Aren't you a pretty thing, What's your name ...

“And they found that once the door of willingness was open, it could always be opened a little bit more.” ~ anonymous (paraphrase)

This has been an interesting month and few weeks. 6 weeks ago I had my final round of chemo. Since then, I’ve gone back to work, been leant a car, been on a non-date date that has dematerialized to nada, bought IKEA lamps to flank my new bedframe, redecorated, written Morning Pages, been to therapies, and signed up for a softball league.

I’ve sung with a friend’s band in public, and was good enough, which is good enough for me. I contacted my school about renting music and art studio space, finally continuing a line of communication that my gmail tells me I began with them literally two years ago. I’ve noticed I stopped reading fiction, and was pleasantly engrossed with my friend’s copy of The Art of Fielding as a diversion. I’ve watch a lot of t.v. on my computer, but I’ve also noticed that my dishes are getting done more frequently, without my demanding it of myself.

It is this last bit that I am hopeful about. That without beating myself up to change, patterns that had been entrenched will simply shift, and one day, I’ll just notice they’re completely different.

There’s a lot of demand on myself following all this cancer stuff. And even though my friends gently admonish/remind me that it’s unreasonable to think that I’ll change my life and my self and my patterns when I just finished fighting off cancer, there is the great part of me that feels that it is because I have just fought off cancer that I must change all these things – and tout suite.

Because there’s the linger not only of the disappointment of accumulated years of mediocrity, -- or if I were more fair to myself, hiding -- but there’s also the imperative of the cosmic clock that cancer has installed in my being – hurry up and fix yourself, you never know if I’m coming back, it intones.

Surely, no one is skilled at getting “better” under such pressure. And so, yes, I do have to let up on myself, but that’s one thing to say, and even act, it’s another to believe. Because there is also still the idea, fiction as it may be, that if I don’t “do this better”, this life thing better, that the cancer will come back. There’s also the idea, perhaps like many of this age/generation, that life is quickly passing and I feel like I’m barely oriented to the spinning orb we’re all attached to.

“Easy does it” comes to mind. I have enough collaged reminders of the word “Relax.” But the hyper-vigilance, and perfectionism, don’t have time for relax.

One way that today I am trying to counter-balance my crazy is to write this, write my blog, which because of my work schedule, and the rest of my typical morning practice, I’ve had to skip to be to work (relatively) on time. So, I got up a few minutes earlier, to ensure I had time for this, because, as you can see, I need some outpouring of the crazy, in order to be a little emptied for the sanity.

I met with my writing group yesterday. It was only two of us this time, but it was our first meeting since cancer, so it was a welcome return to normalcy. We spoke a lot about where we were in thinking about our writing, what we had to give to it, and came to the idea that perhaps it could be fun again, instead of something that feels like another job, as she put it. To play with it, instead of be beaten by it. Sounds a lot better, eh?

This precipitated the story I wrote yesterday, which I realize, I’ll just write as it actually happened, and put up here, because there’s a real version of that story, as I’m sure many of us have, and perhaps I’m simply better at non-fiction, or maybe that real story simply should be told instead of some fantasy version where the dorky girl gets the cool guy. In the real version, I assure you, she doesn’t.

But not because he didn’t show interest, but because she (I) didn’t pursue, in fact, she tried to disappear from his notice. Which I feel is pretty emblematic of my m.o.

Hiding. The thing that underlays all of this, me. Hiding from jobs, relationships, vulnerability, authenticity.

My therapist and I came up with some phrases after some work we did last week which are meant to counteract this habit and pattern of hiding, diminishing, and, perhaps, shame.

My feelings are valid.

It is okay to act authentically.

I will be safe and protected if I do.

I am lovable no matter my feelings.

I am pretty familiar with the diminishing part/habit. There are probably some more threads to untangle, but I’m less familiar with trusting that I will be loved and cared for if I express myself authentically. I am not familiar with trusting that I will be okay. To come right down to it, I’m not familiar with trusting. To a point, sure, but beyond that, when they say a leap of faith? I’ve already hooked up my carabeener and holster, because damned if I’ll let you drop me and be disappointed again.

The biggest fear, that I’ll be tricked into trusting. That I’ll be tricked, betrayed, after I have trusted. And that I’ll be shattered from it – something I fear I won’t come back from again.

So, how do you trust, when you’re terrified? When the thing you’re supposed to learn is trust, and the only way to learn it is by trusting? How do you unhook the harness, and say, okay, I’ll play, because I am tired of being diminished, and, truthfully, I’m tired of being suspicious?

A Writer Writes. Even Mediocrely. (That's the phrase, right?)

Inspired by this afternoon’s conversation with my writing group buddy, Jenelle, this story is based on pw.org’s Prompt: Write a story that opens with your main character doing something that is completely antithetical to his or her personality. Having not written fiction in a long time, here is a cliché short story in which little happens! Enjoy!

Ordinarily, she’d never have said such a thing, but once it was done there was no unsaying it. The entire class, in their half-piano desks, turned; the professor, wearing tweed without irony, furrowed his wiry brows.

Orly tugged on the hem of her skirt, and sputter-mumbled herself into rephrasing. “It – I – You’d asked what reason the main character might have for delaying such an important meeting, and I just think – well, based on the lascivious language the author uses elsewhere in the chapter – well, I just think she might delay in order to … to masturbate.”

A student in the 2^nd row who’d turned around shifted his gaze to the guy across the aisle and raised his eyebrows in Groucho Marx innuendo. The girl to her left, Wendy, simply stared, like Orly was a pop icon, or on fire.

Into the silence, Professor Grant regained his composure by flipping back and forth a few pages of the novel they’d been discussing, and the rustling caught wind through the classroom as other students scoured their books as well.

“Surely, Miss Elliot, we each have an interpretive reading, and yours is quite … creative, but I see little evidence of your so-called ‘lascivious language’ in Motley’s prose. Perhaps you’ve confused our text with The Interpretation of Dreams?”

The few students who understood snickered and made a few last side-long glances toward Orly, now curving her spine low into the molded seat, and consciously willing her foot to stop hyper-jangling as the class resumed its course.

After class, she quickly descended the front ADA-approved ramp and turned left out of the 6pm crowd toward the dusky brick buildings that flanked the Commons.

“Orly!” someone called behind her. “Orly, wait up!” Orly turned around as Mike Gordon hurried out of the mill of students. She paused to mentally check that her skirt still faced forward and hadn’t edged around sideways like it does, and ran her tongue over her teeth for good measure. “Hey, Mike,” she replied, and turned back as he caught up to her, matching her pace, his messenger bag thumping their rhythm.

“That was pretty lame of Grant to call you out like that. I mean, I think what you said made sense. It’s too bad it’s just a bunch of prudes in that class.”

Orly inwardly smiled, and, with more nonchalance than she felt, breathed, “Oh, it’s no big deal. I mean, I should know by now to fly under the radar with Grant.”

“Ha! Then who’d keep that class interesting?”

They walked along into the deepening darkness, the wan peach of street lights punctuating their path until it T-d into Emerson Boulevard. They both came to a stop on the same square of pavement and faced each other for the first time that evening.

“So, I guess you’re off to the library?” Mike asked.

“Why would you assume that?”

“Because it’s where I always see you,” he said, looking amused. “Books splayed open across the whole table like the bodies of Gettysburg!”

Orly laughed. “So that’s what you think of me? Some bookworm, huh?” she teased back.

“No, no, it’s just I – I just meant…” At this, he finally broke his gaze and watched a car pass. “No, I just thought maybe we could study together sometime. I think you'd have a good influence on me, is all.”

“Well, Michael Gordon," Orly said and turned, indeed, toward the library, "it’s about time someone did!”

April 25th

7 years ago tomorrow evening, I arrived in San Francisco. The first moments of getting lost at the tangle of onramps near the Bay Bridge. The “quiet” first to drinks in square leather chairs on California at Divis, which I had to ask my host to repeat, it’s full name, and then spell. The walk back down the hill past several bars, the need for a cigarette, which led to shots with people as willing to yell celebratorily before throwing them back while my friend waited for me to finish getting up to my blood-alcohol equilibrium. Her total unknowingness when I’d asked to stay on her couch in the Victorian with elaborate moldings, steep stairs, and cavernous ceilings with medallions that used to hang chandeliers. The map in the kitchen, framed, that showed everything I didn’t yet know about where I was and the bowl of organic fruit on the stainless steel-and-wood island that indicated she and her roommates did. “Is this all you brought,” she asked at my one large suitcase. “I would have packed a U-Haul with a bed and desk…” and everything I didn’t realize or think to realize to bring on my loosely charted drive across country. Like her bookshelf lined with poignant, funny indie authors and photography books, her bedroom hung with the art and travel accoutrements of a young 20-something with much more wherewithal, worldliness and self-confidence than I had. The photo of her and her smiling old brother, the one I tried to sleep with once, as I would the other couch surfer in her house, but who sent me back to my own, as her friend, the other newbie in town, wouldn’t. The toilet beside which I would kneel for my last time ever to toss up the pitchers of margarita-mixed tequila served by the bartender who shared his rolled cigarette but refused to kiss me under the awning of his establishment where I’d been left by my friend to my desperate, near-pleading come-ons. The Kezar bar where I learned of the game flip-cup and downed the unflipped cups on my way out with those who’d last-minute invited me to a show at the Fillmore, where I, according to my credit card statement, bought several rounds of shots on me. The band was something hippy-Jew-bluegrassy and the pot induced thoughts: Did I drive here? The post-tequila day, when I softly resolved I wouldn’t drink that day by Ocean Beach at the Park Chalet where my one friend’s boyfriend was playing a daytime set with his band and I there decided that a Blood Mary was a breakfast drink, which was, I do remember followed by pitchers of beer. The booting up of my senses, the snap into gear, as my vision came on line and showed me some unfeatured, perhaps bearded stranger standing a foot from me engaged in what must have been a charming conversation I must have been participating in as the sun and sky took on that ethereal duskiness. Is it interrupting when you inject consciousness into your own speaking and ask where the band went? Or odd to turn in the morning to the couch surfer and say without guile for the first time since meeting that you regret you can’t be friends now, because you have the utter inability to be friends with guys you’ve slept with? Is it strange for him to look puzzled and mildly alarmed at the prospect of really meeting the person he jumped into bed with? Perhaps it’s not strange, then, that the day after the band blackout I sat in a room with other people who’d also finally realized that alcohol was the problem and not the solution, or that I learned San Francisco geography by driving from one church basement to the next. 

me and my gracious host, April 25, 2006

Coincidentally ...

It’s been a week of coincidences, reminding me I’m not alone, that people care, and that I can take action in my life to move forward and take care of myself.

First, I ran into my friend the acupuncturist, who I was just thinking about, and got the instructions for this technique he told me last time we met.

Next, I took myself for a facial at a fancy sf salon (chemo's a little weird on the skin), and an old co-worker/current friend happens to work there now, so I got a treatment for free, plus enormous hugs.

Finally, I was walking to the movies yesterday, and ran into an old schoolmate who had just been thinking of me, and wanted to put me in touch with a writer friend of hers.

Add to that, that I called one of my friends with a band last Sunday, and she invited me to sit in with her band practice today,

And I guess you have a Universe or world where good things happen, too.

It’s been so strange to be moving out of cancer world. It begins to feel less real, and yet, it still colors and informs everything. I am not oblivious to the fact that I’m blessed to be even just alive, let alone taking actions that make me happy. I actually danced in my apartment yesterday. Thanks to the shuffled Pandora music playing on the laptop donated by a school friend of mine, I got to relive some 90s ridiculousness, and bounce around to Blink 182 and R.E.M.

I haven’t felt that kind of umph in a while. … Although it helped that I slept until noon yesterday, despite the gorgeous weather. My body has needed it. Waking up for work, and not napping in the afternoons as I had been is taking its toll on me, but I will continue to get stronger.

Also, I got on the work-trade list for the workout studio I love, and will soon have access to unlimited free classes – lifted “seat”? Here I come!

There are things that I have control over. What I do, and how/when I do them. Sometimes these things aren’t done, because of patterns and habits of self-denial. But, I’m actively looking at and working on those too. I have two therapists, and a psychic (ahem, “intuitive”)! It’s not just about “getting out there.” Anything is easy once or twice, and then several days of non-stop t.v. It’s about getting to the root of the pattern and cutting them out, letting them go, recognizing their falsehood while doing the things I do have control over.

I can call that friend with the band. I can email my writer friend that, yes, I will go to that reading with him. I can dance in my apartment, and remember that music and joy do exist in this world. … I can make the phone call to the Tax Board and ask for help working out this 2010 IRS business – and I can speak to a woman there who thinks all is perfectly well, and we can totally sort this out, no problem.

Taking action. Sometimes that means, like yesterday, staying in my pajamas til 4pm; playing dress-up with the dresses a friend recently gifted me to feel feminine again; taking a long-needed shower and shaving places that the cocoon of cancer made me forget; and laughing with nostalgic delight as Presidents of the United States sing “Peaches” behind a happily shimmying me. 

What's Normal Again?

I went to Kaiser yesterday before work to have labs drawn, a normal procedure, checking to see what my blood cell count levels are, if my white counts are up yet, since they’re really an indicator of my post-chemo health. Afterward, I drove to work (thankfully, and gratefully, using my co-worker’s car for the month) and got to the tasks I do, and then I got an email from my doctor that said, “Call me.”

Please, for any of you who will ever be, are, or have been a doctor, PLEASE do not ever write to a patient, “Call me,” with no further explanations, ever. You know what happens? Fear. Panic. Terror.

My stress level only got perhaps as far as fear, not panic, as I didn’t expect to hear anything other than what I knew from looking at my labs online: my white count dipped back down from earlier this week. So I called my doctor from my work phone, which was perhaps not the best idea on my part either. And she said that likely the low counts are due to the antibiotics I’ve been taking, and that my oncologist interprets, that as the rest of my blood cell counts (red blood cells, platelets) have recovered well, there’s no reason this result should indicate anything. Anything like cancer, are the unspoken words.

And so, I spoke them. I asked her, in a straight voice, sitting in a non-ergonomic chair, in an office with people walking by, and other phone lines ringing: Could my low white counts be an indication that there are leukemic cells? 

She said no, and repeated what she said earlier about the other cell lines recovering, and the antibiotics having a tendency to reduce white cells. And so, she took me off the antibiotics, told me to come back in a week for follow-up lab tests.

And I got off the phone. And I tried to do my work, updating calendars, making copies, and I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t hold that line, that dissociation, that compartmentalizing, that managing. I couldn’t manage. And so I went to lunch, which meant I walked to a nearby park, sat down in the grass and bawled.

I  don’t  know  how  to  do  this.

I don’t know how to be on the phone with my oncologist one minute, asking if I’m fucking dying, using the words "Leukemic cells,!!!" and then answer a question about an item in our gift shop the next. I don’t know how to hold that. That inevitable reality of life and death at the same time. The “normalcy” of “real life” and the abnormality of what’s happening in my own real life.

When I was leaving the lab yesterday morning, my nurse, whom I’ve now known pretty regularly for 6 months, who’s seen my hair fall out, my weight drop 15 pounds, my color fade and return, she asked if I was heading to work. And I said yes, “back to real life.” Then I asked her if that was really more real life than this. More of a “real” world than the room where people sat getting infusions and machines beeped to keep others alive.

She said she didn’t know how to answer that. And I responded, maybe it’s all the real world.

There is nothing that makes answering phones and creating pamphlets more “real” than cancer. It’s just that it’s the more “normal” world, the more accustomed world. For others. For me, right now, the “normal” world is like an alien planet, where I’m aping the motions and actions of those around me, those actions I know to be interpreted as normal. As average. If I act like one of you, I’ll be one of you.

But I’m not.

No, I’m not special, different, have more or less pain than anyone, but at the moment, I’m not plain, average, or managing.

When, after work (which I left early, following another mid-afternoon meltdown, unable to stem the flow of confused, angry, exhausted tears) I went to a nearby friend’s house, and sat on her couch crying, and I sobbed that I don’t know how to do this – to integrate these worlds, to manage this situation, to walk from what was into what is – she replied kindly, You are doing it.

So, this is it. Messy. Uncomfortable. Jarring.

This is how you walk out of acute trauma: slowly, inexpertly, and by being honest when too much is too much. 

Intimacy? Please Knock First.

poem written August 2012

every inch closer you come toward me

is every inch farther from myself that I am

so by the time your cock is pressing against

the putty of my cervix,

i have found a home inside your walls

like the twilight zone where the little girl

gets lost in the walls

and drifts bemused

around cubist boulders.

i push my palm flat against your wall

– ragged pockmarks, cool satin paint –

as if this physical sensation

will pull me back through

and hearing the suck and slap, forward and back

i note that, somewhere, i must be enjoying this.

* * *

Sometime in my mid to late teens, I began to keep a list of my hook-ups. I color coded them with markers, each color of the rainbow representing an act, beginning with red for kissing, and going around the bases.

Sometime in my early twenties, I went to this list with a pink highlighter and marked those on this now extensive list that had involved alcohol, including the one when I lost my virginity. Nearly all wound up pink.

A habit evolved early: I am rarely present in my body during events like this. Whether that’s alcohol related, or as with the above poem, which took place in sobriety, simply a self-protection habit.

Several of the acts on that list were not entirely consensual, and most would not have happened if alcohol hadn’t been involved -- but some surely would have, because that’s what you wanted from me, wasn’t it?

This was the story I told myself for a very, very long time. Sometimes I still think it. You’re interested in what you see, so I’ll give you what you see and nothing more – the “real” me will be hidden, withdrawn, somewhere else. It’s not safe for me to be present during these acts because of the many times before when my answer was no but I was too drunk to argue, so it happened anyway.

How. Do. You. Integrate?

I still hold my breath most times I hug people, a way to retract and not be vulnerable. Do I simply become more aware of these patterns, and they fall away? Do I trust that these parts can heal if I allow them into the light, after so long of protecting them, protecting me?

If I’m fully present during sex, then I’m vulnerable. Vulnerable to the overstepping of boundaries, vulnerable to my inability to own my No or my Not now. Also, I’m vulnerable to the disappointment of not getting what I need or want when I do ask – better to just sort of be checked in, and fake it.

A friend asked me last week what my “story” was with guys right now. That I must be beating them away with a stick. That he was truly shocked to hear that I’m not, and never really have. I have intimacy issues, I told him.

Which will only get me so far. I don’t want to have intimacy issues. I don’t want to hold my breath, check out, or pretend that things are okay when they’re not. I don’t want to hide behind the armor of “I have issues” or continue to babysit my wounds in a way that prevents them from being healed.

In the end, I have to grieve what was lost. The moments of powerlessness, terror, self-abandonment, betrayal. In order to do that, I have to acknowledge them, which is a way to bring them to light. I don’t have to share them here with you, but I can share with you my process of moving (and wanting to move) from constriction, protection, and hiding to care, openness, and trust.

As I’ve been reading, being vulnerable, yes, lays us open to pain, but it is also the only tool for true connection we have. By protecting my sore places, I also prevent closeness … intimacy.

What would it be like to be present in my body? To accept and care for the body I have myself, and pony up to ensure that it’s/I’m safe when I’m with others in a vulnerable way? Can I trust myself?

The Apple and The Tree

As it turned out, when she was here, my mom and I did talk about “where” she was during my childhood as my dad dealt out some pretty nasty physical, then later verbal blows. I didn’t bring it up; it actually came up by her as part of a conversation about my brother, and, basically, how he’d asked her recently where she’d been during that time. I guess he and I are doing similar work.

When she brought it up, I told her, as I’d written here, that really, it’s water under the bridge. That she’s owned up to her shortcomings as a mother before, and more importantly, she’s changed and is continuing to change from that avoidant woman. But, since it was there, she answered anyway. And basically her answer was that she didn’t know it was happening. She was either away working, or, she admitted, she was in denial and didn't want to see it.

There’s not much to do with this information. It doesn’t change the past, it doesn’t change that I do still feel more forgiving of her than him, because she has the capacity to see what pain she caused by commission or omission, and to make changes in herself to course-correct the blindspots that made her unavailable to my brother and me.

So, this leaves my dad. And what do I do with him.

Yesterday, I went to the batting cages. I’d actually been wanting to go for several years since I’ve lived in the Bay Area, but as there weren’t any in SF (which I find abominable), and once in the East Bay my car was stolen, I haven’t been able to go. And so, finally, yesterday, I did.

It was glorious. I had so much fun. I hit the majority of the (admittedly soft) pitches, and some of my shots were actually quite good. My body remembered how to do this. I remembered how to do this. I used to go to the batting cages all the time – with my dad.

It’s the both/and again. If my father (or mother for that matter) hadn’t given my brother and me some genuine goodness, we’d both be sociopaths. If all was neglect, abuse, and secrecy, we’d be something other than we are: generally well adjusted and generously kind people.

As a former boy scout and army captain, my dad was capable of the “outdoorsy” stuff that society says dads do: take us sledding in the winter, teach us how to bat, take us hiking and camping and sailing. He was able to be there in the ways that didn’t require him to step out of his comfort zone. (Unfortunately, my brother has tales from “throwing around the ball” with our dad that don’t have such fond memories; apparently demanding perfection from a 9 year old doesn’t instill confidence or trust.) But, my dad did teach us these things.

And as I consider what my relationship with him is, and what I want it to be, I know that there is this part. A part of me that wouldn’t be if it weren’t for him and shaped by his… --I can’t believe I’ll use this word–nurturing, I wouldn’t have the urge to go to the batting cages, or the part of me that enjoys and indeed demands that I get out into nature and stoke a fire.

Like anyone, my father is multifaceted. He isn’t an ogre, though he was in part. He isn’t a swell dad, though he was in part. He isn’t entirely absent, though he was in part.

My mom and I talked some last weekend about the things she “got” from her parents, the good things she got. She has her own multifaceted parents too, but it was nice to hear, for maybe the first time, the positive qualities of them, and what they’d passed on to her.

Because no matter what, no matter how I feel, what kind of relationship, if any, I choose to have with my dad, he still did raise me, for better or worse.

And as to the better, yesterday, I left the batting cages with a smile that lasted for hours, today my arm muscles are sore, and next week, I know I’ll be back. 

From Velveeta to Bone Stew: A Bi-Coastal Tale

My mom was in town from New York last weekend, and I took her to this cute row of stores called Temescal Alley, that if you didn’t know was there, you wouldn't know was there.

In this alley is an apothecary, which I didn't exactly know what that meant, but apparently, here, it means lots of loose tea ingredients and medicinal, herbal items. Including … a Hot Sex jar of honey for my mom (hey, she ain’t dead! And I’m sure her boyfriend will appreciate it!) and a vial of liquidized, immune-boosting mushrooms for me. … Not quite as “hot” as the Hot Sex honey.

The whole fact of all this is funny to me. The owner talked with us for a while on the benefits of bone marrow stock, how to make it, by slow cooking a bone for 72 hours, and I listened raptly… I have become more Californiafied than I ever thought I would.

Though certainly some of my bending my ear to these whispers of magic mushrooms of a very different stripe than I’m used to is the cancer stuff.

Things change after cancer.

Particularly, I’m noticing, my threshold for my own bullshit. Or, to put it a wee bit more compassionately, my tolerance for my own reticence, fear, and stagnation has decreased rapidly.

It’s my first week back to work. I haven’t sat in a chair in front of a computer screen for entire days in 6 months. (Perhaps I’ve lain on a couch in front of a computer playing DVDs for entire days, but I digress.) I did not face and fight death to be a secretary. I just didn’t. It’s where I am right now, but it’s up to me and only me to change that.

I was telling a friend this week about some of my (same old, same old) frustrations about working this (or any) secretary job, and she gave me the same shtick most people do: see it as an opportunity for service, see it as a chance to do good, what can I give rather than what can I get. Yes. But that’s not the whole story, not by a lot, for me.

My friend has a mission statement for herself that goes something like this: “To use my gifts and talents to be of maximum service to those around me.” The only gift or talent I get to use at this job is my personality. Which is fine. But it’s not nearly enough. Data entry, running reports, updating computer filing systems … a monkey could do my job.

This is not a use of my gifts and talents.

So, it’s up to me to use them, eh? It’s up to me to find ways to use them, perhaps for now, extra-curricularly. I finally emailed back the photographer who offered me headshots when I put out the wish in December, and my hair has grown back long enough to be pixie-ish cute, and so it’s time to move forward with that. I emailed my friend whose husband is a pilot, and who’d offered to give me flying lessons. I reached out to my defunct writing group, and we're back on the books for this month.

I ‘ m s t i l l d r a g g i n g my feet a little about the singing with the band stuff. But, I’m coming up to it.  I must. 

I did not fight death to be a secretary. I am not eating marrow soup, taking a supplement called Liverplex, eschewing sugar, or flossing in order to be a secretary.

It is a noble place to work at least, and yes, work is work; there is always something that brightens my day about it – be that the kids coming in all nervous for their first pre-Bar Mitzvah meeting with the rabbi, or the Nursery school kids hiding shyly in their mothers’ pant-legs as I wave goodbye to them, or sneaking into the sanctuary for 5 minutes to play the piano in warm peace. I’m not a line cook, I’m not a prostitute, I’m not a field hand. My job is not bad.

It’s just not me.

Therefore, it’s up to me to change, not my job.