One thing I’d like to change about myself … my absolute, unrelenting need to be agreeable. I recently listened to a recording of myself trying to persuade my mother-in-law to follow her doctor’s advice. And, listening to the recording, you’d be forgiven if you thought you were listening to a Master Class titled “The Art…

A couple of years ago I bought a poster in a thrift store. It’s a copy of an illustration by a French artist, and it depicts a woman looking out at the bay of Mont St. Michel. I liked the colors in the poster, and I thought the woman looked chic. I brought the poster…

Let’s go back in time…forty years or so.  To a neighborhood in upstate New York.  Think starter homes and station wagons with wood paneling.  Almost all the men work in white-collar jobs for the same large employer.  The women are stay-at-home mothers.  A kind of company town.  On summer nights, the kids go outside and…

A DSW shoe store seems like a pretty innocuous place.  Somewhere one might go to kill time on a cold January afternoon.  Hardly the type of place for a nervous breakdown.  And yet, in a particular DSW on a particular January afternoon, a middle-aged woman paces up and down the aisles of the store, almost…