedure went well today, and I feel great. (It could be the residual opioids in my system talking, but I am sticking with the win, and I’m sharing it, because deep down, these days people need good news; they need hope— even if it’s just the outcome of one sixty-six year old’s insurgency against knee osteoarthritis.)

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The other day I saw the immensely talented comedic actor Chad Doreck play the role of Joe Biden in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Forty-four— the Musical. In it, Doreck mimics forty-six’s painful descent down a staircase.

I’m well acquainted with that excruciating manuever.

But now there is hope.

This morning my friend picks me up at six-fifteen and drives me some distance to an outpatient surgery center. It is a nil by mouth car ride, so not a slug of water and not a sip coffee of coffee consumed since well before midnight yesterday.

My own mini Ramadan.

At the surgery center, the nurse preps me. Ensconced in my hospital gown and accessorized with an IV drip, finger pulse oximeter, and ECG leads, I accept one of the warmed blankets. Nurse S suggests a second warm blanket. Trying not be bougie, I demure.

After ten minutes, I decide, What the hell.

Every time she offers another one, I say “yes, please.” My Ramadan is fast morphing into a morning at the spa.

Because I have a low standing heart rate, we skip the Valium typically administered for this type of procedure. (If only my low heart rate were the result of extreme fitness, but with these knees and feet? I don’t think so.)

The nurse says, “Since you’re so relaxed [clearly, she knows nothing about me] and you didn’t take any valium; do you want to walk into the operating room?

Who am I not to accept a challenge?

Still Un-caffeinated but newly hydrated thanks to my saline drip, I walk toward the operating room clad in my hospital gown and gray nonskid socks, — no eyeglasses, one hand behind my back trying to hold together the two untied ends of the gown.

You do yoga. You can walk twenty-five feet half blind and nearly naked on two bad paws and one dicey knee. You got this.

In today’s genicular arterial embolization (GAE) procedure, an interventional radiologist threads a catheter through a leg artery (in my case at the top of my left foot). She shoots dye into my knee joint in order to identify the extraneous blood vessels that have formed to feed the inflammation in my arthritic knee. This intervention originated in Japan sometime in twenty-fifteen.

Once my doctor identifies the offending “abnormal hyper-vascular branches” (the procedure does not touch normal blood vessels) she shoots crystals into the excessive ones to block the flow of blood feeding the inflammation in the synovial lining. I hear my doctor explain to a colleague who is learning the procedure that she shoots “two hundred.” (I think I hear this correctly, but there is fentanyl involved.) The male physician is impressed with Doctor C’s shots, who by the way, walks into the theater in a colorful cap and nineteen-seventy style outsized eyeglasses, transformed from the nerdy (in the very best sense) physician from last week’s consult, to a badass combatant.

Her first words to Alexa: “Play music.”

I feel at home.

Soon I am anywhere but home. I am in my own thirty-five minute episode of The Pitt, the second season of which I binge in record time only days earlier. No Doctor Robby in my surgery. I have my well-trusted gunslinger, Dr. C, and her lady team (plus the male physician learning the technique.)

Early in the procedure Dr. C tells me that she’ll be “delivering treatment.”

That’s code for “pain’s a comin’.”

Nurse S, my hot-blankets-and drug-handler, tells me to breathe deeply. Little does she know that, courtesy of yoga, deep breathing is my super power.

Intense inhales and slow exhales get me through a few of the “treatment deliveries,” but as I soon learn by listening to the doctors talk and later by my own subsequent AI dive into the topic, she’s delivering treatment to sites located off of five different arteries. Certain of the deliveries aren’t for sissies; that’s where the pain meds come in.

At one point, as subtly as I can, I edge my chin up to see if I can lay eyes on the monitor. I want the visual, the map of this hellacious pain that has dogged me for decades. I want to witness its annihilation, but Nurse S is onto me, watching me like a hawk. I put my head down on the pillow and listen to the docs talk about Dr. C’s technique.

During the intitial consult, Dr. C tells me I can expect a slight decrease in knee pain two weeks out, even less discomfort after a month, and significant improvement a couple of months later.

Nine months ago I had never heard of genicular arterial embolization. Each of my three older siblings has had one or both knees replaced. I assumed I was in the grin-and-bear-camp until my time came, but a good friend talked me into considering cortisone and then gel shots last summer. Not sure why I ever waited on that. When my physiatrist mentioned genicular arterial embolization, I was dumbstruck. I thought I was a well-informed patient, but I had never heard of this intervention.

The doctor visiting in the operating theater says to me that I am fortunate, because elsewhere in the world, and even elsewhere in the U.S., people are not yet doing this intervention.

I realize how lucky I am to be an American, to have this access to cutting edge health care. Some readers might not like my pointing out that I am the only White person in the operating theater. I’m so proud that this level of care and innovation is delivered by a team of women and a male doctor of color in training who reflect the color wheel of race that is our world.

With the promise of reduced pain and fascinated by this innovate resolution to knee pain, I’m almost ready to ditch retirement and consider interventional radiology instead.

This shit is cool.

The scrub nurse agrees with me. We end up kibbitzing after my gunslinger has won the fight and the lady team are about to transfer me (channel The Pitt) off the table to a gurney.

“Hug yourself, Ms. Callahan, but don’t knock out the IV.”

They ask me how much I weigh. I round up two-tenths of a pound. What woman rounds up her weight? It must be the fentanyl.

They tell me I’m ‘light’ and no problem for these three to transfer.

I love it here. I get warm blankets, drugs, and people think I’m slender.

In recovery, my nurse makes the case that I should eat. She’s dosed me with antibiotics and I need something in my stomach.

You don’t have to tell twice me to eat cookies, even at eight-forty in the morning. With drug induced chutzpah, I ask Nurse S if she has any coffee.

“Coffee,” she repeats.

“Yes, good coffee.”

I’m on a roll.

“Strong coffee.”

“I have dark roast,” she answers.

Dark Roast is my love language.

Readers, what about you? Comments on The Pitt? Knee pain? Medical Ingenuity? Badass doctors? Cool teams of women? Hope in times of challenge? Overcoming limitations? Dark roast coffee?

Inspiration comes in all forms. Share some of yours by leaving a comment. If you enjoyed this essay, please drop a ❤️, or if inclined, consider ♲ (restacking on the app.) Thanks for reading and for spreading the word.

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If nothing else, twenty twenty-six has been a year of good reading; it’s the first time I’ve made a concentrated effort to include audiobooks in the mix. As a result— and despite excessive streaming and social media scrolling— I am back to reading more, which to me is an important life goal.

Below are three nonfiction titles I especially enjoyed so far this year. I borrowed all via the public library’s Libby app.

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Nonfiction Standouts

My first recommendation is the riveting storytelling in Master, Slave, Husband, Wife (2023) by Ilyon Woo, who won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for this title. It recounts the true story of how in eighteen-forty-eight— Ellen Craft, a light-skinned woman enslaved in Macon, Georgia, impersonated a sickly white man and together with her husband, William Craft, who was posing as her enslaved manservant—fled to Boston and eventually England.

If nothing else, this book is a gripping tale of daring and bravery, but given the subject matter, adventure is the least of it. Through the story, readers of Master, Slave, Husband, Wife can begin to understand the significance of the Fugitive Slave Acts and how they played out in the politics of the time and how they lined up within the abolitionist movement.

History is complicated and often tragic. The story of the Crafts and their quest for freedom begins to peel back some of the layers of complication. For example, while readers might assume that once Ellen and William Craft escaped to the North they would be safe, nothing could have been further from the truth. Due to the Fugitive Slave Acts, they were hunted down, and their story provides insight into who helped and who did not. Readers learn that even Daniel Webster, who considered slavery a moral evil, felt hamstrung by the days’ politics, in his case, the need to preserve the Union.

In today’s times of anti-woke curriculum, the Crafts’ story is an important one to absorb. I was shocked I had never heard it, a fact that left me pondering the deficiencies in own education.

The second nonfiction title that captured my attention in the first half of this year was the strong narrator’s voice in Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage (2026) by Belle Burden. While on the surface the divorce of a wealthy New Yorker from a storied family might seem tawdry, this memoir instead draws a compelling portrait of how a well-educated and accomplished woman allowed her misplaced trust in the man she loved to completely undermine her well-being. Yet despite her husband’s bullying and prodigious income, the narrator eventually and unexpectedly flourishes in the face of his betrayal.

Like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, this book may well spark a new wave of feminism during a time when patriarchy and oligarchy are rearing their heads.

Listening to the author narrate this book lends it even more gravitas.

The third of my nonfiction picks is a compelling portrait of love and a very different type of marital loss, Geraldine Brooks’s memoir Memorial Days (2025). The story relates the unexpected passing of Brooks’s husband, the author Tony Horowitz during the Covid-19 global pandemic and their decades-long life together. (Horowitz is perhaps best known for Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Civil War (1998), a seemingly apt topic these days and a book I hope to read.) The settings of Brooks’s memoir include West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard; Chevy Chase, Maryland; and Flinder’s Island, Australia.

Curiously, I read my top three fiction picks for the first part of the year in the print version.

Fiction

You’d think that only an Irish author could conceive a tale such as The All of It (1986), a first novel by Jennette Haien (1922-2008). Other than her nationality (American), another astonishing detail about the book’s author is that she spent her career as a concert pianist who taught at Mannes College of Music; she dipped her toes into literary waters at age sixty-four.

(Hurrah for late-bloomers.)

I won’t spoil the plot by providing any details of The All of It, except to say that if you enjoy topics and themes often found in Irish literature—fishing, priests, religion, poverty, oppression, and taboo—chances are you’ll love this short novel.

The second of my favorite fiction titles so far this year is also penned by an American, in this case former Minnesota Public Radio reporter Leif Enger. While I’m no fan of dystopian anything, his work I Cheerfully Refuse (2024) is an exception. The story grabbed me by the collar and wouldn’t let go. It’s set in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, and as its jacket-cover might suggest, the book even features sailing passages—an unexpected joy for a reader who consumes books on frequent and long stints on the water.

My third fiction recommendation is Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), loosely interwoven stories by Pakistani-American author Daniyal Mueenuddin. I loved the sense of place in this writing.

What about you, readers? Thoughts on these books or others you recently read?

Opinions on audiobooks?

Ways to enhance your reading habits?

Inspiration comes in all forms. Share some of yours by leaving a comment. If you enjoyed this essay, please drop a ❤️, or if inclined, consider ♲ (restacking on the app.) Thanks for reading and for spreading the word.

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People here grow up with names like Azalea, Snookie, Easter, and Lurlene—even the sheriff answers to “Moose.” Some go by a merged first-and-last-name. Bobby Lowe becomes “BobbyLowe,” and Martha Hill, “MarthaHill.” When I lean in to ask a woman at a holiday party to repeat her name, she doesn’t simply say Kay, she says Kay…. (The party is loud, and she speaks softly, so I never actually catch her second name, but I like this woman and in the future will learn her entire merged name.)

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For a Yankee like me, the Deep South will always be a foreign land, but the Mississippi I visit is a cherished place, and as much as a New Jersey-native is able, I try to embed myself in local life. I joke that I have two “sons” here, one dark, the other more fair like me. Percy, short and stout, lives to eat. (I know what that’s like.) When not downing his chow, he spends much of the day lounging indoors, resting on his bed under the kitchen table or backed up to the kitchen couch. Sometimes he gnaws on deer antlers scattered about the floor.

During Percy’s mandatory daily outdoor time, you can often find him parked under a shrub in a brick planter next to the back door. His brother William, meanwhile, spends his days patrolling the perimeter of the Drake Hill property. When not barking at the UPS truck and other passersby, William is either stretched out on the front lawn, snout on paw, nosing around for a fallen pecan, seeking shade in a den under a massive shrub, or bedded down by the fence in the heat of the day. No matter the hour or the weather, William adores the outdoor life.

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Around six years ago, my friend found a female dog and her litter hidden under an uninhabited house in town. She rescued William and Percy and their siblings— nine puppies in all—placing every one in a good home. This was an act of pure kindness, as plenty of painfully thin strays languish by the roadside here. Still others run in packs in the cemetery, where on my first visit, I would occasionally walk William and Percy.

Tan with white patches, William is now nearly seven and about the height of a small pony. When I visited a couple of years ago we picked pecans together on the front lawn, William nuzzling around in the leaves, crunching the nuts as contentedly as any human.

I like both here—the humans with their quirky names—and the animals with their determined personalities.

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Thanks so much for reading Booked. If you enjoyed this essay, I’d be grateful if you pressed the ❤️— it helps the almighty algorithm, as does re-stacking the post. I write essays on many topics, below find links to some published in the last twelve months.

In case you missed them:

Slow

When Trying to Eat Right Goes Very Wrong

Invasive Species on the Potomac

I wake up at three in the morning and make coffee because “why not?” —lots to do in the days ahead, plus a busy few weeks after that.

Last night I attend my third literary society meeting. The conference table is packed when I arrive, but I manage to squeeze in next to Dorothy, the one with a good eye for a great read. This meeting, she’s in full holiday splendor— parakeet-green trousers, red cotton sweater, Christmas brooch, jaunty eyeglasses. She fingers a slim volume, Billy Collins’ Questions About Angels, and reads us a stanza from “Reading Myself to Sleep:”

Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page

When Dorothy talks about books, it’s like when elementary school students get to clean their desktops with shaving cream at year end—pure fun. As Dorothy voices her thoughts on Collins, I feel compelled to speculate about how she might have spent her working life. High school English teacher? Professor of literature? Federal worker?

Perched next to her, I feel ebullient—as if I’ve won the seating-chart lottery. Basking in that geography, my eye wanders over the conference table only to discover that sitting within easy reach is a bowl of chocolate-chip cookies edged in green and red granulated sugar. The discussion leader has been baking, and apparently my mighty fine evening just got even better.

📖

It has been a string of eventful days—preparing coq au vin with leftover Malbec, hosting a dinner party, and hours before that, a Potomac River rescue by Alexandria Fireboat 201.

Chances are, if it’s a December day with no sun and a stiff wind, the Potomac River is devoid of activity.

Sensible people are inside.

We are not inside.

We are three on the boat. A substantial wind blows, with gusts near thirty. To de-power, we put a single reef in the mainsail and deploy a portion of headsail for stability. Once out of the Four Mile Channel we ply up and down the Old Town stretch of river. An hour in, during a routine tack we hear a sound.

“What was that?” says the first mate.

“The mast,” says the skipper.

Perhaps a cotter pin eases its way out of the clevis pin at the base of the lower stay. Whatever it is, it causes more than thirty feet of aluminum to snap eight feet up from the deck, pulling the roller furler, jib, and mainsail into the water. Meanwhile, closest to our heads, the boom lowers gracefully onto the cabin top.

“Cut lines,” orders the skipper.

(Note to self: The rigging knife is of no use back home on the bookshelf.)

Lucky for us, a crew of local firefighters is also not inside. Its MetalCraft Firestorm 50 happens to be tied up at the city dock, affording her crew a front row seat to our dismasting. While we make a distress call and report the accident to the Coast Guard on channel sixteen, the fire department, red and green bow lights flashing like Santa’s very own sailing sleigh, heads toward us from the west.

Aboard the Dehler 29 our goals are to keep the mast from penetrating the hull and to clear lines that might jam the propeller once we start the engine. Meanwhile, the fire department vessel appears to approach in slow motion (we learn later that shallow water is a shared concern) her crew of black-with-safety-stripe-clad firefighters on deck, red fenders festooning her starboard side. We tie fenders off our port side and prepare bow and stern lines.

Everything is happening both too fast (drifting into shallow water) and too slowly (securing tow ropes to the rescue craft.) At last the firemen cast lines to us, which we make fast.

Painstakingly, with coordination between captains, the fifty foot vessel tows us close to the city dock. Once we establish that our engine is clear of anything that might foul our prop, our skipper starts her up and edges us onto the T-dock where two fireman make fast our lines.

⛵︎ ⛵︎ ⛵︎

⛵︎ ⛵︎ ⛵︎

Thanks so much for reading Booked. If you enjoyed this essay, I’d be grateful if you pressed the ❤️— it helps the almighty algorithm, as does re-stacking the post.

I write essays on many topics, below find links to some about the sailing life:

⛵︎ ⛵︎ ⛵︎ ⛵︎

Kamia Chora Sets Out

The Voyage

Choreography at Sea

A Mutiny of Sorts

Morning

Pretty Much a Port Tack the Whole Way

Just Another Saturday Night Talking to the Coast Guard

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This fall I joined a literary society, but before that strikes you as pretentious, let me assure you that this is not a snooty group. While everyone is a book nerd, book nerds come in all flavors, and some of us try to keep that bit about ourselves on the lowdown. We want to fit in. Be normal. (Now that’s a stretch, isn’t it?)

So here I am, perhaps even in the right place, attending meetings of a literary society one Thursday evening a month in the attic of a former house now converted into a used bookshop. Upon entry I encounter a warren of bookshelves then turn right to a staircase and begin an ascent. At each landing, the space brings to mind an old-fashioned narrow library, with floor upon floor of stacks. Finally, I gain the top, the penthouse, where a large conference table occupies the backend of the room.

Here the literary society members discuss their reading. The group is not a book club, (although some members do end up reading books that others have shared. This is the case with All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley. More on that later.)

During my first meeting, I find myself focusing on the people rather than the books they describe. Some members drone on about genres that hold no interest to me. One compulsively looks up information on any books discussed and feels compelled to share the information, reading from her phone. She can’t help herself.

(I have a friend who thinks that group therapy is helpful because it teaches you to keep your sanity as you listen and interact with those you find trying. Maybe the literary society will be my alternative to group therapy.) While I resist the urge to muffle the compulsive talker, towards another participant, a young person who stammers and blushes, I feel an inexplicable affection. Still another makes me want to prescribe an exercise regime and a wardrobe update. (Unkind, I know, but by my second meeting, my attitude towards the person I’ve deemed out of shape and ill-clad does a one-eighty. Instead, fondness spreads like a used teabag’s mark on a paper towel.)

Will the literary society expand my reading life and make me a nicer person? I hope so.

At my second meeting, a couple of people I’ve not met roll in. The moment a certain older woman opens her mouth, I realize she must be the spellbinding book guru my friend described. This must be she. Immediately, I, too, became a disciple. That evening she is extolling All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley, a memoir written by a man who lost his beloved older brother to cancer at a young age and whose grief led him to renounce a job in the literary world, seeking refuge as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for ten years.

It’s the story of how the museum’s collection— from baseball cards to Bruegel—offers Begley solace and how he settles into a different kind of brotherhood, one with his fellow guards, men and women from all walks of life and all corners of the globe.

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Like a lot of people who grew up in or near New York City, I had parents who exposed me to high culture at a young age: years of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, road trips to the Philadelphia Art Museum (or was it the Philadelphia Zoo?) trips to Brandywine, Pennsylvania, to see Andrew Wyeth’s works, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Frick in New York, and of course the other Met (the museum of art, not the opera house, where most of my hours of high culture were spent.) One time my mother’s only Jewish friend in the very Catholic world of my childhood led us on an adventure to the Brooklyn Museum where we saw an unforgettable show devoted to Van Gogh.

Even before I set foot in my first museum and a lifetime before Begley wrote his book (published in 2023), my mother dipped my toes in the waters of fine art. Starting in my childhood, she hung reproductions of Nineteenth Century paintings such as Renoir’s On the Terrace on the blue walls of our basement laundry room. While transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer or ironing my father’s boxers, she would teach me the names of the paintings on the wall. In a crowning moment of her motherhood, after lunch at the B. Altman restaurant, she walked three-year-old me into the store’s art department where I shouted,

Look mom, there’s Renoir’s ‘Girl with a Watering Can,’ to which a suburban matron demanded,

How does that child know that?

It was one of few parenting stories my mother told.

No matter anyone’s relationship to museums or art, Bringley’s memoir makes a strong case for the power of art to teach, heal, and connect people across time and place. I’m ready for my next pilgrimage to the Met, now hours from where I live.

Two excerpts:

Bringley, five years into his stint as a museum guard, has just returned to work after a three-month leave for the birth of his son. He comes back a hero, the recipient of hearty congratulations and lots of advice from his mostly male counterparts. The embrace he feels extends to some of the museums “regulars.” Here is his quick sketch of one, whom a lesser individual might find trying.

There’s Kenji, a young man with developmental differences who asks the guards which trains we’re riding home and alerts us to any service advisories, which is very useful.

On page one-hundred-two, Bringley reflects on what it means to be a museum guard.

I’m surprised by the meaning I begin to find in even small interactions with guards and visitors. I feel as though I’m discovering the kind of grown-up I’ll be. Most of the big challenges I’ll face in life are also little challenges I confront in daily interactions. Trying to be patient. Trying to be kind. Trying to enjoy others’ peculiarities and make good use of my own. 

Readers, inspiration comes in all forms. Share some of yours by leaving a comment. If you enjoyed this essay, please drop a ❤️, or if inclined, consider ♲ (restacking on the Substack app.) Thanks for reading and for spreading the word.

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Departure day

The crew is up early—shortly after zero three hundred.

The captain flips on the generator; the first mate switches on the propane; the crew fills a kettle and sets it to boil on the stove, prepping three instant coffees. At the nav station, the first mate turns on the chart plotter, the VHF radio, as well as the running and navigation lights.

The three drink coffee in the salon, then all hands head up on deck, where the captain starts the engine. The day’s wind is light enough to hoist the main and mizzen while still on the anchor. Both nest in lazy jacks. To take up the mizzen the captain heads aft, then returns to the cockpit where the crew assists in upping the main.

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Release main halyard and furling line clutches on starboard cabin; wrap the halyard thrice around the electric winch, then activate button on the starboard combing; ease the main furling line.

Main’s up. Genoa will come later.

It’s zero-four-thirty and time for the first mate to raise the anchor. The deck lights illuminate brightly, but once the anchor is up, they will go dark as Kamia Chora heads out of the anchorage, threading her way through a now sparsely populated field of anchor lights atop moored sailboats.

A slightly squished-looking orb, the nearly full moon, glows orange, close to the horizon.

Usually an exit into the Phoebus Channel is chock-a-block full of warships or an occasional submarine, LNG tankers, and crab boats. Today’s traffic consists of commercial vessels and a rally of sailboats headed offshore to Antigua and the Bahamas.

Initially, AIS does not work on the chart plotter, but Kamia Chora is able to spot other vessels via Navionics on the tablet mounted below the chart plotter.

As the sun rises, the captain goes forward to tension the swinging spinnaker halyard on the port side. Channel sixteen on the VHF radio crackles with Coast Guard transmissions and communications among the sailing fleet and between it and commercial traffic.

Accents are British, American, and non-native English speaking.

Good morning, captain. We’re off your port stern. What are your intentions?

Several voices are female.

Confident.

Wet socks dry on the starboard life line, foulies in the cockpit. Diesel and water are topped up. Dolphins give a show off the starboard side. Anchor’s away at four o’clock tomorrow morning. In the meantime, inspect everything on deck before lunch—turnbuckles to cotter pins. Wrap cotter pins and ring dings with electrical tape. Secure shackles with zip ties. After the midday meal, use the storm sail halyard to haul the dinghy on deck.

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SV Kamia Chora, (Greek for No Country) is a forty-nine-foot Transpacific Marine built in nineteen-eighty-three in Taiwan. She’s a ketch with two masts and a crew of three. Tomorrow she sets out on a seventeen-hundred-mile passage from Hampton, Virginia to Antigua.

She’ll pull up anchor in the Hampton River at zero four-hundred hours, sail into Chesapeake Bay and then out into the Atlantic. Her first endeavor will be to enter the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, some one hundred and ten miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake. Her entry point is thirty-five degrees, ten minutes north, seventy degrees, ten minutes west. The Stream is thirty-five miles wide at this point and the crossing should take six hours.

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Susie Boyt.

Never heard of her until someone—another Substack writer, I think— pointed me in the direction of Loved and Missed, an intense character-study of a single mother, Ruth, who loses her daughter to drug addiction but meanwhile forms a strong bond with her daughter’s child.

Boyt, who is English, is the author of seven novels and a memoir. She is as well the daughter of the portraitist Lucien Freud and the great granddaughter of Sigmund. Loved and Missed is Boyt’s only novel published in the United States, emerging in September 2023 from the small press, New York Review Books. Thus far, Loved and Missed is a strong contender for my favorite read of the year—perhaps not for everyone, but to my eyes, an exquisite portrait. The cover of the Penguin edition published in the UK rather looks like a Lucien Freud, don’t you think? (Perhaps it is.)

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Everything is a matter of timing, and had you asked a month ago, I would have said Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, Callum Robinson’s 2024 memoir about his life working in wood was my favorite read in 2025. I found the Scottish setting, secret stashes of priceless lumber, and the world of high-end furniture production fascinating. My sister, however, did not. Since taste is highly subjective, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Age has summoned within me a deep appreciation for contemporary Irish fiction (think This is Happiness and The History of the Rain by Niall Williams), so were I to round up another of my favorites of the last six months, I would have to include William Trevor’s slim 2002 novel The Story of Lucy Gault, a tale relentlessly dark but at the same time spellbinding in its twists and turns.

Of course the joy of reading William Trevor brings to mind an even smaller book—you can finish it in an afternoon—penned by the Irish author Claire Keegan, whose Small Things Like These, published in 2020, might even rank as a nearly perfect story.

Lastly, I’ll mention a very different volume, Mason Currey’s, Daily Rituals: Women Artists at Work, which I hoped might help me establish a more productive writing life. (The jury is still out on that, but I did have two big takeaways.)

One: As far as creativity—anything goes— there is no formula. Some artists and writers wake up early, others late. Some have partners, others not; some, families, others are childless. Some have rich social lives; others are loners. Some do their art first thing; others clear the decks of others matters first. The sheer variety of approaches brings me relief. Nobody insists that artistic pursuit has to be a solitary slog.

Hurrah, because where’s the fun in that?

Successful artists and writers have friends and families; they entertain, go out, pursue outside interests.

That’s encouraging.

My second takeaway from Daily Rituals: Women Artists at Work is that this compendium of various artists’ daily routines has wider appeal than as simply a self-help text for struggling creatives. One of my Manhattan nieces loves the city’s cultural history. Surely she would find many of the New York artists profiled in the book fascinating.

If you enjoyed this essay, kindly tap the heart ❤️ button at the top, and if it’s got you really jazzed, hit the re-stack symbol (resembles the recycle sign). Most importantly, make a public comment to keep the conversation going. The algorithm likes that and your doing so will help bring readers to my work. Thank you.

What about you, readers— finding any joy and hope on the inside of a hard- or softcover these days?

What titles jump out at you and why?

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The police officer turns to me and says, “It was like having my own personal yoga instructor right in front of me.”

When he says this, of course, I have no idea that the slim young man on the adjacent yoga mat is a police officer—no NYPD Blue uniform or the like in sight, and his is far from a too-many-squad-car-donuts physique.

Before “B” (he introduces himself later) and I become yoga buddies that weekday afternoon, I move my yoga mat at least five times trying to accommodate stragglers arriving to the already-full vinyasa flow class at the local rec center. Finally, as the practice is about to commence and two more would-be practitioners timidly enter the studio, I pick up my mat for the final time and move to the very front of the room next to the instructor, a spot no neophyte would ever occupy.

Now directly in front of B, I apologize for invading his space. (The good thing about certain yogis is that they have no sense of territory when it comes to accommodating more people into the practice. I don’t know if B is of this variety or not, but by the end of class I sense he might be.)

The deep breathing that powers me through a vinyasa flow practice must sound to others like a cross between a steam engine and the panting of a woman in the throes of labor. So when Ky’s class ends and B turns to me and says, “It was like having my own private yoga instructor in front of me,” I am astounded at the compliment.

Women over the age of sixty do not get noticed by younger men.

I launch into my second apology.

“I’m so sorry about all the loud breathing,” I say, pausing before adding, “I used to groan during the poses, but I do less of that now.” (For the most part, I can now do most of the poses Ky takes us through—this, like B’s compliment, is another unbidden miracle.)

“No, it was good—it reminded me to breath,” he replies. “I have a home yoga studio but I’ve sort of fallen out using it,” he continues. In his line of work, he goes on to say, he really needs this, gesturing toward the crowded studio. He needs to practice in a community. He volunteers his profession.

“I’m a police officer,” he says, the detail disclosed almost as an afterthought.

Stunned, my brain fires up. (Oh, how fleeting the calm of shavasana—the final yoga pose in any practice.) Thoughts inundate my brain. I still them and ask, “Where do you serve?”

“Washington, D.C..”

I reach out to touch his shoulder. This summer, the President has called in the National Guard to fight crime in D.C. and I want to compensate for what he must surely see as a slap in the face.

B continues to talk yoga.

“Do you usually come to this class?” he asks.

“It’s my first time, but I take other of Ky’s classes. Because of her, I feel like we’re all going to live forever.”

“I’m B,” he offers, as I take my mat and head for the exit.

Even if I never run into B again, the fact that a D.C. cop has a home yoga studio but seeks out community yoga practice has startled me, as has our entire interaction. When so much current public discourse weighs me down, I can’t help but think that this encounter is what it must feel like to do an impossible yoga pose—a natural high worth waiting for.

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If you enjoyed this essay, kindly tap the heart ❤️ button at the top, and if it’s got you really jazzed, hit the re-stack symbol (resembles the recycle sign). Most importantly, make a public comment to keep the conversation going. The algorithm likes that and your doing so will help bring readers to my work. Thank you.

• What random interactions with strangers have made an impression on you?

• Do you find you meet like-minded people from unexpected quarters?

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Twenty-Five in Twenty-Five

When Not to Wear Linen

A Well-Trained Wife

Early last October, I published an essay on the final hundred days of the year.

Today I stumbled upon my Twenty-Five in Twenty-Five list, a tab in this year’s master spreadsheet. My love for and reliance on Google Sheets confounds me: I’m an Italian major; numbers mean little to me, yet spreadsheets bring organization to what feels like a disordered life. Plus—I am an accountant’s daughter; (what a disappointment that my father did not live to see the age of electronic spreadsheets. He would have loved them as much as I do, although his would have been filled with numbers, whereas mine are filled with words.)

Back to my Twenty-Five in Twenty-Five.

You know this concept, right? The idea of setting out a specific number of goals corresponding to the last two digits of the current year? (I first heard about it on a Gretchen Rubin podcast back in 2015—the year I turned my world upside down by leaving a marriage, a highly coveted job, and a life in Europe I loved.

My Twenty-Five in Twenty-Five is, by some measures, pitiful. To start, I only have fourteen items on it—although, I can of course, continue to grow it, right up until December 31. That was my approach this year. I didn’t want to populate the list with silly things that were either easy to check off or truly unrealistic.

Turns out, funny enough, that only a few of my items were realized.

Dying to know what they were? They are vastly unrelated.

Number Five: Secure a crew position on a transatlantic sail. (Thanks, Marco.)

Number Ten: Develop a yoga friend group. (Thanks, Siobhan.)

Number Thirteen: Learn features of Substack that will increase engagement. (Thanks, Sarah Fay.)

Many of the other as to be completed items relate to my household:

Number Eleven: Hang the chandelier. (Not yet ruling this one out.)

Number Six: Install a dishwasher.

Number Seven: Get new window treatments. (Cindy and Tina are my girls. We may succeed.)

Numbers Three and Four relate to visiting friends from Warsaw who live in Colorado and friends from Taiwan in Washington state. If not in 2025, soon. Right, Craig and Peg? Kevin and Debbie?

Numbers Eight and Nine won’t happen. Apply to twenty-five writing residencies/etc. Play pickleball twenty-five times. Number Eight, not this year. Number Nine, not ever, unless the health of my feet changes, but that’s an item for my Twenty-Six in Twenty-Six list— as yet unhatched.

Numbers One and Two were purely aspirational, but fall’s coming, a favorite season, and with a little help from my friends (anyone?) could still happen, and if not this year, certainly next.

Number One: Sleep in a tent.

Number Two: Attend one Dark Skies event.

For anyone keeping the disordered count, the only goal I have not mentioned is:

Number Fourteen: Put my name in the MOTH hat until it gets picked and I go onstage.

Been working on that. Sort of.

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What about you, readers? How is your year going? Ever done a challenge similar to the Twenty-Five in Twenty-Five? (BTW, for those seeking encouragement—most people—and this is part of the design—do not accomplish the entire list.)

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When Not to Wear Linen

A Well-Trained Wife

Reluctance

At dinner with a few pickleball gals, I pull out my phone and ask if I can wear the turquoise linen dress in the photo to an upcoming wedding calling for cocktail attire.

“Absolutely not,” Tina replies, with a certainty I both admire and suspect I will never possess.

I’m relieved that I have avoided a social blunder, sheepish that I didn’t know any better—and grateful that I’m teachable.

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Tina and I are polar opposites. It’s a Ruth-Bader-Ginsberg-and-Antony-Scalia friendship—diametrically opposed political views but an abiding affection and respect for one another. Ideological foes, the liberal and conservative Justices found common ground over a shared love for opera. I’m not sure what hatched the bond between Tina and me— perhaps it was her remarkable personal warmth; she’s Southern, sassy, inquisitive, and immeasurably kind. In politics and sartorial choices we are dissimilar, but if not her politics, I do admire her taste. Bottom line: If Tina says I can’t wear a particular dress to a wedding, I believe her.

Sheri, who’s also at the pickleball pals’ dinner, immediately offers to outfit me for the wedding and invites me to come shopping in her closet. (I guess this is what some girlfriends do for one another, but up until a wedding last autumn, it’s not something I ever did.)

Sheri shares my liberal politics and has my mother’s eye for thrift shop finds. For my friend’s daughter’s wedding, she loaned me a pair of sparkly earrings she bought off of a drag queen.

A column of fourteen-karat-gold bangles permanently adorns one of Sheri’s arms, the clasps welded together—a measure taken after she once lost a bracelet in the ocean. Turning eighty in a few months, she’s been working her style for decades. I’m not sure I can pull off any of the outfits in her closet, but I will try some on, if only for the experience.

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It’s my Mississippi friend, my style guru, who gently explains to me that linen is too casual for a wedding. Of course it is. (She later explains it would be fine for an afternoon wedding.

(Noted and understood.)

How is it that I never knew that—never even thought about it— (and wait: Did I wear linen to my former husband’s son’s wedding in Grenada; to one of my bestie’s in Manhattan many moons ago? While I want to say yes, I did, photographic evidence suggests I had more sense than my memory gives me credit for.)

My Mississippi friend worked in the fashion world for a long time. Hers was a world of fabrics, cuts, palettes. Maybe she knew that linen was inappropriate for a wedding because she grew up in the South. Maybe she knew because that was part of her job. It’s okay that I didn’t know. Now I do.

It’s never too late to learn.

Here’s to a future fashion faux pas averted.

Yay, team.

Readers, what say you? Unexpected friendships, wardrobe errors, life-skills deficits?

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You may have missed:

A Well-Trained Wife

Reluctance

Choreography at Sea

These days I rarely finish the many books I set out to read. Rather than cracking open a novel, I mostly scroll and stream, every bit the victim of the attention economy as anyone else. I’m not proud of this; it’s not how I want to live my life, but like everyone else, I find myself wrestling with the giant beast called digital distraction and losing the war.

Occasionally, though, I win the battle by devouring a book, and to that end, I continue to arm myself with a stack of hardcovers—the issue of a carefully curated and fertile library queue. The reality, however, is that I actually crack open very few of those loans and get through even fewer. Sadly, I’ve gone from being a book-a-week gal to someone who has reached the final page of just two volumes this entire summer.

Yet despite the dereliction of my own reading habits, I still love books and all they promise: transportation to another world; the discovery of fascinating characters, and the exploration of ideas.

As of today, I’m happy to report that of the two works I recently finished (both were stellar), A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy struck me as a particularly important and relevant read in these times.

It was just over a week ago. I was driving home to Virginia, diverted from the I95 southbound traffic to the Delmarva Peninsula, when I happened to tune into the QWERTY podcast, where Marion Roach Smith, a well-known memoir coach, interviewed Tia Levings, author of the 2024 New York Times bestseller, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. One of the things that instantly caught my attention during the interview was the intersection between the rise of the Christian Right, Donald Trump, and Levings’ own escape from an abusive Christian community.

I was curious as to how those puzzle pieces fit together.

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Anyone with a pulse who lives in the United States is well aware of the political strife inherent in our current landscape. As someone who keeps her head down and clings to the underside of the rock under which I shelter, I nonetheless felt inspired to explore how Levings’ narrative might explain the Trump presidency. I wanted to understand why my fellow citizens, some of whom are beloved friends or family, voted for a felon, a flimflam man who has taken over our country, upended our humanity, brought troops to our nation’s capital, defunded international aid, and under-minded the health and well-being of the entire world, not to mention his complete defiance of science and climate change. I wanted to bust out of the paralysis I feel and take action. To do so, I needed to better understand how it all came about. If Levings’ book could help me do that, I was willing to cast aside a few evenings of social-media scrolling.

Most of the people in my life think like I do. We want to help those not as blessed as ourselves. We welcome hardworking immigrants seeking a better life; we understand the connection those immigrants have to our own families, just a generation or so behind. We respect the rule of law, the three branches of government, its checks and balances. We revel in those who are different. We embrace what they bring to the table. We respect women. We insists on people’s rights to love whom they love and make health decisions about their own bodies. We abhor gerrymandering and assaults on voting rights and fair representation. We don’t want Donald Trump or JD Vance anywhere near the Kennedy Center.

That anyone voted for Trump feels unforgivable, but I choose love over politics. I want to try understand their point of view. For now, I can only guess at it. I attribute their vote for Trump to fear. Their fear of losing a nation run by white men. They are tired of what they see as undeserved handouts, of being the world’s sugar daddy. They fear people of color, people who had to steal into the country because they were fleeing poverty and violence in their own.

This pro Trump stance sets off sirens inside of me that make it hopeless for me to reason. I need some sort of backdoor so that I can calm myself and be of use.

In reading A Well-Trained Wife, I became an eyewitness to how one woman lost all her rights and freedom and became totally subjugated. Hers was a world where women are held down— not allowed to vote, told what to wear. The male elders of her religious community mandated that her husband monitor everything in her life— the mileage on the car, visits to the public library, her writings. She had no access to mainstream health care during her pregnancies. She was not allowed to work outside the home or earn money. Her childrearing was monitored closely by her religious community. Children were “switched.” Wife beating was sanctioned.

What Levings endured is horrific, akin to what has been reported in ultra Orthodox communities in places like Brooklyn, where women’s primary role is to bear children and obey religious dogma, where access to public education is denied. The women who live under these circumstances are often uneducated and poor. To think that this happens in twenty-first century America stuns me, although it shouldn’t.

I understand people’s need for faith. I know the comfort that faith communities can provide. My father endured horrific childhood poverty and felt he owed much of his survival to the Catholic church whose sisters and priests aided him and his family.

We all need community to love and support us. For many, community comes from a religious institution. Sometimes communities go awry. Frighteningly, our country has become unrecognizable, led far astray from decency and doing the right thing. Levings and her children escaped their subjugation in nothing short of a miracle.

What will happen to us?

If you’re curious, the other remarkable book I read this summer was Claire Keegan’s 2020 short novel Small Things Like These which points to one man’s remarkable action to countermand the tragic goings on in Irish homes for unwed mothers.

Shame on all of it.

Please share your thoughts. Have your reading habits eroded in the Attention Economy? Have you finished any extraordinary books that can compete with streaming and social media? Thoughts on faith communities? Our future?

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My friend—I don’t think she’d mind if I called her that—is trying to explain to me exactly how men pursue relationships with women. This is not my area of expertise, so I am all ears.

When Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus came out decades ago, the title captured my attention, and though I never managed to read the book, I remember thinking: Oh, that might explain things. Later when He’s Just Not that Into You surfaced, I thought: No reading required there; the title says it all.

Now, all these years later, my friend explains her theory. “Men are all about the chase. They like identifying high-value trophies and the subsequent pursuit of them,” she says. She posits that I—little ol’ me—am current quarry in the scope of several men’s crosshairs. I’m not buying this part, but I play along. She goes on to say that in order for the ritual to reach a successful conclusion, I need to act my part—stop trying to rush things along.

This is a problem. While I have zero problem encouraging a relationship with someone of interest, I feel ill-inclined to role-play in order to facilitate matters. I don’t, for example, see myself as anyone’s prey, and should I happen to find myself in anyone’s crosshairs, my instinct would be to shoot back in self-defense—or more likely—run away.

Yeah. Running away sounds about right to me. And also, didn’t most of civilization exit the hunter-gather stage with the Neolithic Revolution, eons ago?

My friend is well-educated and a feminist. Her profession mandates that she understand these matters, so I am paying attention, but frankly I am skeptical—disappointed, even. I mean, what century are we in, anyway? Can’t affairs of the heart be a bit more civilized? Equitable, perhaps? Do I really have to gaze through this crude lens of man-as-hunter and woman-as-trophy? If this is how it works, I’m not sure I want in on the game. I’m not some four-legged doe foraging in the cover of the forest.

My lord, this metaphor.

But because I have known my friend for decades and trust her, I cautiously consider her stance; review what she says. If a woman wants to end up with an attractive, suitable partner, she accepts this construct…

In a moment of desperation I blurt, “I’m game.”

The double-entendre. Didn’t see it coming, but sometimes a big fish lands on deck, and you just can’t throw it back. I’m game—both in my willingness to accept the rules of play and my role in the play.

In fact, Game on.

Early summer. I’ve crossed the ocean on a sailboat and sit waiting in Sao Miguel, Azores for a flight to Paris, gazing at all the attractive age-appropriate Frenchmen.

Already coupled.

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The wind is steady at twelve. We’ve deployed the working jib, and the mainsail has one reef in due to higher winds earlier in the day. Better to be under- rather than overpowered, especially at night. While catamarans are known for their comfort, we have had a couple of rough days at sea— the kind where the twin hulls slam so hard into the waves that a panel falls from the ceiling next to my bunk, grazing my arm before it thuds to the floor.

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If only the captain had gotten off so easy. The hatch in his quarters blows open and seawater pours in, soaking everything.

When a relatively small boat is tossed around in a mighty ocean, the up and down motion defies gravity, and the sounds can be deafening. You focus on not being sick and not getting thrown off your feet. Big things can go unnoticed.

You might, for example, wake up in the morning only to find that the furniture in the salon has staged an unscheduled nocturnal performance. While it would be safe to assume that fellow crew have secured the fragile items, in this case you’d be wrong. The furniture, apparently, has repositioned itself of its own accord, with no audience to admire the maneuvers. The unlikely star of the show is the double-paned glass dining table which, in an unprecedented act of choreography, has rotated off its pedestal and gracefully landed between a chair and the settee.

It’s as if the fat lady stopped singing and instead executed a quadruple pirouette center stage.

The next morning the crew all assign credit to one another for having saved the table, but apparently, the table has saved itself.

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With wet mattresses pulled up from below, sheets, coverlets, and pillows hoisted onto the aft deck, the vessel has an air of Armageddon about it, and every time I get up to move, I do my own rendition of Charlie Chaplin.

Tonight, however, the seas are calm—cooperative, even—with a slight swagger left to right. I’m high up on the fly bridge where the only noticeable light is from the laptop, the steaming light, chart plotter, and instruments at the helm. As I close the laptop, a blanket of stars reveals itself, with a density of design to the south and west. This time of night, long after sunset and before the moon has yet to rise, is the sweet spot for stargazing.

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A Mutiny of Sorts

Morning

Things have not been this out of control in a long time.

I exaggerate. Things aren’t really that bad, but here’s how it is.

When I told my teaching friend that I couldn’t get off the couch, she replied with the most comforting words ever.

“That makes perfect sense. You’re not getting off the couch because you won’t have a couch to be on for a long while.”

She’s right.

Who cares if I’m binge-watching good and bad television and avoiding the list of endless tasks prior to my departure on a very long trip?

I’m protesting the situation I’ve put myself in.

It all started with an invitation to join one of my dearest friends on a trip to the South of France and the Basque Country in celebration of her eightieth birthday. Wouldn’t miss that for the world, even if it is in summer.

Then there was the goal of crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat, which is a June thing. Finding a boat to crew on took a lot of effort.

Then there was the matter of the timing of it all. I’d arrive in the Azores only to fly home for a week, then turnaround and return to Europe. Didn’t make any sense. Just stay in Europe.

That’s where the third piece of the puzzle came in— killing a week in Paris with my Madrid-based friends. I know. Poor me.

But I really don’t want to be away from home for seven weeks: I have two garden plots that need attention; I don’t want to miss yoga; I want to keep up with my library books; I don’t want to sail across the Atlantic with people I don’t know. Plus, I don’t do well in the heat, and summer in Europe is hot and alarmingly un-air-conditioned.

So here’s how the feelings manifest. The used dishes do not make it to the sink. I smell the aroma of rotting apples and realize it’s probably the wrapper from yesterday’s popsicle. I keep flip-flopping about my plans. Skip the transatlantic?

In the end it’s easier to just keep things as they are and follow through.

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Meanwhile it’s difficult to remember an absence from home of this duration. It might be forty-five years, in nineteen-eighty when I signed up for a twenty-eight-day Outward Bound course on Hurricane Island in Maine which was then followed by a six-week language immersion course at Middlebury College School of Italian in Vermont.

The Outward Bound portion of the summer went swimmingly. Waking up in a tent in May in Maine at five-thirty in the morning, running three miles around the island, and jumping into the icy waters of Penobscot Bay invigorated me. The Vermont experience? Not so much. If you ever want to know one of the hottest ways to spend a summer in New England, it’s living in a dorm with no air-conditioning in a valley in Vermont. But I did learn to speak Italian. Plus, I made wonderful friends, and I loved my Italian professor whose name I no longer remember. He was a kind Mormon with a good sense of humor who taught me well, despite my constant marveling about the absence of caffeine and alcohol in his life. Why learn Italian if you can’t order un caffè at the corner bar in Piazza San Marco?

My professor tolerated my incredulity better than my vegetarian Outward Bound instructor whom my twenty-year-old self asked, “What do you do about dinner parties?”

Dinner parties. I was twenty years old, but somehow I knew they would be what I would enjoy in life, even though I don’t always host as many as I’d like and still lack a proper dining room.

And the vegetarian thing? As much as I’d like to be one, the inconvenience and difficulty still dogs me.

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That summer at Middlebury I was hot and miserable despite new friends and the joy of acquiring a new language. After morning classes, I’d walk the considerable distance from my dorm to the town grocery store in the heat of the day to buy a box of Freihofer’s chocolate chip cookies in an attempt to comfort myself.

God knows how much weight I put on.

When my parents picked me up from Middlebury, we drove to Newport, where they had lived in nineteen forty-four, the year they were married. My father, who had suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) since I was born, had really started to fail physically, and I had a front row seat to the beginning of his demise. He didn’t die until fourteen years later, but you could see the disease robbing him at a slow and steady pace.

My adolescent depression persisted for decades, although I managed to graduate from competitive schools and secure jobs at which I excelled. Maybe my people-pleasing masked the precariousness of my mental health to all but a few.

Things are very different now, and despite how much I’m digging in my heels about being away, this summer’s experience will no doubt be excellent.

If it’s not, you’ll hear about it.

Stand by.

More to come.

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A Mutiny of Sorts

Morning

Bakery Baloney

Two things, actually.

Shade and air-conditioning.

Even before the anchor sets, she reads that Fort Pierce has a museum devoted to Florida’s pre-eminent landscape painter, and she knows that if she makes only one stop in town, it will be to the A.E. “Bean” Backus Art Museum and Gallery.

Do the five-year old and the seven-year old want to go to the outdoor farmers’ market in the midday sun with their parents, or do they want to go to the air-conditioned art museum a stone’s throw from the dinghy dock?

The five-year doesn’t miss a beat.

“The art museum.”

If any other five-year-old male in history has ever answered similarly, she wants to meet him, especially when you consider that this five-year old has a third option, the manatee center. Most kids would jump at that prospect, but these sun-baked youngsters are no dummies; they know the manatee center likely involves outdoor time, and they’re not having any more of that.

All any of the three really wants is icy indoor time. The seven-year old, like the sixty-five-year old, doesn’t like the heat, so the decision is swift and unanimous; call it a mutiny if you will. These three will take on the art museum, while the captain and first mate head to the farmers’ market. (Don’t worry. It all works out in the end. The foodies enjoy their mission and then, back on the boat, the art-aficionados make out like bandits, sampling basil hummus, tiny scoops of flavorful goat cheese, za’atar pita chips, grilled olives, baklava, fresh snap peas and broccoli crowns.)

Looking at landscape paintings is like being outdoors, only without the bugs or the heat. Any museum, anywhere in the world, she’ll happily take in landscapes, seascapes, and portraits—those are her genres.)

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She isn’t sure if the kids know what a landscape painting is, but they have only to hear “air-conditioning” to be one hundred percent onboard.

About to pull open the museum door, she considers the merits of an “inside-voices-only” speech, but seeing that these two children look closer to sunstroke than bad behavior, she skips it. At this point, they’re game to watch the paint dry on the artist’s canvas, as long as there is air-conditioning.

“We can go to see the Backus paintings in the back room first, or we can go to see the exhibit by the “Highway Men—” artists that Bean Backus taught how to paint. Or we can go to the photography exhibit and vote for our favorite. Or we can go to the shop.”

The boys want to shop.

Nothing better than a regional art museum shop for envy-inducing purchases.

The youngest pulls a paperback about sea creatures off the rack; the adult makes a beeline to the hand-painted placemats depicting Backus’s more famous works. The oldest child is fixated on a small box with flowers painted on the top. Sixty-year age-span notwithstanding, after a passage at sea, all three need a little retail therapy.

“Where to next?” she inquires, then points them to the Backus exhibit, where the boys—like heat-seeking-missiles—find artifacts from Backus’s Fort Pierce kitchen.

“Look, Cheez-Its.”

Pickles—two jars.

A peanut brittle tin.

Bottle of sherry.

The four essential food groups— salt, veg, sugar, and alcohol My kind of guy, she thinks.

At the exhibit of contemporary photos, the boys vote for Ben’s Second Sonata, a portrait of a bare-bottomed child seated on a piano bench facing the keyboard.

A text arrives. The children’s parents are on the way to the museum. Once inside, they lay down their farmers’ market burdens. She insists they gain admission.

“There’s ice cold water in the water fountain.” Truly, the iciest martini could not compete.

Plus, there are real bathrooms.

Case closed.

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