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Recently I was cleaning out a cedar chest and amidst the college papers and pressed christening gowns I found an old bundle of love letters from my first real boyfriend. During our relationship I studied abroad for a semester, and throughout that six-month period he sent me dozens of letters.

For six months the blood continued to pump through my veins merely for the arrival of those letters.

Now the yellowed stationary is bundled together with a satin ribbon that probably has a sentimental memory attached to it if only I could remember. Each letter feels as fragile and soft as the skin on an old woman’s neck and the ink is slightly blurred from all the folding and unfolding.

I’ve lost the desire to fold and unfold those letters now. I haven’t opened them to visit those memories in years, and I certainly don’t want my children to find them when I’m gone and feel even the slightest pain over my love for a man other than their father.

But can I throw them out? At the thought my heart starts to thump and beads of sweat dampen the little hairs on the back of my neck. Instead I move the linen tablecloth and the crocheted baby sweaters and the little box of baby teeth and I bury my treasure of vanity at the bottom of my now orderly chest.

Why can’t I let go of words that have scattered from my life like sunlit dust?

Because when I occupy the darker, lonelier corners of my life those tissue paper memories are my proof that I am lovable, that I have been loved fiercely by another, and they are tied up with my hope that somewhere in another dusty chest someone is cherishing a bundle of carefully folded love letters signed by me.

If you drove down the main street of our little town on any given day, you would most likely get a glimpse of Earl, either wabbling his way to Wawa or sweeping the sidewalk in front of the jewelry store.  Earl was a fixture in our town for the fifteen years we’ve lived here.  He knew everyone and everyone knew Earl.  If you stopped at the video store, you might find him leaning on the counter having a chat with the owner.  If you grabbed lunch at the pizza place, you might find Earl hanging out with a soda in hand.  We nicknamed him Tweedle Dum because of how he looked and how he walked, and the kids were used to seeing him sitting on his front porch or meandering down Main Street at least a few times a week.

About a month ago Earl collapsed while waiting in line at the corner pharmacy.  By the time the parametics arrived he was gone. 

Yesterday when I drove past Earl’s house I saw a new set of furniture on his porch.  Someone else is living in Earl’s house.  A new name is on the mailbox, a different car is in the driveway, and our little  town marches along without missing a beat.

I’m contemplating life and death and how both slip away so quietly because my mom was in a car accident last week and came ever so close to slipping away herself.  She sustained a brain injury that has left her confused and disoriented.  She doesn’t recognize us yet.  She can’t remember how to cut her food.  She can’t recall the names of her grandchildren.

I was a literature major - I’ve covered the theme of man verses mortality quite thoroughly - but it doesn’t sink in, it doesn’t become real when it’s somebody else’s.  It’s like wrinkles.  I just couldn’t worry about them when my face was as smooth as a new tub of margarine.  Wrinkles aren’t real until you catch a glimpse of them around your own eyes when you smile or until you actually feel the soft crepiness of your very own neck.  

It’s the same way you don’t own Mortality until you wake up every day thinking is this it?  Is this the day I’ll have to say goodbye to my mother?

Some time in my future I will be motherless.  I’ll wake up, make the coffee, put the kids on the bus, the mail will arrive, the news will be on at noon, and someone else will make her lunch at my mother’s stove.

And all of these things will happen quietly, without so much as a fight.

Tomorrow is the tenth annual Open that Bottle Night sponsored by Wall Street Journal wine columnists Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher.  The idea is that everyone has a bottle of wine they save for a special occasion, but the special occasion never comes and the bottle turns to salad dressing.  So every year they host a night in February where people all over the world can open that special bottle of wine or champagne and celebrate it in and of itself.

I want to live every day as if it were Open that Bottle Night.  I’m not saying I want to be drunk on wine every night, although by Friday morning the thought has its attraction.  I’m saying I don’t want to live my life waiting for the perfect moment to… live.

I was raised by a woman who knew the value of good.  My mother had good sheets, good tablecloths, good glasses, good pillows, good quilts, all saved for when we had guests.  We never had guests.

She had good bathrobes, good nightgowns, good slippers, all saved for that special vacation.  We rarely went on vacation.

She had a good coat, good gloves, good purses, good scarves, good shoes, all saved for that special occasion like seeing a Broadway play in New York.  She never went to see Broadway plays.

I dread the day my sisters and I will have to find places for all the beautiful things my mother has never used, worn, opened, enjoyed.

I married a man who for some troubled reason grew up believing he would never live to be an adult, who never thought he would survive life to see his fortieth birthday.  You may be thinking how sad as I used to, but for whatever the cause of Nathan’s fears, the effect has been a life lived fully.  Every day Nathan wrings every stinking ounce out of his options; every day he wakes up and puts on his good tie, his good shoes, his good coat, and he drinks out of his very best crystal glass.  Every single day Nathan runs laughing into the cold ocean.

And every day I try to be more like him, to fight my desire to wait for the perfect moment to get off my lazy ass, to stop watching the game from the sidelines, because I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I have become salad dressing. 

(This might be a good time to remind you of those fingernail clippings…)

On Saturday I will be opening up a seven dollar bottle of wine and I will be toasting to whatever life might throw my way on Sunday, and to meeting it with purpose.

And I will be wearing my good underwear.

I’m always appalled at the way our nation clings to other people’s agony, as if by dissecting every cell of someone else’s heartache we can protect ourselves from ever feeling that same pain.  Like maybe if we know what John Travolta ate for breakfast on the day his beloved son died, we can somehow be sure that we will never be the one to loose a child.  Or maybe we want to be in so many Hollywood minds as not to go out of our own, choosing to be voyeurs of other people’s pain as a way of denying what’s ailing us. 

I am not a voyeur.  I cringe and change the channel when the local news interviews the sobbing family of yet another policeman gunned down on the streets of Philadelphia.  I would much rather read a factual account of Philadelphia’s increased struggle with violence and murder, complete with statistics and comparisons to other dangerous cities made with a chart, than to eavesdrop on a person’s lowest moment in life.  Maybe it’s the Irish in me, my stoic refusal to show my own emotion, that prevents me from choosing to witness other people’s deepest feelings.  Maybe it’s part of my lifelong struggle to see raw emotion as anything other than weakness.  If I could get past that personal flaw I believe I would be a better friend, spouse, mother, writer, woman.

Or maybe I just don’t like to feel uncomfortable. 

I have had mixed feelings about the public outcry surrounding Rihanna and Chris Brown.  A part of me desperately wants to yank my head away from viewing their private pain, for it is so not my business.  But, thanks to Maggie and her pledge to make a difference, I am beginning to see how important it is for victims of domestic and sexual violence to speak out, to have a voice, to know that they are not alone, to find a way to get beyond the pain and shame, and to stand together in the effort to affect change.  I’m coming to understand that hiding domestic violence in the deepest corners of our darkest closets allows it to feed and to fester and to draw strength and to multiply into the pandemic that it has become in this country.

I am one of the lucky ones.  For no reason other than I have been blessed by fate I have never been the victim of physical or emotional abuse at the hands of another.  There was a time when I would have tried to take some credit for that, as if it could never happen to me because I am too smart, or too strong, or too proud, or too fill-in-the-blank, but my friend Maggie has taught me otherwise.  Violence does not pick and choose between the weak or strong, the wise or naïve, the wealthy or poor, the ignorant or educated.  It invades and attacks insidiously and indiscriminately.

It has been hard for me to click to Maggie’s new blog, Violence Unsilenced.  It has been a struggle for me to page down through the breath and blood and skin and tendon of these beautiful women who are just like me.  But I’ve learned that by reading their stories I am not exploiting them.  I am honoring them by listening, and I am raising my voice with them in an outcry for change.  

Maybe it’s time we all allow ourselves to feel a little uncomfortable.

The other day I wrote about getting it totally wrong while trying to motivate a child, and then yesterday I read about fifteen year old Max Gilpin and his high school football coach, Jason Stinson.  Stinson will be the first coach charged with wreckless homicide for Max’s death from heat stroke.  At an August 20th practice the coach ellegedly refused the team water and told them they would run until somebody quit.  Max collapsed on the field.  His body temperature was 107 degrees upon arrival at the hospital.    He died three days later having never regained consciousness.

My heart breaks for Max’s family.  They are living every parent’s worst nightmare and their lives will never be remotely the same.  But my heart breaks for the Stinson family as well.  They too are changed forever and perhaps will carry an even heavier life-long burden than the Gilpins.  How many of us in the field of education have gone about motivating kids in an inappropriate manner?  I just wrote about committing the very same crime, although my actions created psychological rather than physical scars.

I think motivating a child to strive and to achieve is one of the most difficult things to get right as a teacher and as a parent.  We all fail sometimes: dampen a child’s spirit, damage a fragile psyche, extinguish a fledgling dream in our desire to maximize a potential, to ensure that a child has the very best shot at having their very best life.

So when we get it wrong, very, very wrong, should we be held accountable for our actions?  Many people are defending the coach because it was an accident and because denying water to athletes and pushing them beyond their breaking points is a common practice in the world of competitive sports.  Talk about a slippery slope!  It’s like Everest after a Vaseline rain shower.

This is a case of judgment, not intention.  We all need to have our own internal barometer of what is appropriate, rational, reasonable, in spite of what is accepted or normal.  Can you forgive those soldiers who flipped the switches on the ovens that burned 6 million Jews to death simply because it had become common practice?  Although a very harsh analogy, it makes the point. 

I feel the purest empathy for Mr. Stinson.  I don’t for an instant think he was acting maliciously or intentionally, but he acted in poor judgment.  Being put in a position to motivate a child is being given a sacred charge.  As a mother I give that sacred charge to professionals five days a week and I have to trust that they will use flawless judgment.  

I pray that Max’s life will be honored every time an educator or a parent thinks twice about the way they are treating a child. 

I promise I will do my best to honor him often.

One of the lessons that greatly shaped my life unfolded when I was a first-year teacher in my early twenties. I loved all my students, but I loved one little African American girl a little more than the rest. She was shy and beautiful, and reflected in her magnificent bronze eyes were the shadows cast by a hard life.

Midway through that year I got a phone call from the little girl’s mother requesting a meeting. This woman was clearly irate when we spoke. I remember standing outside of the conference room door watching her as she entered the school. As she walked down that long corridor toward me, it would not have looked incongruous if she had had a silk jacket draped over her shoulders and a skinny old man running next to her squirting water over her head.

I was scared. For the life of me I couldn’t think of what I had done, how I could have wronged this little girl I so adored.

Once we settled into the conference room this woman opened fire. She berated me, using curse words I had yet only heard in rap music, for announcing to the entire class that her daughter had gotten a 44% on a math test.

In an instant my vision cleared and it all unfolded in my head. I had done exactly what this woman had accused me of doing out of inexperience and a genuine desire to motivate a child to do better.

When that formidable mouth finally closed, my first thought was to defend my actions, to mention that this child was not doing very well in math, that she wasn’t doing a lick of homework, and that I had been spending part of my lunch hour trying to help her. It’s part of my nature to be right all the time, and, quite honestly, I could probably defend a Parka to a Death Valley ditch digger in Mid-July.

For some reason I decided it was the day to grow up a little bit, and I said to this woman who had spent much of her life fighting to be treated fairly and with respect, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. I was trying to motivate your daughter to do better. I can see now that I chose the wrong way. This is my first year and I’m just learning.”

For a second I thought the skin might just melt off of her face and puddle on the ground, so unfamiliar was she with the direction our conversation had just taken. I think at the very same moment I decided to do the right thing, she realized that I had not done her daughter wrong out of prejudice, injustice, or malice. I had done her daughter wrong out of stupidity.

The meeting ended with both of us smiling sheepishly and slinking back into our respective corners of the world. Over the course of that year she and I forged an awkward friendship around what we had learned that day. I learned something that has stayed with me all these years later as a mother - that shame doesn’t motivate. More importantly, I learned to own my mistakes, and I learned the power of a genuine apology.