July 23, 2024

Took a ride to Walgreens to pick up some photos. I haven't been in my car for quite some time due to vacation, so it was nice to be back in her, music loud, windows down.

Mike Campbell was on Tom Petty radio on SiriusXM speaking about the recording of 𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝑹𝒆𝒂𝒍, by Tom Petty, which originally was from way back in the Mudcrutch days.

Over on my regular people Facebook timeline, I posted a video of 𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝑹𝒆𝒂𝒍 produced by Dana Petty, and said that if you want to know more about Tom Petty or me, it's a good lyric to absorb.
(If anyone wants to see the video, add in the comments and I can direct you. Lyrics will be posted below.)

For me, the song is a giant metaphor, or maybe mostly a simile, of my entire existence.

Its title, 𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝑹𝒆𝒂𝒍, was in the dedication of 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆 to my man for that very reason. We did for real, for sure. Everything.
Still. To a nauseating fault, and I revel in it. (usually)

Before I was a famous author (ROFLMAO), I was a full-time mom for 30 years. I never considered it a job, but rather a vocation - a word taught to me by my parents through their words and mostly their actions. It never occurred to me to be anything but a mom - and I took it seriously and invested as much into each of my kids as was humanly possibly, probably too much at times. It was my job, my calling, my self, 100%.

I was put down and ridiculed for years for being "a stay at home mom," which is an ignorant label anyway, and was asked questions like, "How could you waste your brain away?" or "You're too smart to just do THAT," or "But what do you DO?" Or "When are you going back to work?" I loved that one because I WAS at work, much like their own paid daycare providers. It boggled my mind.

"You're so lucky that you get to stay home!" really got to me. How did they know ? I never knew...

They had me here: "Aren't you BORED?" Like hell I was!!!!!!!
And intrigued and fascinated and busy and in wonder and awe of the humans that were entrusted in my care. But it was lonesome being one mom "at home" while others were out working "real" jobs. It wasn't like the 50's with aprons and fake smiles.

Once I began to answer the question, "And what do YOU do?" (oh little short woman behind the man...)with, "I raise humans," I was cut more slack do to confusion and perhaps with my sanity in question.

What's my point? (I never quite know.) Just that sitting in BackinBlack (my car),listening to Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, remembering Tom Petty, I was overcome with nostalgia for things past - those very things I strived to achieve, the very things I thought I'd given my all to - and I had, and the very things my gut and my core spoke to and from and from which anything I am resonates.

Kids: I did it for real. I did it for me, and I did it for you, cause it was all that rang true. I hope you know.

Very recently, a friend of mine helped me restore my faith in that word - hope - and I do...I hope today.

I miss Tom Petty and I miss what was. I know I did it for real and I hope that you do it for real, too.

I'll never be nothing inside me but real. And that's all you really need to know.

(If you don't like my perspective or Tom Petty's, read below John Lennon's of being a full-time dad for which he too, was ridiculed.)

May 11, 2024

My mom was a great mom. I know others may say the same about their moms, but she was a pretty cool lady.

I wish I could write her obituary today instead of the day we had to prepare it with a mere stranger asking if this sentence was ok or that sentence was ok. All of the sentences about her were ok, but I was in such grief about her demise that any sentence would have been ok just to have the question of them being ok over and done with.

Mom loved baseball but hated if the players were too fat. She hated when they spit. Both were uncomely of professional ball players.

She loved all angels and rounded up a whole team of them for herself: The Traffic Angels.

Despite this, she once drove her car right over a gravestone trying to save a spilling cup of coffee because you know, waste not, want not. A splurge on an out coffee was far more costly than that tow truck and collision repair. The gravestone survived without a scratch.

Mom loved McDonalds but ate it sparingly. She ate Cheez-its and canned spinach and hoarded candy.

She hated anything foreign like pizza or Chinese food or Mexican food. She preferred, in her vernacular, a “lousy hot dog.”

She loved “Days of Our Lives” even though she claimed to find it nonsensical.

She had unfailing faith, especially in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

She rubbed Noxema everywhere.

Her favorite color was purple and she loved lilacs, birds, and horse racing.

She found my father mildly ridiculous but I could tell she loved him, too, and kissed him hello and goodbye like clockwork. They had 55 sets of Irish twins, though…so someone had some type of affection somewhere along the way.

I watched her nurse him through many of his maladies and ultimately cancer and death. I watched her do the same with the dog, and that’s how love looks sometimes.

I watched her care for my nieces and nephews when their moms had their babies.

I watched her agree to my then-controversial marriage not long after we lost my dad and she stood alone like a pillar in mauve and wore a smile that was as much forced as genuine.

I watched her attend all of my kids’ school events until she couldn’t, and that wasn’t until she couldn’t do anything else either.

She always wanted to go to Vienna but told us too late.

The first time she told me she loved me was when we lost my brother.

Watching what that did to her, losing a son, was proof of love.

So, this is what I write today: some sentences that look and feel ok enough.February 27, 2024

So, I guess the fake news about the Pope saying “…the sacrifice is not in the stomach, but in the heart...” was, well, fake. Kinda wish I knew that right away, because I’ve been (meatless) stewing on it all week.

In case you don’t know, it is suggested that Catholics refrain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent, and the above fake statement from the Pope was insinuating that it wasn’t about sacrificing meat but rather enriching the matters of the heart.

When I was growing up, not only did we not eat meat on Fridays, but we didn’t eat Jell-o which was made from horse hooves (is that TRUE?!) or pizza from a pizzeria because we could not ensure that the sauce was meatless or had not been cross-contaminated with meat.

It was fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, or pancakes in our house. (Siblings – is it true that we didn’t eat meat on ALL Fridays throughout the year in the early days, the DAD days, or am I making that up??) For the record, I remain meatless on Lenten Fridays which requires zero sacrifice much to my chagrin and disheartening.

As a child, and as suggested by my faith and its indoctrinators, I “gave up” things for Lent. Uncharacteristically, I don’t remember what I gave up. It couldn’t have been much of a sacrifice, and because I can’t even remember what it was that I gave up, I can assure you that I did so with ease, which naturally felt like a cheat to me.

By the late 70’s, it was suggested by the big authorities of Catholicism that instead of giving up something that something be added instead: be kind, do extra chores, help a neighbor, etc. So I did that for a while, but those never felt like worthy offerings either.

So as an adult, I have floundered every year as Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent) approaches.

To give up or to add? That is the question.

I gave up various things over the years: chips (which I avoid anyway), fancy coffees or black coffees purchased out, specific sins of the flesh, iphone indulgences, gossiping - oh, I don’t know what else.

This year I had a big list ready for myself of Lenten “give ups” and additions as I do every year. And, like every year, I squandered and questioned the severity of each task and its intentions.

Is avoiding eating something that I am trying not to eat anyway really a sacrifice acceptable for Lent? Is adding something like a random act of kindness that seems self-serving really a give at all?

Yes, it’s true, we are two weeks into this mofo and still I am doggy paddling in the Lenten pool of possibilities. Bleh…meh…to everything.

Add this. Take away that. Your turn. It’s life dodge ball. Who’s in? Who’s out? Shirts or skins?

Who knows?

Um…may I phone a friend? Ask the audience? Throw me a Lenten lifeline, will ya?

February 13, 2024

World Radio Day

I remember being a tiny kid and falling asleep listening to the big kids (the adults) talking out in the living room and kitchen with Mom and Dad. Their dins were my lullabies.

As they each moved out, the house became quieter and quieter and I filled in their voices with a small handheld transitor radio (a wristlet!) I got for Christmas. Luckily, the batteries lasted a long time!

I carried it everywhere with me and it filled in the lonely spaces while watching the big kids live their lives like a movie in front of me.

I became addicted: I was drawn into talk radio from Dad’s car speakers, sometimes comfortably filling the tired silence between my parents (they were very conversational, but sometimes they were silent together); held it to my ear listening for school closings on snowy mornings predawn; I couldn’t wait for Casey Kasem's Top 40 each week, or the Top 100 songs of the years; then there were cassette tapes and the panic of taping favorite songs from the radio; and then Sally Jessy Raphael; PYX106 and Bob Mason as I got ready for high school each day and their infamous Two for Tuesdays; and then of course, Dr. Laura and the King of all Media - Howard Stern.

I’m still addicted. I cradle my earphones at night (and used to panic almost daily when and if they became lost in the bedsheets – thanks to Keith Rose for finding them always and making it right again, and now placing them between the pillows each day).

Imagine a time when you, Radio, were all people had, this mystifying source of widespread communication with presidential addresses and emergency broadcasts and soap operas and variety shows.

So, thanks, Radio, for your companionship, your information, and your dedicated staff(s). Your words and your music were soul saving.

PS Happy Shrove Tuesday! (should I write about this later?)

January 31, 2024

When my oldest son was in the third grade, his teacher told me to keep books in every room. She said that it would normalize books for him, make them a part of the landscape, make them not so intimidating and scary. In a perfect world, their presence would instill a love of reading, a love of language, an interest in knowledge and learning, a thirst for more.

And so I did. I added books to every room. And it worked. My son and his siblings consistently thirst for more, be it from knowledge or people or books or life.

I sit here today at my desk with an old book in my hand that I keep in a wooden chest in my bedroom where it's safe, next to a to-be-read stack piled twenty or thirty high next to my bed, beneath the iPad from which I regularly read.

I thought to myself - maybe I'll keep this book here in my office - and I looked around and smiled. There are books everywhere in here, on shelves, on my desk, atop my filing cabinet, in drawers, borrowed ones from a friend in their book bag in my closet,some whose covers have been made into canvases on the walls.

There are books in every room of my house to this day: the infamous Grandma's Dictionary in the dining room, volumes of kids' poetry in the white room, ancient editions of classics from Mom in the family room, seasonal types in my husband's office, my own novel strewn in different places (kitchen, car, book bags)for different reasons, and hundreds that line four or five six-level shelves in the basement, including the Harvard Classics along the bottom which I have vowed to read.

I don't know what this means or why I am typing this. It was just nice to remember that teacher, her great advice, and how I took her words to heart back when my son was 8 and I was 29, and how words and books are part of my culture, part of me, and inevitably a part of each of my kids, and of my house - full up with words.

January 25, 2024

Writing is difficult because words and ideas and sentences are infinite.

In a more finite sense, they are like thousands (millions?) of puzzle pieces.

Some are the same shapes. Some are the same colors. Some are the same sizes. Some don’t ever belong and some seem to fit perfectly (and they do) but they belong to an already discarded puzzle.

But as soon as you think you’ve found pieces that fit together, giant universe hands come down and mix them all up again and then you don’t even know what piece goes to what puzzle.

Or…even…if it’s a puzzle at all, or just a bunch of ethereal pieces of eventual nothingness or something eventual somewhere, anywhere.

So then you sort. Again.

And again.

And again.December 23, 2023

Since 1973, I have listened to the song “Kodachrome” by Paul Simon and wondered why it spoke to me so loudly. I was 8 when it was released, and I’m a little bit older than that today, so it’s been a long time coming.

Overnight, I finally figured out in my brain the final piece of a gift that had been missing – that last puzzle piece that had plagued my mind. You know, that thought, that spark, like the Little Drummer Boy's remembrance and realization of his drum and its sticks.

I awakened to the most perfect poem by my friend Paul O'Brien, words that really spoke of the true meaning of Christmas (and really all of life’s events) - the details and the wonderment of gathering and all of its pieces coming together to form what becomes Christmas Day. (There’s much more to his poem than that, but this was one part that resonated with me. That’s what good poetry does.)

So, I’m in my car, having had secured the last piece of this year’s Christmas puzzle, and “Kodachrome” comes on the radio.

I think to self the things I wrote in the first paragraph above, and it hit me: THAT’S what that song has meant to me (subliminally) all of these years. The proof is in the details. The color, the holiday, the event, any event - the love is in the background. It’s not who gets the best gift or goes to church the most or has the nicest tree or the best cookies (I do), and obviously, I know all of this. But it’s the care, the hard work, the thinking that brings it all together so others might gather and enjoy.

And “Kodachrome,” well, yeah, sadly for me, the camera does capture the scene, the color, the event, but pictures don’t secure tradition and pictures only immortalize what was then. People and life don’t last.

Love is an action word.

So please…“please don’t take my Kodachrome away.”*

*Paul Simon

December 19, 2023

The tree. It's small this year, but it's perfect. A lot of love went into creating this tree, and also help, care, concern, patience, thought and companionship.

We can't decide if it's a boy or a girl (yes, we gender-identify such things), and that too, seems fitting. Time will tell.

It is what it is. "You can lead a horse to water, Kate," Mom used to tell me, so often that its finale, "but you can't make him drink," was unnecessary because of its regularity of use.

She shortened it. Abridged.

Truncated. Like this year's tree. Like relationships and conversations. Like patience and kindness. Like Tatum's tail. Shortened. Amputed. Gone forever.

What comes first? The cause or the injury? They interplay, don't they? They sever and they change things forever.

I'm reminded of "Daniel" by Elton John and Bernie Taupin and the sensation of watching my brother leave on a plane for the Air Force, or for forever. I was 9. He was 19.

The lyrics are: "Daniel my brother, you are older than me, do you still feel the pain of the scars that won't heal? Your eyes have died, but you see more than I. Daniel you're a star in the face of the sky?" (Hold on...waving to sky, searching in the daylight for the star that is he.)

Is pain, is heartache, is missing and yearning the gap between the scar and the sky? Is it the waiting period before the stars illuminate again to shine brilliantly to provide serenity and beauty for all to see that axed wedge?

Maybe.

December 14, 2023

This is so hard to photograph, and so hard to see in the picture.

Only for a short time during this season, if I’m lucky enough to be awake and standing RIGHT HERE at my kitchen sink gazing out the window, I see the sunrise.

But it’s not like a typical sunrise. It’s literally a bright linear ray of light, almost like a spotlight, and it highlights the yellowed reeds in the most warming wheat color I have ever seen. The ray runs horizontally across the back of the property, framed in crayon colors of red orange, burnt orange and yellow orange, as if it’s running up the hill in all its glory - because it is.

It makes me feel small and it makes me feel big, but mostly it makes me feel connected to something profound and brilliant. Finally. Again.

***see Facebook to view pictures

December 8, 2023

I visited the cemetery last week, on my birthday. Our family plot sits just behind a statue of the Blessed Mother, by design.

A tree had fallen, and it was like as if Mary had stricken it down and pointed to Herself just maybe for fun, you know, like "Bewitched." I don't know, call me crazy, but it made me smile, and reminded me of my secret wish to be able to twitch my nose and make things happen.

There's always been some confusion surrounding The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and I thought - that day of the stricken tree - that maybe Mary was upset about this. So I am here to clear it up.

Today is The Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the Catholic faith. This day honors The Blessed Mother and the fact that SHE was conceived immaculately, that is, without original sin. It has nothing to do with Her conception of Jesus. Also, it commemorates Her sinless life.

And there you have it - today's religion lesson.

Happy feast day, Mary! You go girl!

PS Happy birthday to one of my followers!

November 30, 2023

Happy birthday, Dad. Where are you? In the ground, I know I know, but I can barely FEEL you anymore. You’re in my heart and in my memory, and I can hear your voice still and I can see you a little bit in your work clothes and your glasses, but that daily FEELING of you has faded. That’s sad.

Where were you in your 50’s? Living, fighting, dying…did you feel it? Or was it a flash, a memory, minutes - was it all for someone else?

The apple of your eye, that’s what your workmates said I was to you, born on your birthday. Did I wreck your life? Did I make it the best life ever? We had fun in your 50’s– riding bikes, playing tennis and ping pong, eating at Lum’s, siding the house, making dressing, going to the library, playing pool, swimming… It was good, you and me. And then it wasn’t, huh?

Our birthday is as bittersweet as they come. But we rocked it, didn’t we? I hope you felt it, too.

Our 50’s. Wow. We, I, you and me and everyone else…how did we get here so fast? For me it was a flash of minutes, not years.

One last year here in the 50’s - here’s to FEELING it.

PS fyi this doesn’t FEEL sad. I love my birthday. I love that I was born on Dad’s birthday. I wait for this day all year. I was just wondering about Dad and his truncated 50’s. I just wonder did he FEEL them?

November 22, 2023

Today, November 22, is the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

I am too young to remember it, but people seem to akin it to 9-11 - knowing where they were, what they were doing, how they felt and how it changed them when they heard the news.

I don’t really want to make this about myself, or my book - 𝐾𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑑𝑦'𝑠 𝐺𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑏𝑦𝑒, but in truth, I have been waiting for this day to tie it all in somehow in some effort to gain some steam with its popularity or sales. But as this day approached, and as I type, I continue to struggle with what to say or why I want to say it.

I didn’t choose the name Kennedy for my main character – it chose me. I was Googling saint names and quotes about battle and resolve. I couldn’t seem to get the concept of fight, of battle, off of my mind.

Quotes from JFK surfaced. I read and read and read about this Irish Catholic, this pioneer, this beloved man taken too soon and too tragically.

And then I read this:

“Now the trumpet summons us again; not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation; a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” JFK

And I thought. Her name is Kennedy. The character Dad names her this because this adored president is Catholic and Irish, and the character Dad feels a sense of pride for him and his own self because of him.

I read the quote over and over and it was IT – THAT was what my book was going to be about: “a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation.”

I remember thinking: Kennedy will march on, rise above, die her own individual assassinations, and be made into someone of strength and character, maybe like Dad (the character AND my real one), and maybe like John F. Kennedy.

So maybe today, THIS day, we can remember not only big deaths, but all of the little deaths we endure daily, and we can honor them by giving thanks. We can honor them with almsgiving. We can show some dignity, some value or morality by listening to someone or holding a door, helping with dishes or simply by saying thank you or telling someone that you like having them in your life.

I’m grateful for the influence of President John F. Kennedy on my novel. I’m grateful for my Dad and my Mom, my sisters and brothers and their families, and my children and their children, my extended family and my friends, my agent and publisher, and even strangers who have been stepping stones and Band-aids and warm places to fall and generous of mind and heart.

And if this sounds sanctimonious, you’re probably right. I’m sure it does sound that way. I don’t even mean it not to. I don’t mean anything at all.

I just think that it’s pretty neat that the first Catholic president, an Irishman, spoke to me through his words and moved me to create a character who would draw strength upon him nearly sixty years after his assassination. That feels fortunate, that feels serendipitous, and that feels like a ginormous privilege for which I am soulfully grateful and proud. So sue me for bragging.

Thank you, President Kennedy, even if I’m too young to remember, for all of the ways in which you changed the world, big and small.

So today, do it: "ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." JFK

And give thanks.

PS Did you know that President Kennedy was a Pulitzer Prize winner?

November 10, 2023

My mom carried a keychain boasting the slogan “Life’s a Bitch, and Then You Die,” even back when the kids were little and swearing was damnable. Her realism always gave me confidence, and faith more than hope.

“The road ain’t gettin’ any shorter, Kate,” she’d warned me for more than 20 years, but still, even with her realism and faith in my back pockets, I refuse to concede.

The slogan though? I drink my morning coffee from a mug boasting the same.

Miss you, Mom.

November 5, 2023

Happy No Shave November!

Here’s to men’s health awareness.

Who’s on board!? Me. For sure. I love men and being aware of them. Sure - I’ll sacrifice and not shave. You’re welcome.

But the reality is…ugh…it’s just that full-body dermatology appointment on Tuesday…lurking…mocking…telling me to shave…

Any doctors out there? What’s the scoop? Should I, as a woman, November or not, feel judged if I haven’t shaved for a day, a week, a month, ever?

Women - what’s your take on shaving?

Men - kidding aside, I sincerely wish you all, shaved or unshaved, good health.

November and always.

November 2, 2023

𝙎𝙞𝙜𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙁𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙨, by Dani Shapiro is the best book I have read in quite some time. It was fluid - but deep, and moved me to tears.

It's no coincidence that I waited until today, All Souls Day, to tell you about this. In fact, I'm not sure that there are coincidences at all. I don't know.

Anyway, I hope you'll read this book. I hope you like it.

And in the meantime, I hope you'll say a little prayer or send a silent (or screaming) vibe into the universe for all of the faithful departed on this day of remembrance, on this day of all-connectivity. And I hope all of the living souls hear it or feel it.

October 17, 2023

Keith Rose and I had the awe-inspiring opportunity to meet Wally Lamb and his lovely wife Christine last week!

Wally Lamb read an excerpt from his upcoming novel which was (naturally) riveting. It was overwhelming to hear his own emotion through his own words and voice.

Mrs. Lamb was warm and ingratiating, and as the kids say, a great hang!

What an amazing weekend at the Saratoga Book Festival meeting authors and attending really informative seminars from learned folks. Good stuff.

And yup, that's a picture of Wally Lamb below holding my book, 𝑲𝙚𝒏𝙣𝒆𝙙𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝙤𝒐𝙙𝒃𝙮𝒆, wrapped up like its own wish come true in ribbon blue.**

**to see photos, visit www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor

September 22, 2023

As my second stint at the Albany Book Festival quickly approaches, I felt compelled to explain to you all a little bit about the NYS Writers Institute.

 Disclaimer: what I say here is my opinion, not the ideals, mission, or intent of the NYS Writers Institute, except where quoted.

 The NYS Writers Institute was founded in 1983 by Pulitzer Prize winner William Kennedy. For those of you who do not know, he is a “local” author from Albany.

 Part of their mission statement is as follows:

 “The NYS Writers Institute’s goal is to enhance and celebrate literature, writing, and performance, and to recognize the position of writers as a community within the larger community. Books, films, plays, and their creators can provide portals through which the most personal or complex issues of human understanding can be explored.”

(https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org)

 Now, in 1983 there was no internet. I attempted to research them and, if I’m being frank, I had found them quite elusive and daunting. I felt that only well- known authors had cracked, or were allowed to crack, their code. I had a difficult time finding any information on them. Granted, I was very busy for three decades raising my family, so, the time spent trying to make my way into the NYS Writers Institute was scattered but forever fervent. Credit here to Sara Spychalski who has partnered me in crime for decades to attempt to break into all of this via her friendship with famed author Bernard Conners.

 I’d craved for those same three decades some form of comradery and companionship in the writing community beyond book clubs and writing classes which still do not seem to fill my cavernous void.

 Where were (where are) the writers? Are they all hermits like me? (Also, FYI, the internet, despite its likes and followers, is as isolating as it gets.)

 Anyway, with the unwavering hand holding of my husband, Keith and the publication of a novel, I think I’ve finally cracked the code.

 NY State Writers Institute offers a warm and inviting reception and their events cater to their aspiration to “recognize the position of writers as a community within the larger community.”

 They host writers, filmmakers, provide writing workshops (for high school students as well), show films, and sponsor both book and film festivals.

 All this to say don’t be afraid to become part of it all -whether you’re a reader, a writer, or really just a human, a curious human. It’s fascinating to listen to authors and filmmakers speak about their journeys which involve so much more than just their bodies of work.

 I know it’s hard to branch out into the unknown, and the SUNY Albany campus seems large, but NY State Writers Institute provides the forum for you to learn who is in your community and beyond and what they have to share with you. They provide a way for you to meet and greet and listen to those who may have been integral in your life such as Melissa Gilbert or Toni Morrison or Joyce Carol Oates or Alice Green, or maybe it’s just the person sitting next to you.

 You never know what you’ll find.

 I hope you’ll come by tomorrow to say hi to me and other authors at the book festival, and peruse the tables of those in your community who have chosen to share with you their words.

 And special thanks to Jack Rightmyer who urged me to “get a half table.”

 Https://www.albanybookfestival.com

September 5, 2023

Labor Day.

It used to be a day I looked forward to in the most bittersweet sense because in many ways it marked the end of summer. But, Labor Day meant Mom’s picnic – her big hoorah.

She hosted it mainly as a treat for her adult kids – a day of rest for them. It was a day where she provided an extravagant picnic (more like a catered driveway event) with decadent food of superior quality: steaks, lasagna, chicken fingers, chef’s salad, baked potatoes, corn on the cob (always, God forbid there wasn’t FARM FRESH corn), specialty ice cream treats, assorted chips, and the usual hamburgers, hot dogs, and marshmallows to toast. The tables were riddled with small treats like Nabisco sugar wafers, sometimes mini cupcakes, Twizzlers, bowls of whole fruit.

As I mentioned – all this on a driveway. All this prepared by her.

I used to buy one special piece of clothing or accessory for it - maybe some funky furry thong sandals or a novelty tee or a Steven Tyler type long-length sweater or some Ted Nugent moccasin boots; something transitional, something offbeat, something fun, something me.

I did buy a long sweater to wear but didn’t wear it.

I did make Tim’s dip twice, (and ate some for breakfast) - the only addition to Mom’s menu that was allowed (was Tim her favorite? Why was his dip allowed and why was he allowed to make it? He was so proud, maybe that’s why. Moms always know the whys of loopholes and seeming inequities). I did wear his stealth bomber tie tack.

There was a lovely picnic. All the same players were invited. Some came.

I sit here in silence this morning on Labor Day Tuesday thinking about people and picnics past. There’s no more driveway and no more Mom. I make the dip because there is no more Tim.

I have no uniform pants or skirts to hem, no school supplies to label in Sharpie, no groceries to purchase for lunches, no bus numbers to add to the bus cards my brother Mike gave me for the kids to help them remember their bus numbers, no books to cover.

It’s just me and a daddy long legs sitting on the deck with a cup of coffee wondering where it all went.

September 3, 2023

Reasons why Labor Day/or maybe it’s just Sundays of Labor Day weekend plague me:

Long-sleeved shirts in the summer

Face too red

Sweat too profusive

Metal tables paper-tablecloth clad

Driveway cafe

Cream sour in melted ice baths

Sun falling too soon

Shade too cool

Mini bags of chips disappearing

Savoured one by one and then another

Twizzlers

Meat overdone gosh darn it

Dip dip and more dip

Ah the dip

The newest addition

The newest subtraction

Guilty nicotine breath

Back door slamming

Tension too tight

Marshmallows toasted so perfectly

They nearly fall from their sticks

From grace into ashes

All of us

One by one

Disappearing

Nutty buddies

Who’s your buddy

Who’s got your back

Back in black

From flannel

Into a book

And over again till next year

Or forever 

August 8, 2023

I didn’t ask for Barbie. She arrived on Christmas Day, 1970: a Twist and Turn Barbie. She had bendable legs and a Marlo flip which I never realized until today which is kind of weird because I was obsessed with Marlo Thomas and “That Girl.”

I loved that Barbie so much that all of the hair on the crown of her head is missing from styling it so much. Also missing are her feet, chewed off by our dog, Chico. I didn’t care. I covered her feet with boots I’d bought at The Kids Store (Kids) in Colonie Center with a dime and a nickel. If I were older and wiser and progressive enough at the time, I would have renamed her Limb Reduction Barbie, no joke; I’m embarrassed by my six year old self for not embracing limb issues until I was 8, when it became a reality too close to home.

Over the years I’d acquired some hand-me-down Barbies from neighbors and sisters (and I am still so and forever sorry about cutting Midge’s hair…I found it unrealistic that ALL girls had long hair, and Mom had short hair, just saying), and even managed to get some new ones of my own for birthdays and Christmas: Malibu PJ, Ken, Malibu Ken, Gymnastics Skipper, Malibu Skipper, Growing Up Skipper (Dad disapproved vehemently). I had GI Joe, Alan, Ricky, and an off Barbie named Tammy.

I played with them endlessly all over our living room floor as eight other people climbed over me and them. I played with them under my bedcovers day and night when I was told that I was too old for them, and then played with them in my room over the covers late into the nights when I thought the coast was clear.

Barbie gave me hope and pride in being a woman. She gave me company when I was lonely. I imagined a life for her and for me. In my Barbie world there was honestly and conflict and resolution. There was no secrecy and no lying or undercover hiding. I accepted her just the way she was, even when she lost hair or a limb. It never occurred to me until recently all of the skills I self-learned while imagining a world for them, and for me. There was love between us, an unbreakable bond.

There is always so much criticism about Barbie adding to the objectification of women. No one ever considers the self-esteem that she may have brought to girls who had no one telling them how proud they were of them, or to girls who had no one tell them they were pretty even when their mold of perfection was shattered.

I could write an entire book about Barbies, about how they influenced me, or how they were lifesavers in a world (and a house) full of adults, how they were my sounding board and my compass and my voice of reason and of love. But I can’t go into it all now; and, because I despise spoiler alerts…all I can say right now is…

                                              THE BARBIE MOVIE…

…in my opinion, is an eye-opening film that could be pulled apart and pieced back up into an entire college course whose teachings would be sublime. Maybe go see it.

It even turned and twisted me, and I thought I was Barbie-eyed-wide-open. I’ve been defending Barbie and my love for her and all of her spin offs for years, and now I know why.

And for the love of your higher power, please don’t tell anyone that they are too old to play with dolls.

PS  Is it irony to be told in one lifetime that you’re too old to play with dolls and too young to have a baby?  (Or just a contradiction in terms…)

July 1, 2023

 I lost a good friend on this day seven years ago. Seven years. Why does it always feel like yesterday?

 Usually, I stay at wakes. I sit. I think. I pray. I try to lend support to those who are grieving. But his? I walked through with the other hundreds of people who stood in line waiting to pay their twenty seconds of respect.

 I sit here typing thinking – why didn’t I stay?

 Was it because we were being ushered through, nudged to keep the line moving? Was it because it was so crowded and I am so short that I didn’t even see if there was even a place to sit? Was it because I could barely speak when I approached his receiving line – his mom, his brothers, all of whom were as speechless as I was? Was it because I couldn’t stand to be in that room with him horizontal and still for a second longer than I had to?

 I visit him often where he lay at rest. Often I tear up, but always feel myself smiling inside at the same time, hearing something he would be saying to me if he were still able to be vertical alongside me.

 I have finally stopped starting emails to him. I have finally stopped looking for him at mutual events. I still drive by his childhood home now and again, remembering riding my bike there or meeting him at the corner of Cottonwood to trick or treat after dinner like other cool kids did.

 I remember chocolate bars and nuns and sacraments and altar serving and bus 86 and bus 96 and Iggy and letters to each other written in Spanish and his colloquialisms and sense of humor and smile and intelligence and warmth.

 I learned of his death rushing down the Thruway hoping to make it to the hospital in time for the birth of my first grandchild. One door closes and another opens. Out with the old and in with the new.

 “Every time someone dies, someone is born,” Mom told me once, appeasing my worried little-kid brain.

 Maybe she was right. But will it always feel like yesterday?

  ·

June 27, 2023

Has my popularity been steeped in service?

I always thought that while growing up and until, well, minutes ago, when I typed the above question, I was pretty popular. Not in the sense of cliques, not in the most-asked-out-girl type of way, not in the hand-shaking-political type of way, all knowing and gossipy, but rather in a quiet low-key way.

My family of origin (I think) was well known in school, church, jobs, neighborhood, community – essentially in any arena in which we involved ourselves. To me at least, we were the reliable, steadfast, go-to people whom anyone could count on. Because we were. Because we are.

But as my life has been changing very rapidly lately with way too many wake up calls from way too many people I have deemed close to me, I wonder if I have mistaken it all. Were their intentions pure? Were mine?

I have been accused of being a brown-noser or people-pleaser, terms I detest and deny vehemently. I was taught to treat people as you would want them to treat you. I was taught to be responsible, reliable, true to my word, dignified and generous of hand and heart. If those qualities make me those derogatory terms, then I guess that’s on the accuser, not me. I’m tired of being my own body’s defense attorney.

Being responsible and reliable and generous come with the heavy burden of when and how to say no. Dr. Laura Schlessinger says that when we say yes when we want to say no that we are abdicating self. Call me the Queen.

Have I simply been the go-to person for everyone who is otherwise too busy to be responsible or to show up when they should? Am I just an easy out? Have I mistaken assistance and inclusion of actions for true connection? Have I been used? Have I been wearing blinders? Have I simply provided service and that’s why I felt I belonged? Have I belonged?

So I ask again – has my popularity been steeped in service? I know it’s a question that only I can answer, but I’ll leave you with two reflections in the pictures below. I hope they provide some of your own clarity.

Footnote: I struggle weekly about whether or not to post this kind of stuff, because I know from the numbers that these kinds of posts aren’t “popular.” (Yes, I also know what types of posts draw numbers, and thus, “popularity.” Kinda don't like this game.)

So, on days like this, I'll suffer with the low numbers of one of life's popularity contests.

Cuz, the bottom line is that I’ve been asked to build a brand here, and I am nothing at all but real on the inside.

June 19, 2023

For the first time ever, I saw a confederate flag. I don't mean a sticker, or a patch, or a bandana – but rather, a giant one - enormous, and on a flagpole seemingly miles into the air and waving just like you’d imagine a bigger than life flag to wave.

I gasped aloud, froze inside, and felt an incomparable sense of disbelief and shame.

“Is that for real?” I said aloud to the gods of surreality.

It left me unnerved to the core.

Check out the house pictured below. It doesn’t really matter whose house it is or where it sits.

What matters is this: it was built by slaves.

I didn’t know this as I approached the house, I only knew that I felt a strong vibe of unreal force and spirit, like a vapor, as the distance between it and me lessened. I read the historical sign telling me all about it, like it was some trophy of war, some cherished artifact, and maybe it is. But it didn't feel that way to me.

It was so beautifully built – wood and random bricks and mortar. The wood was made of giant thick tree planks, and the stones were cobble-like and bricks of cement (a recent invention at the time). The mortar in between was spread smoothly and perfectly. I know this because I pressed myself against the house and ran my hands along it.

I stood on the porch and said little prayers of thanks and sorrow. I tried to apologize. I rubbed my tears into the mortar. I touched the cobblestone fireplace and thought about the comfort it may have provided to those who may have been able to receive it.

I really didn’t know what to do but I was bound and determined to vibe back into the walls some type of gratitude and honor. I pressed my palms on its strength and wished super hard like a little kid hoping someone somewhere caught the pulsation of teeny bits of love that may never matter.

I flew my forebodings on a flagpole.

June 6, 2023

Last weekend, the president of the Colonie Fire Company gave my daughters, grandson, and me a tour of the fire company.

Although I’ve been there dozens of times since I was 5, the profundity of the majesty of the equipment and the quiet silence of bravery always make it feel as if each time is my very first visit.

That wonder and awe never fade.

Today especially, D-Day, I remember and honor all the heroes, unnamed and named, who have fought and who continue to fight for our safety with unspoken courage and valiance.

Thank you.

And happy birthday, Mr. President.

May 16, 2023

The nicest thing happened to me about two weeks ago and it is still speaking to me.

Ready?

A stranger asked me for help.

Since my last baby moved out, my primary job and purpose in life seemed to have vanished in the meanest and most cutting ways possible.

It’s true - it gave me time to publish a book (I mean, credit to my agent who got me the contract and the publisher who said yes!), allowing me the time to focus, edit, help create the cover and write the jacket contents, do more edits, gather reviews, be photographed #tomwallphotography). But even that, although amazing, did not fill the void left by my forced retirement from full-time hands-on motherhood.

So there I was, at a gas pump, minding my own business, when a young girl (I say “young”…I don’t know…she was maybe I don’t know…young…somewhere between 23 and 32) said, “Excuse me?”

I looked over, eager as hell, but hesitant – violently aware of stranger danger, checked her hands for a gun, checked the car quickly for others who may ambush me or my car, checked my wrist for the mask I still carry to protect others and myself and said,

“Sure!”

Warmth fell through me like it hadn’t in a long time, that kind of full body hug you get when you know something even tiny in the universe took a giant pivot.

“Do you know how to open this gas cover?”

I had no clue.

“I do! Yes,” I said.

I looked at it and tried to push it in on one corner. Nope.

“Is there a symbol on your key fob for ‘gas tank’?” I asked. Nope.

“May I approach your car?”

She looked afraid, maybe thinking the same things about me that I had originally worried about her, the trepidation of a stranger apporoaching her car, and her.

“Sometimes there’s a button to push along the front there.” Nope.

“Is it this?” she asked, like a little kid.

“Yes!” It was.

Along the side of the driver’s seat was a push button with a gas tank etched on it.

POP.

“Thank you, “ she said, and started pumping.

I continued pumping my own gas, and I know it may seem dumb, but it changed me. I’d forgotten how good it felt to help someone move their day, however small, however large.

The thing about it was that she asked nothing in return, there was no owing, no baggage, no expectations, no me feeling as if I was not enough for those who ask too much of me, not referring to my kids here – they were and are my life’s work, my vocation – I’m referring to others who take without asking, expect without knowing their thiefery has left a void in me.

But that simple act of helping…of giving without receiving in its purest form…that feeling of being needed without more more more…that ability to change someone’s stress, change their day, or maybe even change a life the way mine was changed that day.

It had -for even a few minutes - given me true purpose.

May 9, 2023

“I love anger. I think it moves worlds.” (Alanis Morissette

Me too.

an·ger| ˈaNGɡər | noun

a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility

Anger moves worlds…and helps to rearrange furniture and carry nine thousand things at once and writes songs and poems and books and makes worry lines and scowl and frown wrinkles and increases the chances of heart attacks within two hours of its incidents – world moving.

I thought about why I have been angry since birth: injustice, rule breakers, unfairness, liars, being unheard, feeling unseen, cancer, heart disease, death, abandonment - a surface scratch of strong feelings from concrete consequence.

Is this bad?

"You Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England" (John Irving"Cider House Rules") - instead of asking me why I am angry, ask yourself why you aren’t.

Hard promises.

I rummaged through my vinyl. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers have a whole album named for them, for hard promises.

“And I’m the one who oughta know.

I’m the one left in the dust.

Yeah I’m the broken hearted fool.

Who was never quite enough.

I’m an insider.

I’ve been burned by the fire.

And I’ve had to live with some hard promises.

I’ve crawled through the briars.

I’m an insider.”

(from “Insider”: Tom Petty)

I’m in good company. I’m not worried. But I’m wrinkled.

Anger is my middle name. And my first. Kati. Kati with an “i”. For insider.

Some point in space and time:

My favorite subjects are math and English.

Math is beautiful and pure. It can be proven without equivocation. Math is math, numbers are numbers. They never change, they are reliable, they are what they are, always. I trust them. They trust me.

English is a little bit different. Yes, there are grammar rules, and I love them, because again, they are rules, and they are supposed to be followed. I find infinite safety in rules. It boggles my mind that now, even in journalism and on TV, that these rules are not followed; there is subject/verb disagreement happening everywhere, which will become a funny piece of irony by the end of this.

But that’s not the part of English I like. I like English – the reading part, the analytical part -because it gives me an opinion and a voice, and usually, with a good listener or teacher, that opinion is met with validation and consideration.

I like the writing part, too, because the words belong to me, and I choose which letters to put together to form words and sentences that string along into thoughts and letters and poems and stories.

Words are the gatekeepers of memory.

So, yeah. I do math, I get 100%. I do English, I get a good grade, but mostly I feel seen and heard. That has no number value. It’s an ebb and flow of acceptance and loyalty. My soul knows no differently.

Math is pure. People are not.

Math has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the universe, life, keeps swirling in and out and back and forth with its everchanging issues and demands and even with its joys and moments of sheer euphoria. But it’s constant change. It’s a giant eyeball keeping me on my tippy toes, eggshell walking, performance bound.

Writing is freedom. My typed words have the potential to be read. My spoken sentences are not cut off before they have a chance to find their endings. My intentions remain mine.

Have I multiplied myself so much that anything multiplied by me is zero? Has my viscosity become too diluted to be effective?

This about me and no one else. I have no motive but to type my words and these are the words that got typed. The only difference is that they are here and not wherever there ended up being. This is my page, these are my words, my ideas, my absolute facts. These are my fingertips typing. These are my completed sentences and thoughts. I’m raw. It’s about time I effaced.

raw 

of an emotion (or quality) strong and undisguised

I was born raw and I shall die raw. That’s who I am. And I love my naked thoughts, sentences, words, and feelings.

So, I opened my laptop and wrote unabashedly. I typed unapologetically me.

In my kitchen are framed lyrics. I keep them by the sink to remind myself of my deepest wish for me in my time here on this earth.

Directly across from this framed outcry is a post-it that says:

“I can’t burn the bridge to myself.”

I hear PuffHost reassure me, “You’re brave, I know.”

I am.

April 23,2023

In-laws. Spouses of siblings. You don’t hear much about them, there’s no national day for them. So, I’m going to tell you some stuff about mine. You’ll see how fortunate I am.

peanut butter and jelly ice cream and kielbasa basketball games and overnights first time eating chinese food driving me to buy chloraseptic spray when I had a sore throat on Easter brand new

mittens and playdough just for me cows and alphabet art haircuts legs as high as the sky plays and performances love of design and logos of brown every brown first time fishing fireman firehouse parades and christmas parties unforgettable christmas days christmas trees and giant balls the band the buddies your arm across the bench seat making me feel safe flahs and shoes shoes and more shoes the princess and the pea bed and backdraft reading and more reading boxed set the hobbit and books books books everywhere and deepak chopra crochet tips and carrot cake brunch and ziplocks full of fruit and shrimp amazing mystery casseroles split pea soup and key lime pie the colonie center and pretty make-up old movies and new movies at the theater the rabbit and always speaking to me like I was a human and liking my kids table

first wedding

first time in the adirondacks

first time seeing the ocean

first time needing help lifting MomApril 4, 2023

I was in church the other evening watching my granddaughter participate in the Stations of the Cross. She read beautifully. I was so proud of her - proud of her ability, her courage, and her Catholicism.

It had been about seven years since I’d been to the Stations of the Cross, and I forgot how holy they were. I remembered how much I missed them.

The whole evening – the religiosity, the flashbacks to my own mom being the grandma, the actual being of the grandma, the child’s resonating voice of pure faith, and the Man who hung on the cross anchoring the altar - was quite moving.

I tried to remember why I’d lost touch, and as one of the readers said, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” I remembered. It was the burden of seeming hypocrisy that had tarnished me.

But then I realized that even Jesus had felt that way – abandoned and betrayed, left alone with His whole world turned upside down. Even Jesus.

I know I have been told this or heard or read this a million times, and whether you believe in Him or not, it’s kind of a profound family saga. This guy’s father lets Him follow this trail of denial and road of lonely abandon. Each is alone, feeling some type of way.

It was the first time in nearly two decades that I’d allowed any thawing of my heart following the discovery of all of the priest abuse. They had betrayed, abandoned, abused, devastated and shattered so many lives. Why? I thought – what hypocrisy. I thought – how could they? And I thought – how could I ever trust again?

But as my granddaughter stepped down from the pulpit, she smiled at me, she beamed at me. Her pureness and innocence and the profound TRUTH in her love radiated and zapped my insides.

THAT is the magic of faith, of belief, of Catholicism/religion, of love and family, that moment when one soul beams right onto and into another bringing light and the remembrance of how.

*************************************************************

Author’s note (aka inside a writer's mind):

This piece began in the pew at church. I scrambled to make indelible notes on my mind.

I just got thinking about hypocrisy and vehement reactions to faith and organized religions and how much being born into traditions of faith mold who you are and are nearly un-erasable.

I looked at Jesus hung on that cross and thought either way He was someone’s kid. Who would betray who and when and how vehemently? Who would breach trust and when and to what degree? Who would go too far and how would that all come back together and heal – or wouldn’t it?

And that, dear readers, is the literary reason for the extremes in “Kennedy’s Goodbye”. That is the answer for all of you who ask why or are bothered by them. If you’ve ever been deeply betrayed (dare I say, like Jesus?), you probably already get it.

(And that was the original object of this post. My, how things change.)

March 27, 2023

Part 1

Dear Grade School Bully,

You know who you are; I have always seen it in your eyes. You knew you were bullying. It was a choice.

Your shirts were filthy but the whites of your eyeballs and your teeth were blinding. Your height was daunting. Your back brace was like an extra and unfair weapon.

I turned the other cheek, I killed you with kindness, I asked you why. I even let you copy my homework once in exchange for the safety you never delivered.

For five years you pushed me, you punched me, you teased me, you moved my desks or emptied them out, you stole my books, pencils, erasers, test answers, money and many friendships.

You stole much more than that, but I rebuilt those intangible things daily and began and ended every day with a prayer that you would change. You didn’t.

I hear you became a cop. I don’t believe in your goodness – did you become a cop to bully people with your badge? Was it a license to continue your terror?

If you read or hear about this post, I hope you’ll DM me or email me. I’d love to know why…and why me? What was your freakin’ problem with me? What were you even thinking? Didn’t it feel bad? Do you even remember me?

I bet you won’t reach out. My guess is that you’re still hiding behind your back brace, your inner steel, that which made you mean to begin with. I’m sorry for your heavy cross.

I hope someone has called you out on your sh*t. If I ever see you again, I will. I promise.

I hope you’ve changed.

Signed,

I’m Still Standing

Part 2

Bullies come in all forms, shapes, and sizes. They impart huge injustices and minor infractions, both physical and emotional, both gnawing at and challenging our mental health and physical wellness, not to mention the overshadowing SHAME.

No one can measure your hurt but you.

I have no answers. I know people make mistakes and say and do dumb stuff sometimes, even tragic stuff.

I’m told that bullies bully because they suffer from their own pain. But come on. Enough is enough.

Dear Bullies,

Why? And please, would you just stop?

Signed,

Unforgiving

dear body shaming high school boy why did you whisper loudly

enough for me to hear your hurtful hideous reasons as to why you

said no to me when I invited you to that dance dear supposed best

friend why did you dump me like a hot potato when I questioned

you over a hurtful indiscretion of yours dear mean persons why did

you call me lucky what did you really mean was that right after you

told me that it must be nice to have time to do whatever it was I had done

which was most likely something I had done for you or your kid or parent

why did you body shame me or disrespect me over principles why would

you tailgate me and road-rage me when I was adhering to the laws

March 14, 2023

Transistor radio pressed to ear.

Watching the closings scroll.

Hunkering in with the kids. With blankets.

Movies. Games. Books. Baking. Hot chocolate.

Watching the plow come through.

Shoveling. Big shovel. Push shovel. Mini shovels.

Catching snowflakes.

Frozen eyelashes.

Rock salt.

Wet snow pants and mittens and boots dripping on heat vents.

Watching for dad’s headlights to make it back home.

Actual dad. Husband dad. Other dads.

Snowmen. Snow tunnels. Snow banks. Snow days.

PS Hey Rose kids - I really loved our days.

March 9, 2023

Well. Thanks to everyone who celebrated Kennedy’s birthday with me yesterday, especially to you Top Fans and Top Commenters. Your presence here is invaluable.

I thought about birthday cake a lot throughout the day yesterday, and became obsessed with the question:

If I were Kennedy’s mom, what kind of birthday cake would I make for her?

Now, I don’t mean if I were the character Mom from the book, I literally mean if I were the real life mother of the character Kennedy, what would I make?

Lemon flavored, probably, because, well, you’ll have to read the book to understand why.

Beyond that - I thought cranes - and considered if I would pipe some number of cranes (her age? One thousand???!!) onto a cake or make one big crane for her?

Would I design a decade of the rosary out of cupcakes? Pipe it in yellow? Or black?

Would I shape a cake into a lightening bolt?

Design a highway to hell or a computer paper pathway through a desert on a sheet cake?

Have an icing transfer sheet of Joe Perry emblazoned on it? Or a figurine of him!?

None of this matters, I suppose, but creativity and purging are innate and impulsive.

It’s what I do.

“I play just what I feel.”

(Becker,Fagen)

March 8, 2023

To celebrate the one year anniversary of the release of “Kennedy’s Goodbye,” we are running a Goodreads giveaway through March!

Use the link below to enter to win a copy! (Gift to someone, or donate your win to a local high school or library if you have already purchased a copy!)

To those of you who follow me here, THANK YOU for the support and loyalty. Everything you do helps: every Goodreads entry, every follow, every like here on Facebook, every kind word!

Please share this info if you are so inclined. You matter!

Happy birthday, my firstborn, “Kennedy’s Goodbye”!

https://help.goodreads.com/s/announcements/a031H00000RKE8VQAX/giveaways-for-authors-frequently-asked-questions

February 28, 2023

I remember a place in the mall, tucked away in a corner with cement stairs leading underground to its entrance. As a small child, holding the hands of one two or three sisters, it felt as if we were entering some dark secretive dungeon. We were.

Maybe I am making this all up (memory lies! It very well may have been #The Barnsider, and the library was upstairs by Sears), but I swear our local library was located in the Colonie Center mall. If anyone remembers this, please comment below! I’d love to hear about it.

(Also, shout out to The Historical Society of Town of Colonie for their current reseaching of this for me.)

I remember how safe it felt being surrounded by books and words; sentences upon sentences of things people wanted to say. Those were the lucky ones, the chosen ones, those whose words would live on. Or at least that’s how it felt.

I have a lot of really good library memories, even the horrible ones when the nuns yelled at me in awful spitting whispers to hurry up or I wouldn’t get a book (who could rush through a library???) – even those had good outcomes. Another set of sentences, another point of view, a chance to live inside someone else for a while.

SO…Happy National Library Lover’s Month – yeah, it’s over now, and I gave you no warning. And that’s the kind of February this one has been…like a curious child lost in words as the winter world whirls.

Don’t forget to check out my author page on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor

February 21, 2023

I showed my daughter the puzzle which took a YEAR to complete, a gift from her and her family to my husband and me from the previous Christmas. 

“Are you going to save it? Lacquer it? Frame it? OMG the resolution is so good on that picture. You took a great picture. It came out amazing! What are you going to do with it? I can’t believe it’s finally done. It took forever. Was it hard? What a great job!” she said, all in one breath.

I didn’t know where to begin with her excited barrage of questions and exclamations, all of them worthy of response and demanding of thought.

All I could muster on the spot was, “I’m not sure yet. Thanks. It was hard. Tatum (the cat) looks amazing. And the books. And the tile. It’s a great puzzle. It was challenging, but so much fun building her. Thank you.”

We repositioned ourselves to the other end of the table where a new puzzle (another gift from her and her family) was just beginning to take shape.

“What should I post about this week?” I asked.

“Post about the puzzle!” she said. Immediately. Happily. Excitedly. Like a kid who invites you to their softball game and you really want to go except you had other plans you already know you’re cancelling in order not to disappoint. (Full disclosure, I’m not sure she would have felt one way or another about the post’s topic, but it was me who was wrangling with the subject, the object, and the point of view.) 

“Writing a book is just like building a puzzle,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The way you don’t know where anything goes and then suddenly it’s something.”

That seemed to satisfy her.

I got in my head:

What a dime-store rendition of the process. Way to minimize. 

Writing a book is more like building two or three (or ninety) one-thousand piece puzzles whose boxes have been destroyed and some pieces dog-eared. OK - make them new puzzles if that’s a happier scene. Regardless, the pieces have been jumbled all together, and both cats have been playing hockey with some of them over a three year period. You’ve dug some out of the vacuum bag. You’ve gotten close to at least separating them into what pieces go to what puzzle and then you drop them on the floor only to re-scatter them. 

It’s like you finally get one puzzle of the three built and then you think it’s awful (after all that work), so you wonder if you should just throw them ALL out because who really cares about these old pieces that seem meaningless and may not even belong together. You wonder why you even saved them to begin with and why you should waste any more of your time on them.

Granted, some parts are easy. They have straight lines and angel wings (my personal faves, both). But the rest? Yeah. They take a decade to sort, discern, build, create, complete.

And then? When finally finished, an editor (or five) tells you how nice your puzzles are but the one in the middle was intended to be garbage all along and some of those pieces LOOK like they fit, but do they? Shouldn’t you check them again? Are you sure you want to keep those dog-eared ones and how about an altogether new puzzle as an epilogue? 

And even though you know you're the BEST puzzle builder on earth you: 

#1: cry

#2: pout

#3: decide if that’s really who you want to be and you begin a new search in the basement or the attic once again for the unopened shrink wrapped or nearly mossy old gem puzzles and start building again, hoping somewhere, somehow, you get it right. 

And although seemingly meaningless, all those pieces and all that time may turn into a beautiful Tatum cat sitting next to some of the best books ever against tile that took four months to make it across the ocean from Spain. 

February 14, 2023

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! If you are reading this, know that I appreciate you, your time, and your loyalty.

Valentine’s Day reflection, an adapted excerpt from a letter to my daughter:

In first grade, we were allowed to exchange Valentine’s Day cards with our classmates which were to be placed inside little mailboxes we had made out of milk cartons. The nun was mean, and I was so worried about making my mailbox incorrectly and being nun-pummeled for my lack of artistic ability. (That’s pretty ironic, if you know my current craft-ability.)

I remember getting cards at the Village Pharmacy, a neat little pharmacy (it’s now Lyle’s Hoagies by Smith’s Liquor on Central) that carried all the necessities of life: cards, boxed confections, medicine, magazines, paperbacks, mints, flowers in a cooler, some offbeat stuff like slippers and shawls, candles, pillows, mugs, perfume, glass trinkets, nickel and dime candy. It was air conditioned, so in summertime it was almost worth the brutally hot mile walk just to cool down for a bit. It smelled like penicillin and felt like deliverance.

Anyway, when it came time to do my Valentine's Day cards, I filled them out for my friends and sealed their tiny white envelopes.

Mom: Did you include everyone?

Me: I included my friends.

Mom: You have to give everybody a card.

Me: Sister Evodia didn’t say that.

Mom: You have to give to everyone. How many are in your class? Make a list.

The task seemed daunting. I knew we had 54 students. I numbered a piece of paper 1-54. Doing my best to visualize, row by row I filled in students’ names, missing a few here and there until I remembered all 54. I crossed out my name and handed the list to Mom.

Mom: Make a card for everyone.

Me: But I don’t love everyone.

Mom: It’s about friendship, which is a type of love.

Me: But they aren’t all my friends.

Mom: How do you know?

Me: Silent.

Mom: Besides, you wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by leaving them out.

Me: Silent.

The woman had some good points. I DIDN’T know then who would end up being my friend. I was 6, for goodness sakes. And OF COURSE I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Upon arriving at school on V-day, our first order of business was to put our cards in each person’s mailbox. So we did. Then we were allowed to open them. So we did. I had a lot, I remember that much, but not everyone gave me one. I didn’t care that much, thinking that they may have not known yet if I was their friend, like Mom had said.

At the end of the day, a classmate approached me.

Boy: Thank you for the Valentine.

Me: Silent, afraid he might have thought that it meant LOVE, not friendship.

Me: You’re welcome.

Boy: You were the only one who gave me a card.

Me: Silent again, trying not to full-out cry.

Boy: Thank you.

Me: You’re welcome.

Boy: Why did you give me one?

Me: Because we might be friends.

I’ll never forget that boy’s sad face. I’ll never forget the hollow loneliness in his eyes, the grayness of his cheeks, the slight hint of OK-ed-ness when I said “might.” A small let down of relief. Deliverance.

Mom was right. And it was because of that very incident that I called after each of my own kids as they left the house random things like, ‘Say hi to the new person,” or “Don’t let so and so eat alone,” or “Help whomever on the bus,” or whatever it was. I heard Mom’s voice. I saw Boy’s eyes.

Every Valentine’s Day I think of this, that little card in his empty box, alone, his slow approach, his wanting to smile but just not quite knowing how.

And maybe that’s the true meaning of Valentine’s Day’s – the Boy - giving, reaching out, sharing, remembering, eyes and hollowed cheeks softening from the kindness of one; like Blanche DuBois of “Streetcar” fame always depending on the kindness of strangers. It’s tokens of kindness that add up and equal love. It’s inclusion.

It’s Mom. It’s Boy. It’s Blanche. It’s me. It’s YOU.

February 7, 2023

If you follow me on Instagram at kati_p_rose, you already know and have seen evidence that hearts follow me: potato chip hearts, rain and snow hearts, oil-stain hearts, coral hearts, etc…

It's a comfort that never fails to make my, well, heart smile.

And even though the heart is the muscle that pumps blood and sustains life, it has become a symbol of love and emotion.

I tried to summarize it and/or bullet point it for y’allzies, but here’s a video that did a better and less boring job of it. (You gotta know when to fold ‘em…I’m learning…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp34dcs1kvY

January 31, 2023

Visit me at https://www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor to see some insights on Valentine’s Day traditions!

January 25, 2023

bait-and-switch* | bāt and, (ə)n(d) swiCH | noun the action (generally illegal) of advertising goods which are an apparent bargain, with the intention of substituting inferior or more expensive goods: [as modifier] : a bait-and-switch scheme.


bait-and-switch** | bāt and, (ə)n(d) swiCH | verb the action of promising, stating, eluding to behaviors, product or person deliveries, or emotional support; saying one thing and meaning another; switching up the intention and leaving other person feeling invisible.

*Dictionary.com
**Kati

January 18, 2023

So, the tree is down. She is perpendicular to the road as instructed by the town. She’s ready for the next phase of her life  - pine chips.

 I thought a lot about this tree thing and I’ll be brief: maybe in those years, those times, when Mom warned that it was not good if you didn’t want to take the tree down, it was (and I am speculating or projecting) because maybe the tree was the only good thing that happened that season. Maybe the tree was in her control, maybe it was the only ginormous effort worth continued and perhaps solitary celebration. Maybe the tree did not take for granted her hard work, her care, her effort, even her sadness of what could have been or what was.

 In short: why dismantle love?

January 10, 2023

There’s a thing I do. I’m not alone; others I know do it, too. Mostly pre-dawn, and sometimes late in the afternoon or late in the evening, I sit with the tree - the Christmas tree. When all is said and done, when it’s quiet and still, she stands, majestic and holy with her lights and ornaments.

I am sitting with her now. She’s a beautiful love child of angst and intention. She is a worthy struggle, a gift of hope. This dead (or pretend) tree, once decorated, becomes a living belief, and she radiates her splendor until she is put away or discarded. It’s a lot to ask.

My mother used to say that it’s a bad sign if you do not want to take down the Christmas tree. I don’t know why; I’m not sure she knew why. Was it a superstition? Did she know from experience? I never could quite pin her down for her reasoning or its outcomes, and now it’s too late to ask. But there was foreboding and firm warning in her tone.

This is such a year. If she were artificial, I’d keep her up, well, until I felt the time was right to undo her loyalty. But this one is real which should alert me to its safety concerns and fallen needles and the fact that the room is colder due to closed heat vents near her – but it doesn’t. I’m careless at heart.

I trust she will let me know when it’s her time to go. But until then, her quiet understated promise, her brilliance and shine, will keep me sitting, keep me staring, keep me still in dark hours.

PS I am just now remembering learning “Oh Christmas Tree” in German in the sixth grade for the school Christmas show. It feels right recalling the harsh rendition.

January 4, 2023

THE REAL CHRISTMAS PANTS

I pretended for a long time to be someone I wasn’t. I mean, not inside of me, but on the outside for sure, for others. I still do to a great extent.

Wasn’t that what we were taught to do as Christians? Do onto others as you would have them do onto you?

Always, I was trying to put myself in everyone’s shoes; be the quintessential empath. I thought it was my duty.

But this morning, as I put on (my) THE REAL CHRISTMAS PANTS, I realized that maybe the reason this Christmas season felt inauthentic to me was because, until I stumbled into THE REAL CHRISTMAS PANTS, I’d been inauthentically Christmas-me.

Christmas-me plays continuous Christmas music, wears Christmas earrings and a Christmas broach on a coat I probably would not have even worn except to church, bakes 15-20 dozen cookies, roasts anything standing still, decorates the house and several trees – the main one a love and challenge for me and #4, cleans and cleans and shops and shops and shops and shops and shops (I love every second and it’s not about amount or quantity per say, it’s about the joy of shopping and giving. OK, truth be told, the amount is #3’s fault.).

I did all of that this year. But I was like a me-mannequin doing it all, with huge life issues and changes overarching it all. It was as if I were Ebenezer Scrooge watching glimpses of me moving through the motions of my life. Ho ho ho and mistletoe were replaced with irrational job requirements. Drama and heartache sucked the spirit right out of me. I’d been told “no” more this Christmas season than I had in my entire life altogether.

Enough people placed blame when and if I’d tried to vent – that way they do when they tell you why you’re lucky or fortunate and that you should not feel the way you feel even if it’s the way you feel. Enough people pointed out the positives (as if I weren’t already living them, acting them, providing them) to make me feel entirely guilty for existing in my own skin. (see above/pretending)

Christmas and the season were not awful despite the pretense my body decided upon. There were ginormous moments of sheer joy with my family. I just had to take mind-pictures of them all so that I could capture them up and pin them to my memory. Heart band-aids.

I had grazed over THE REAL CHRISTMAS PANTS that sat in my drawer several times throughout the Christmas season. I was saving them for a happier day, the perfect Christmas feeling day. I was waiting till the time was right to wear them, when it felt like Christmas, when I felt like ME.

THE REAL CHRISTMAS PANTS are easily over two decades old, a gift from my brother-in-law back when I could not afford myself such luxuries as novelty pants. They used to be big on me and now they are bigger on me, but I love that about them. If they touched me anywhere I would hate them, and now I need to dry them on low so that they don’t shrink. They were too long until I hemmed them, and when the hems fell out I cuffed them with thin elastic. When the waistband lost its elasticity, I pieced together the leg bottoms’ hem cutaways, and threaded new elastic inside the worn waistband and gave them a drawstring.

This morning, as I mentioned previously, I literally stumbled into them. The cuff’s fabric has worn away from the elastic so that the bottoms are fringy and the elastic catches between my toes. It made me laugh before it simply gripped my ankles. The drawstring is frayed and barely holds up the pants making them hip-huggers. (I rock them there, for the record.)

But as I stood within them, I didn’t regret not wearing them ALL season as I normally do, I felt good that I had waited for them, and them for me. I felt good that my feelings were safe inside their frayed flannel. I felt royal. It felt good to be back to me, inside my own skin, in THE REAL CHRISTMAS PANTS.

And yup, I took their picture and saved it to my heart-drive.

December 13, 2022

I argued with myself for five days about posting this. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to be misjudged, as if today or its words would be distinguished from any other moment of most days. I thought maybe I’d simply add it to my website, cuz why even post valuable IP here at all?

But as I read and reread it, I asked myself - what’s so wrong with it? Why is truth in struggle something to shy away from? Maybe I DO miss Christmas as it were with people and things the traditional way. Maybe I AM just a big baby. At least I’m brave enough to know my truths, and logical enough to be able to articulate them. I’m not ashamed of that.

So read the below if you want. Or maybe just think about the people around you who may be struggling, or watch a Christmas movie. Hang some lights, buy a gift and donate it, or not – buy a million gifts and keep them all – who cares? make that phone call, remember your Higher Power* and throw up a peace sign. Wallow in your abandon. Do nothing. Be you.

As for the now? I’m off to find a Christmas movie to listen to as I work.

Stay tuned…we will discuss movies in a future post!

*thanks to Sara Carroll Spychalski for the perfect terminology.

*******************************************************************************

I stood in my kitchen last week and said, “I don’t like Christmas anymore.”

As the words flew out of my mouth from the depths of a despairing thought chained word vomit, they sounded more like me, the real me, than I could have ever imagined.

Christmas used to be magical, majestic, wonderous, traditional and ritualistic.

Christmas was the resounding “HO HO HO!” of my Dad, and my brother-in-law who took over for him when Dad’s ceased.

Christmas used to be fun trips to the mall finding just the right gifts.

Christmas was mass and new birth and renewal of hope and carols and joy, a congregation of merriment and oneness.

Christmas used to be the literal running into my monikered best friend at the post office finding the perfect Christmas stamp, or in the shoe department searching for something wise but sexy, our paths always the same ones, our thoughts cosmic and connected until they weren’t.

Christmas was a sibling gift exchange with a theme until it wasn’t.

Christmas was Santa Claus for four, three, two, one.

Christmas was extended families gathering until…I don’t know what yet…not yet…the extensions seem like broken bridges now with attendees being pushed off into rocky muddled waters.

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” Tennessee Williams

I think for me, that Christmas was the one time that I could count on the goodness of strangers, the loyalty of family, the closeness of friends. Maybe I believed too much. Maybe I counted on it all too much, like a kid; maybe it was all a lie, not just the Santa part; maybe it was all just a show of brilliance like midnight mass, a facade; or maybe I’m just caught in the abyss of family and friends who are forging what they call “new traditions.” Maybe I’m just missing the obvious, maybe I am a lone soul who believed too hard in magic.

Magic = a quality that makes something seem removed from everyday life, especially in a way that gives delight. (New Oxford American Dictionary)

Maybe I needed magic to believe.

So, I hope your season isn’t a struggle but that you’re filled with Christmas joy.

I hope your season isn’t riddled with insecurity but that you’re surrounded in safety.

I realize full well that those wishes are only for the privileged, and that my magic is only seen by the fortunate, which is part of the reason why I can’t figure out when or where it all became replaceable, disposable, and reworked. Or was that why? Because it was a case of easy come, easy go…I don’t yet know.

I’m ashamed that I have come to harbor some of the hollow feeling some describe around the holidays - does it happen to everyone at some particular point or eventually? Or can some hold the true meaning so front and center that the peripheral is transient? Or am I too needy? Have I not seen enough of the other side(s)?

Am I brave enough to hit “post”? Am I brave enough to efface my truth?

I guess I need to watch “Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” again. I guess I need to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” I guess I need to ask the infant Jesus or whichever deity that hears me for hope and promise and serenity.

I guess I need to watch these snowflakes falling as I type and try not to feel like the Grinch on the apex of his peak teetering upon his decrepit sleigh…and…and…remember the magic that I believed in and somehow find strength to not only pass the torch but to believe in its new-found home.

Or not.

I am much better at wallowing in the abandon and remembering the sound of my brother’s footsteps making tracks in first fallen snow after midnight mass, incense in our pores; Mom’s butter cookies and her perfect pressing; the rearranging of the Nativity set and trying to explain to each kid why the kings are already there if it isn’t even Christmas yet and is Jesus yet born or not; the Happy Birthday Jesus party I threw at the kids’ school for over 100 each year; the picking of perfect trees all three of them, all six of us; the anguish of calculating the fairness of Santa; struggling to fit gifts into themes and budgets; the feeling of a best friend knowing why we were where we were before we were and then we were; families near and extended all together; the comfort of knowing who what when where and why every year simply because it was Christmas.

December 6, 2022

Sometimes there’s relief in poetry.

                                    taffy

                                    fine ingredients 

                                    (like family members)

                                    melded together

                                    (the melting pot of hope)

                                    stirred into preparedness

                                    (grown and ready to launch)

                                    stretched and pulled

                                    (sacrifice not compromise)

                                    rolled 

                                    (no choice is a choice)

                                    severed

                                    (never saw it coming)

                                    wrapped alone

                                    (isolated)

                                    pretty candies given with the best of intentions

                                    (hardened)

November 29, 2022

Greetings!

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Ours here was challenging, but I was overwhelmingly grateful for those who were able to make it here in the flesh and for those far away with whom I am close.

Over the weekend/week, I thought a lot about relatives and holidays. I thought about the concept of “that creepy uncle,” and wondered how everyones' visits went with them. Were they creepy? Why do they have to be?

I tried to figure out who my creepy uncle was, and just couldn’t find one. The closest that I have come to one was when Mom would tell me about her Aunt Nonna and her husband Uncle Bill. “You stayed away from him,” she’d say, “he was NOT NICE.” *** She’d give me that look with her eyes and one eyebrow that to me meant that he was sketchy in a perhaps perverted way. It was girl-speak, and I heard it from the look on her face. ‘nuff said.

(****Dear siblings and cousins, maybe this was Uncle Chris?? I could be mixed up, I was little then and knew neither of them.)

As a child, my uncles were cool, normal, old as the hills, just men being men in that football after dinner full feeling camaraderie way that relatives you see once or twice a year have. As I grew, I got to know each of them better and truly enjoyed them all. They were good to me.

But then there was Uncle Bub. I never ever talk about him and I don’t know why. Maybe because he died young on Christmas day while shoveling snow as we sat wondering why he was late. Maybe because he was the brother that was the awkward one, a bachelor, a misfit. Maybe because I thought he favored us and we kept it on the down low so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Mom seemed to have dibs on him; she seemed to watch out for him and defend him. They seemed to have some quiet closeness that was palpable but unspoken.

He barely spoke. On alternating holidays, he walked around the corner to the bakery where they roasted a turkey for him and carried it home like a newborn. He stacked newspapers and wrote numbers all day in notebooks, his telephone next to him ringing incessantly. Did he speak into it? I never heard him. He brought giant chocolate bunnies to us at Easter and flats of strawberries in the summer. He brought peaches and hams. Once he brought his hand me down console TV with rabbit ears - not the fuzzy animal the big kids described to me - Uncle Bub is bringing something with ears for you called a rabbit – for us. I tried not to be disappointed. He gave us money folds with ten spots inside - a fortune! – at Christmas and Easter.

On alternating winter holidays his car inevitably got stuck in the rut of snow the tires had made and he’d spend what seemed like eons trying to rock the car out of it until finally Mom and Dad and whomever would go out and push him much to his dismay.

His name wasn’t Bub. He was named after his father (Dear siblings and cousins – was he a junior?),but even as a kid I could feel that he hadn’t lived up to his name somehow.

One Christmas I sat across from him in a rocking chair in our living room crocheting, trying to seem cool, attempting to be Laura Ingalls. After a fashion, probably at half time, he looked over and said, “Crocheting?” It sounded like a lot.

I didn’t know how much he meant to Mom until I saw her face crumble that Christmas morn when my cousin or aunt or other uncle called to say that he had a fatal heart attack while shoveling. And then, as often it is when people die, the truth came out.

He was quiet, but kind. He was gentle, but awkward. He was generous, but guarded. Like his wandering muscle-weak eye, he never fit in.

He won the lottery. $5000. He used it to fly all of my relatives in and hosted a family reunion to bridge the family back together after some troubles which had caused huge wedges and wounds.

I was so excited to attend. It was fancy, and finally there’d be peace.

“Lookin’ sharp,” Mom said to him upon arrival.

“It’s called a leisure suit,” he said.

And there they stood with their matching wry smiles, in sibling silence.

November 22, 2022

I began today well before dawn in the kitchen. I searched TV channels for Thanksgiving cooking shows and found none. I scanned SiriusXM for food programs and found none. So I worked in silence [unless you count the toe-smash and swearing when I walked into dishes in the dark (don’t ask) or the horrific crash when two broiler pans and six cookie sheets slid off of the table via cat-as-sleigh-type passenger] for several hours.

I tuned into CBS (I think) wanting to listen to Regis and Kelly…Kelly and Ryan… talk about their pre-Thanksgiving sagas. All good albeit no Ryan. Tuned into Jenna and Hoda (or maybe it’s the other way around) and by something-o’clock I turned the TV off.

It was loud. It was whiny. Once Kelly and Not Ryan were over it just sounded like a bunch of people telling me how great whatever they were talking about was, and how amazing they were.

I know I touched upon this before, because what else are people going to do on TV but promote themselves or their products, but it really got to me again.

I’m just going to say it – not everyone is that effing amazing. All products are not the best things since sliced bread. All cliches are not metaphorically correct. I almost threw a pie in the TV’s face!

This got me thinking. When my book came out, its publicist (yes, the book has a publicist) strongly encouraged me to build up my social media (hence this ridiculous typing when I am so busy I am pulling all-nighters). Get a Facebook author page, a TikTok, a website, a Twitter, an Instagram and visit all libraries and all bookstores and develop your brand and get a head shot and reach out to all of your important contacts and don’t you know any famous people cuz that will help. Sigh.

I did my best. But we all know that that’s a cliché whose fleshing out can be well, not the best.

It made me wonder where the value is in posting, sharing, exhausting my day’s capacity for writing on writings like these. It made me not want to post. It made me not want to use my time building my brand, amassing a following, gaining likes.

Where is worth?

Facebook and Instagram ‘liking’ have worth, I mean, at least fake worth that my book’s publicist would fine valuable.

Having followers on any forum apparently has worth (just ask the Kardashians), so thank you to all of you who have accepted my invitation to follow me.

Commenting has worth because it brings your friends to my Facebook page which helps me to be seen, and it helps you to be read and seen as well. I mean, assuming any of that matters to you.

Unless posts are ‘liked’ ‘followed’ ‘shared’ or ‘commented upon,’ Facebook decides my relevancy with a mathematical decision made by someone who does not need a following because they have already monetized their value, at least how they have chosen to define it.

I’ve been in a mood recently. I know what some of you are saying…RECENTLY???!!!!…and you’d be right…I was born in a mood.

So maybe this is to just say thank you to all of you who bother to read these, and thank you to those of you who hit the 'like' button and/or comment whether you read them or not. There’s value in that in the fake world.

BUT - there’s value in it to me in the REAL world – I know it takes time to scroll, read, 'like', comment, etc…and I know because of Facebook’s algorithm some of you have to search me to even know I posted over here on the author page, and I know I am boring compared to someone’s meal or boots or haircut or drama, I get it, I do…I DO!!!!!...I get it.

So, thank you for your support and your loyalty. I thank you for your hours.

I see you.

PS To the wonderfully ridiculous people who just sent me flowers, I thank you and I raise you one pie. But really, you do not ever need to do that, for truly, it wouldn't be Thanksgiving without this tradition and you. But I cherish them - thank you.

PPS Did somebody say "The Hours"?????!!!!!!

November 15, 2022

Who can post when pie pumpkins loom in the background begging to be prepared for pies?

The distraction is real.

Even the pumpkins know that today is National Imprisoned Writer’s Day, recognizing those who are or have been imprisoned or who have faced persecution in the name of words. (That’s the way abridged version.)

Some are calling it National I Love to Write Day.

There's irony everywhere.

November 10, 2022

I had a great mom. She was good at everything she did, but she’d have told you otherwise.

She was a little bit kooky, a little bit of a curmudgeon, a fabulous cook, and a great listener. She knew every answer to every question I ever had.

I miss her.

We were pals for tons of years, Dad and all of the older kids having left us by death or distance early on in my life (siblings, should you read this – your efforts were completely seen, and I thank you, I know now the juggling some of you must have had to do in those early days), and when I moved away I could not have appreciated how much that may have changed her life. She called me often.

In the early days, I visited her on pocket change and fumes in hopes that she’d slip me a ten or a twenty so that I’d have money to get enough gas to make it back home. She always did.

My kids loved her, but time and quality of events and immersion became more and more limited as time went on, as I was youngest, and she oldest.

I wish I’d spent more time with her at the end. I did what I could. I wish I’d called more. (More = every day, but she told me not to, so I obeyed.)

A few weeks before she passed she told my husband and me that she had always wanted to go to Vienna. Our hearts sank into our stomachs (after 400 years of marriage these things are visceral and obvious), and the look we shared was one I’ll never forget. I think he asked her something benign like, “Why Vienna?” and I am not sure we ever got an answer.

We got in the car and sat, cried, and both of us said out loud, “We could have taken her to Vienna.”

We could have. A hundred times over. And would have.

So…in this holiday season of thankfulness and giving, think about maybe calling your mom or your dad, ask them where they have always wanted to go, and at a minimum, listen. At a minimum, call. At a minimum, visit. Don’t let it be too late.

PS

Happy birthday, Mom.

Thank you to the progeny who honored her this day by doing a big thing (and I should have told the masses on that particular day, honored her, honored my family, but somehow thought it would bring it down or that it wasn’t my place – Jesus Mary and Joseph, people, just say it…do it…).

But also, let go of your regrets. (As if I can, or have.) My sweet Godmother told me, "Don't should yourself," and I am working on it.

And to those 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆 readers, do not fret, it’s mostly fiction, but there was a moment when Mom became a roadrunner (page 204) and I did in fact contemplate her existence and permanence one day in real life like Kennedy did:

“She was standing in front of the window where the falling sun was illuminating her, translucently, as if she were radiated and levitating. I had never seen her look more alive.” (page 130)

I decided that day that she was eternal, divine. I thought she had the powers of hereos. She did. But the flesh was weak.

November 8, 2022

Happy Election Day!

I have great memories of volunteering at the kids’ grade school on Election Day, making and selling turkey dinners and pies and bake sale items by the hundreds. Fun times!

*****************************************************************

I have been very fortunate in my life to have been able to meet and get to know many people, including some who are deemed famous and some who I have deemed heroes.

Heroes for me are pretty low key. I’m not talking Superman. I am talking people whom I have admired, people who have shown up for me, people who have spoken to my soul my heart my brain in one way or another.

Opposingly, although I am an utterly starstruck type of human, I have found that meeting celebrities is kind of strange. It turns out that they are just normal people finding their way through life just like me, except they happen to be a rock star like Joe Perry. But in reality, backstage before the show, he was just a dude sitting with his kids chatting before he went to work (in multiple layers of black clothing and jewelry he chose from multiple racks in the back of his “dressing room” while I tried not to scream and stare).

Anyway, currently I am reading the autobiography of someone I have been enthralled with for years, decades even, and on whom I have had a major girl crush. I am reading this book in a hurry because I have an opportunity to meet her soon, or at least stare at her awkwardly as she signs the book I am reading.

But here’s the clincher: I’m unenthralled. I’m un-hero-ed. The words, the tone, the self-stroking (I know I know, what else is she supposed to write about in her own autobiography???) are whittling down my perfectly pictured perception of her by the page. “No, no!” my brain keeps saying as my eyes continue to scan her sentences like a car wreck I cannot unsee.

The thing is, beyond the romanticism of celebrity, I have been able to speak with and get to know many of those who have influenced me or changed me in some way, those unsung types of low key heroes. But it turned out in many cases that that was all there was to them – that one dimension I created of them to be what I needed them to be when I needed them to be it. And mostly it has been in my own mind.

I remember a decade ago handing to my agent David Vigliano some raw and true-to-life vignettes in hopes of sharing my own life story. He used a lot of kind words, wrapping his conclusion in a pretty package, but basically he told me I didn’t have enough tragedy or sensation to sell books to the masses (or find a publisher, for that matter). In actuality, no one would care. I know now how right he was.

But as I stumble to finish this autobiography alongside me, I wonder, are most people’s so-called heroes a disappointment? Are most mentors or those whom we admire really fragments of who we want or need them to be because of where we are or were at, and not because they’d been heaven sent just for us? Are we all just regular uninteresting humans that cannot sell a book unless we’ve got a name (like my girl crush) or a story too tragic to be true?

As I approach my public meeting with my lifelong imaginary girl crush…I think…I just want to say to her, “Would you please just stand there and say nothing so that I can pretend, so that I can see that little crook in your lip without your politics ruining my image of you, so that I can hold you dear to my heart for just a little while longer…?”

Please and thank you.

PS Oh, and David Gilmore and Roger Waters – the answer to your question is yes, my heroes have been traded for ghosts.

November 2, 2022

As a follow up to my wildly prolific post yesterday, today is All Souls’ Day. Tradition suggests we should pray for all of the faithful departed who may not have yet passed through the gates of heaven.

So, to all of those in purgatory - rock on, hope, and Godspeed. Keep sending pennies and Pink Floyd.

PS By the way, the mystery saint pictured in the post from November 1 is St. Odilia of Alsace, the patron saint of the blind. My mother prayed to her daily, and kept her prayer card close by.

November 1, 2022

November 1 is a day known in the Catholic faith as All Saints’ Day. It is a day wherein all those who have attained heaven are celebrated and recognized.

I like the saints. I like asking for their help. They have interceded for me in ways big and small. It gives me solace that they were humans who walked the earth like I did, with their trials and hardships and even their joys. It makes me feel closer to those who have passed, and it gives me comfort to know that I have not been alone on this Earth journey.

It’s nice to be recognized even if you don’t have your own day.

It’s good to be seen.

I hope you’ll share your favorite saints below- maybe some we will all know, and maybe some will be seen today.October 25, 2022

Last week, I took a hiatus from the writing job and re-immersed myself into my first job, my true vocation: mom. I mean, it’s not like I ever leave such a role, but times change and needs come and go.

The daughter and I had planned a sort of girls retreat type of week: we painted, we cooked, we laughed, we drank some wine, we walked, we saw the ocean, we obsessed, we painted again. I helped care for my grandson and stood beside him one entire morning watching construction vehicles just outside their window repairing a water main break. I watched him watch them, and I was reminded of singular wonder, of beauty in simplicity and the excitement of newness.

Mid-retreat, I was kind-of-emergency-summoned to my son’s home to provide care for two other grandchildren so that my daughter in law could give birth to their sibling. I became chauffer again – a school mom, built trains, played backup endlessly with a Matchbox tow truck and several broken-down school busses in a Hot Wheels garage. I read books till I was hoarse.

 “Where’s your voice, Grandma?”

 I spoke aloud more last week than the previous three years combined.

 It felt good to be back nurturing, caring, feeding, laughing, loving. It was wonderful to have been included in both family’s dailies, watching my adult kids (forever an ironic oxymoron) be parents, eating what they eat, loading different dishwashers with the same vessels of sustenance, listening to them be me at times, or my husband - or even better - their own selves.

It was like riding a bike – a little shaky at first “does your mom let you do this?” “painting ceilings is the hardest part,” “can he have more milk?” “ what time should I leave the house for pickup?” “that Starbucks will go right through me,” (and it did) – but then away I rode along with all of these seemingly mundane things which suddenly took on lives of their own. I miss it – all that wonder and life, all those tiny moments where lives can be changed, when simplicities become memories, and the way every minute is one you never get back. What an awesome opportunity it is to be that someone for someone, to answer the whys and provide the food or the reading or the kiss goodnight, or simply to stand beside and watch.

 To be the voice for them, even when it’s hoarse. 

October 20, 2022

Happy birthday, Tom Petty.

Me and Tom go way back to “Luna” from that black album with the kickass picture of Tom on the front. And boy, did they come, moon after moon, moment after moment.

How do you begin to pay tribute to Tom? How do you choose favorite songs? There are so many that have sound-tracked my life. Like “Breakdown” – ah, if I could only bottle that feeling of breaking down that first time, that first glance, or that first kiss, the energy and air between two people when the connection is imminent – that vibration in a bottle. Tom gives it to us in song, in feeling, over and over, like his gliding luna.

My husband called me the complex kid when we dated. I suspect he was right. “Complex Kid” – one from Tom on red.

I remember tooling around in the car with the kids, album after album, or cassette after CD, Tom Petty crooning as we all grew up. They know him well.

“She’s the One” soundtrack even…

I could go on and on and name songs for hours, but I can barely reel my brain in to type just thinking about them all.

But even as late as this morning, just after dawn, “I felt so good, like anything was possible, hit cruise control, rubbed my eyes…” when my car hit 100,000 miles on the NY State Thruway at the exit where I’d moved as a newlywed, “Runnin’ Down a Dream” blaring. (Dear son who plays guitar, would you play me that riff someday…that one from “Runnin”? I'd love to see you be it and feel it together.)

It just always comes together. It always feels full circle with Tom. (Or Mudcrutch, for real...)

So, rest in rock, our dear Tom Petty.

“You’re so bad…the best thing I ever had…”

October 11. 2022

It was a big book week for me.

On Thursday, I found my book in the William K. Sanford Town Library (Colonie library). I knew that they had ordered the e-book, but the physical copy was a total surprise to me. I really cannot explain the thrill of walking in there as I have done hundreds of times and finding my 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆 there on the new-fiction shelf, right in the front.

Immediately, I thought of my dad who had driven me there at least a third of those hundreds of times. We spent a lot of time there, Dad and me, and it ended way too soon for us. As I stood in the library taking pictures of my book, all I could think of was how Dad would have yelled OUT LOUD in the then very silent library, “Hey! My daughter’s book is here! This is my daughter! This is her book!”

He would have been proud. I tap-tapped our memorial brick on the way back to the car. It’s the one with the shamrock. Luck ‘o the Irish…

And then…

On Friday, I got to autograph some copies of 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆 at the local Barnes & Noble, thanks to their senior bookseller and business development specialist (I’ll name you if you’d like me to, let me know.), and the sleuthing skills of my cousin.

Again, seeing myself three-dimensionally immortalized through words in the form of a book still has me hazy and dazed.

It makes me think of those long childhood summer days just non-stop reading book after book after book. It makes me think of reading 𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒆 𝑾𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒏, reminding me of my own sisters and wondering how on earth Louisa May Alcott could write all of that! It reminds me of the 𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒆 𝑯𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 books, and 𝑺𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒅𝒆, 𝑷𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊 𝑳𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒄𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝑲𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒆 𝑲𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒕, 𝑯𝒆𝒊𝒅𝒊, 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒐𝒕𝒕𝒆’𝒔 𝑾𝒆𝒃, 𝑩𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒌 𝑩𝒆𝒂𝒖𝒕𝒚, the Dr. Kildare and Nancy Drew character series - all of those early books whose words entered me and never left.

Did anyone participate in the summer read-a-thons? God, those were like heaven to me, a scheme really, getting people to pledge dimes and quarters for me to read, and even more so, a reason for Dad and me to go to the library.

I don’t know. I’m still working on actualizing/internalizing all of this.

But seeing it out there separated from me, that bound blue book with the little girl on the cover beneath a summer tree…I can’t help but think there are some words inside of it that never left me, or her, either.

October 4, 2022

I like walking in my neighborhood at dinnertime because it’s quiet – no dogs on leashes, no couples trying to get their steps in, no groups of neighborhood walkers in which I have yet to include myself or be included, no kids on bikes. Occasionally there’s that ardent runner and they are as disappointed to see me as I them. We respectfully ignore each other or give the obligatory slight wave or nod or grunt.

This particular night was quieter than usual, whispery and serene. The leaves were too wet to crunch beneath my footsteps, but how had so many of them fallen since I’d last walked, and why was it already so dark? I checked for the moon just in case he forgot his job. He hadn’t.

But the real delight in walking at dinnertime are those odoriferous wonders in the air –those dinnertime smells. I close my eyes to guess what's being prepared, what they’ve chosen to serve and gather around – waves of culinary sustainability and resolve wafting around me.

It stopped me in my tracks. I knew that I recognized the smell and it carried with it memory of days past. I stood still sniffing, remembering. 𝐼'𝑣𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑙 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟. The smell in the air was a memory – growing boys eating more than a meal’s worth of food at one sitting, me eating cereal over the sink because there was nothing left of the meal, cold winter nights, 𝑤𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑜, 𝑤𝑒’𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑒 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑢𝑝 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑒𝑎𝑡, shake shake shake and YES! It was Shake and Bake chicken baking and filling the air with my past. A time when my table was full and my kitchen loud.

I think I stood there for an uncomfortably long time, breathing it all in, 𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑏𝑎𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑙𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑐𝑘 𝑐𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑦 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒’𝑠 𝑑𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑘, 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑓𝑢𝑙 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑠, 𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 and finally walking again to smells of lasagna and apple crisp and what I believe was a decent nearly cooked pot roast.

I rounded the corner to a smell I could not identify for the life of me, maybe a roasting chicken with a rosemary sachet and browning potatoes, and I noticed how despairingly empty the streets were.

Now, I know I’m a hermit in general, and Covid and some underlying stuff have pretty much cancelled most gatherings for me, but wait a minute – what happened to early evening streets lined with cars and houses filled with (usually, mostly) women talking over wine and some product? Parties, maybe, we called them – a Tupperware party, a Mary Kay party, a Discovery Toy party, a Pampered Chef* party, and candle parties where everyone got dizzy either from the wine or from sniffing too many candles…what were they called…ah…yes…PartyLite.

What happened to party light? Houses were dimmed except for kitchens, and garages were shut tight for the night, no consultants were lugging their salesman bins, and no one was lining up their car behind their friends’ and there were no demonstrations to be seen through the bay windowed dining rooms and yeah it was dinnertime but wasn’t this also the bewitching hour for friends and their reasons to be together?

Did I get old? Did my neighborhood get old? Did my friends get old? Am I beyond having to wrangle between this and that or buying both? Am I beyond feeling guilty for having to say no I cannot host a party of my own? Am I beyond making a secret phone call asking permission almost to buy Tupperware at 20 because we are newly married and I don’t yet know the Tupperware rules or if I can delve singularly into the envelope I created marked “spending” in pencil in its top right corner? Am I beyond buying pink lipstick that frankly looks awful but I agree it’s perfect for that dab of color for the grocery store? Am I too old to buy those educational toys that guaranteed to make my toddlers smarter (is THAT how it happened?)? Am I too old to host? Am I that old lady who buys everything at your party because she can?

Was it Covid, was it the passage of time, was it a dwindling interest or did I simply stop getting invited to party light and wine or am I simply too old to shake and bake?

Where have all the parties gone?

September 27, 2022

I’m irrationally, hyperbolically, unequivocally terrified of spiders. I mean like not even staying in the same room on the same floor or even in the same house as they. I’m talking calling my Resident Spider Killer at work so that he can come home to exterminate so that I can reenter the house. I’m talking spraying spiders with extra hold hair spray (bought ONLY for this purpose) – spraying and spraying and spraying till they’re still and hardened and can be vacuumed or worse leaving them lacquered until they can be properly mutilated and discarded in layers and layers of whatever the killer needs to use. (Hint: be careful hardening the giant mouse-like spiders, the don’t fit into the vacuum’s narrow hose.)

That’s the premise.

When I lost my brother back in 2001, I began to respect life differently and tried with all of my might to not kill any bugs and even spiders. I’ve progressed over the years - if he (the spider) is not too huge (by the way, to me, all spiders are manipulative male psycho killer types except the obvious pregnant ones which are by virtue female and disgusting beyond words, but ok, omg their sacks…ugh…) I can even get a glass or something on top of him so he can await the return to the home front of the Resident Spider Killer who is now more like the Super Spider Saver…but yeah…I’ve come a long way and can even almost sleep in the same house even knowing there could be a spider or two waiting in the wings in the ever-as-scary basement.

However, there is one kind of spider, one above and beyond all others – the giant daddy long leg, or worse, the angle legged daddy long leg – that continues to tease and terrify me into an uncontrolled frenzy. I could die just typing this. I’m talking those ones whose diameter is that of a dart board; the ones that stealthily hang out on brick, on garages, on shingles, and worse, on plants.

This has hindered my love of gardening, although I am consistently hypervigilant and arriving to harvest with eagle eyes. (I can spot a spider anywhere.) This year, I have had these three amazing basil plants (and we all know that the daddy long legs much prefer bean plants) that produced buckets and buckets of basil. But about three weeks ago, while innocently plucking some leaves for dinner, I nearly brushed upon a GIANT hiding angle legged daddy long leg. Now, I did scream super loudly (no one came to help, for the record), but I tried to negotiate with him via a very long wooden dowel, twenty feet at least. I talked us through it, “OK, now, I just need a few more leaves for my pizza and I am not going to kill you because Tim died. You know this. I have spared so many of you whom would have otherwise been dead. You owe me this reciprocity. Think Charlotte, I told him. Or Wilbur.”  He stared at me with his defiant beady eyes and didn’t budge when I nudged him with my dowel. So I nudged some more. He crawled to the backside of the third bush, and I picked some leaves.

This dance went on with us for days, and I thought, see? I can be a grown up and so can he. And finally, the daily pole-nudge worked. He disappeared. I won. I conquered the spider! I could pick basil freely! This is my territory! We found our symbiosis! I grew just a little spider bit, once again!

An aside: proudly I have allowed a Charlotte-type spider to make her (yes, she’s a girl, see above *sack) home in the corner of our garage with words to the Resident Spider Killer like: I can’t be responsible for killing her babies, she’s mom, she’s not harming anyone, and her web really is a beautiful work of art – leave her alone.

All of this growth and generosity and what do I get????

This morning when I was attempting to hang a fall wreath on my front door, who was there on the threshold waiting with his eight angled legs (see leg chart below)?

Basil Boy, the mean manipulative multilegged monster, staring at me, just waiting for me to open the door – the door that’s miles away (or at least, I don’t know, far – kids – hasn’t one of you counted the steps from the backyard to the front door? Someone? Anyone? Bueller?) from the garden bed.

I know what you’re saying – how do you know it’s the same spider?

#1 – Duh.

#2 – I have photo evidence.

#3 – it doesn’t matter – you’ll never convince me otherwise (see manipulative in the dictionary).

Not only THAT, (yes, I had the Resident Spider Killer massacre him at lunchtime) but ANOTHER daddy long leg appeared later in the day when I went back out to place some pumpkins on the same porch area!

I was so angry (and frankly, hurt) that I got a broom and pushed him to his death, or maybe his death, because he’s a daddy long leg and I forgot that they crawl and live with one two three even six or seven of their legs missing and maybe this is why I am terrified because they crawl at you with their missing legs like a monster from a horror movie or worse sit with just a body after your brothers and neighborhood boys show you when you’re three four five years old how they can still crawl with six five four three two one legs until the beady body sits on your cement front steps and bakes in the sun staring straight up at you hoping you’ll save him but you’re terrifed he might attack you and you’re hesistant to help him knowing he’s probably going to die anyway but you’re not sure cuz you’re a little kid and big brothers and neighborhood boys should know better than to tease little girls with daddy long legs.

So I killed him. Leg by leg with a broom that still sits outside with its leg-spider-cooties. Seven six five four three two one…and he’s probably still a body waiting to come back to haunt me.

Basil anyone?

September 6, 2022

It's National Read a Book Day.

"I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all."

This quote is from a book that changed my life. I never realized until today how much of my life I have spent living it.

Thank you, JD Salinger.

September 5, 2022

Some decades ago, after Dad was gone, Mom began hosting a Labor Day picnic for those whom she referred to as “locals.”

“Just you locals,” she’d say, “I just want you to come and sit and eat and relax. I don’t want you to do a thing.”

Oh. The food. I cannot stress enough what an amazing cook Mom was; everything she touched turned into food gold. She always denied it, “No, Kate, you’re the cook, not me.”

HA! As if. (From whom did she think I learned?)

For me, it was an amazing day: Mom, Mom’s house, the arguments about the barbeque, the forgetting of the mushrooms (it was the end of the world, almost), the coolers, the soda cans, the lasagna, the hot plates, the extension cords, the giant coffee pot, the Twizzlers, the chips.

But it was so much more: her insistence that it was her treat, how she needed no help. She prepared for weeks, and from dawn to dusk that day was filled with work.

Over the years, the non-locals were included, and eventually we all pitched in and lent a hand because it became too much for her to do alone. It was ok because it was a team effort, and from dawn to way past dusk, we helped, we sat, we ate, we laughed, we cried, we cooked, we cleaned. We were one.

Mom is gone now, and Labor Day keeps reminding me of that -well – like clockwork. I miss her crepe-y arms sticking out of giant potholders as she carried a hot lasagna outside, I miss her ice cubes keeping the sour cream cold, I miss trying to keep my mouth shut while watching others cook meat in a way I never would, I miss the sound of the men paying football in the street, I miss her button down white cotton Liz Claiborne shirt, I miss her grumbling over the slightest imperfections, I miss the missing mushrooms, I miss helping, I miss being filled up, I miss my siblings, and I miss my brother who is with Mom and Dad in their new dimension.

Labor Day is “an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers.” (www.dol.gov)

Mom achieved a lot. Through her literal labor, she worked day and night to provide for the nine of us.

As I mixed my own family’s favorite salad in preparation for Labor Day weekend, I saw a tiny bit of crepe peeking up at me from beneath my worn black tee. I struggled to differentiate between labor and love.

Happy Love Day.

August 30, 2022

Stop by my Facebook page www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor to leave your favorite movie wrote on my August 23 post.

August 16, 2022

Sometimes when I enter my house or when I descend the stairs in the early mornings my house smells like my Aunt Mary’s.

It’s that kind of day.

I am pretty sure it’s coffee, but it’s specific – the smell of coffee brewed in a small percolator-style coffee pot whose coffee is then reheated throughout the day on a gas burner in a saucepan. THAT kind of coffee smell. There’s an oldness to the odor, a nostalgic smell of lingering baked something – turkey dinner, baked bread – something burned off of something and gone.

I poured my coffee, sat on my deck, and listened to the sounds awakening – bugs, birds, bees, chipmunks, squirrels, each like gentle alarm clocks.

A few days ago I encountered my first katydid, a giant green delicate beetle, with antennae three times her size. I discovered that it was she who made one of my favorite summer sounds, an evening lullaby. I guess you’re never too old to learn.

It got me thinking about how the senses and memory and experience are so connected: the smell of freedom and relief when the airplane’s cabin door opens to the warmth of vacation, the smell of fallen leaves signaling autumn, the smell of my dog Yoga’s paws; “Stone in Love” when I was stone in love, my best friend telling me the song “You're My Best Friend” reminded her of someone special and it wasn’t me, the sound of the garage going up telling me one of my kids is home, that terrible telephone alarm ringing its bad news, a cat’s purr; that first bite of Thanksgiving dinner, Mom’s lasagna and how it tasted like love, a NYC hot dog, fried dough; a sunset, a newborn, a drive by a childhood home, the first falling snowflake of the season, a first step; a plunge into a pool, velvet and fur, a caught football, a bath, intellectual immersion, skin on skin.

I thought about sensual combination platters like the warmth and feel of the sun and the sounds of summer, finding and picking its blueberries, sampling some along the way home, hearing Mom greeting me while holding the screen door open, watching her make muffins, the fresh baked aroma, the savoring, licking the hot goo off of still sandy fingers.

So maybe it was more than the smell of coffee that lingered when I walked down my stairs to the smell of Aunt Mary’s house. Maybe it was the cells' lovely way of capturing and coding for us days past. Maybe it was a reminder to open my senses and sit in memory.

I had a date in college; we were tooling around my hometown and I mentioned my Aunt Mary.

“I have an Aunt Mary,” he said. “Everyone has an Aunt Mary.”

He was right. Even if there’s no actual aunt, in some ways we all have that memory – that smell or taste or touch or sound or feel or sight we will never forget.

August 9, 2022

Two score and two years ago a classmate walked down the aisle to take his seat in front of me.

“Hi! How are you?” I asked as he placed his books on his desk.

“Do you really care? Do you really want to know? Or are you just saying that because that’s what people say. Most people really don’t care,” he said.

𝑮𝒆𝒆𝒔𝒉.

“I do care,” I said, “that’s why I asked.”

“Fine,” he answered, and took his seat.

I’d admired his honesty and his halting of my perhaps Pavlovian question, even if I had been sincere. I should have gotten the hint then, since he hadn’t seemed to care how I was that day, but instead, months later, I asked him to a Sadie Hawkins dance and was denied.**

Easy come easy go - or maybe - the bigger they are the harder they fall.

Regardless of my teenaged heartbreak, what he said has stuck with me for decades, and I evaluate my own sincerity every time the words come out of my mouth.

𝑯𝒐𝒘 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖?

Often, I wonder, do others mean it, too? Or are they just posturing in the way they have been trained?

There are many who truly care, I know that, and I thank you. (For that special someone who asked how I was in the middle of a random text late the other evening, thanks, and you’ve inspired this purge with your interjected sincerity.I can tag you if you'd like!)

But I do find my own feet stuck in the mud when answering even their simple question, “How are you?” At times, it’s rocky. And if it is, should I lie and tell them all is well, I am great, and yes! there is a tooth fairy? (I do believe in Santa Claus, so don’t ruin it for me.)

Does anyone really want to know the truth if the reality is that the visit or event or personal goal or job went awry or that the perceived perfection isn’t perfect at all but that vaults of steel have sprung around it all shielding anyone from penetrating the armor and if you ever dared to respond to anything in an imperfect way it would be back on you so fast and hard pinning YOU the imperfect and incapable one and thus blamed, judged, or disgustingly pitied?

𝑻𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒂 𝒅𝒆𝒆𝒑 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉.

Sometimes connections are just too far gone. Days go by and the daily drives wedges between familiarity. Sometimes distance pushes others away. Sometimes you don’t hug your kids for over a year. Sometimes pandemics happen and even the CDC can’t decide what is the right kind of space to be in.*

Truth is, no one wants to know how grown apart the person in front of you and you have become, so you ask and you answer.

“How are you?”

“Great! You?”

Maybe that guy from high school was right. Maybe we shouldn’t ask if we don’t want to know how someone REALLY is. Or perhaps we should be willing to lend a non-judgmental ear and remember that distance in any form can breed unfamiliarity, and that very unfamiliarity can turn out to be a stranger we have never met. Maybe, if you mean it, ask that familiar stranger how they are. Otherwise, perhaps we have no business being in their life if we can’t hack their truth.

So if and when I ask, “How are you?” know that you don’t have to lie.

*Respect health. It’s fleeting, dying, and stealthy.

**The reason given to me for the denial to the dance was because he said he was waiting for someone else to ask him. She did, as far as I can remember, and he went. I’d have gone with her, too. But I also would have gone with me.

The reason his friend gave me (as an added bonus!) for his denial to the dance had to do with my body in a negative way. I never forgave either of them for the wreckage they left. However, one of them was domestically violent, ended up in jail, and is prematurely deceased. That’s hearsay.

Addendum:

While reloading on caffeine in the kitchen while wrangling with this post, my person asked what it was about.

"Oh," he said, "like 'The Late Show' by Jackson Browne."

He listens. He cares. He nailed it.

I'd never heard the song before, but the lyrics are brilliant. Couldn't have said it better myself, and didn't.

August 2, 2022

Recently, author #Wally Lamb posted this:

"Writing is just like reading except the book is trying to kill you."

~ Lauren DeStefano

It’s very true, and totally describes my relationship with writing. It’s work – hard work – work that needs time and breathing space. It’s work that needs both lucid creativity and undivided attention when editing and proofreading. It’s always both sides of the spectrum, a see-saw of imagination and reality.

It’s art. It’s lonely. There are no work mates, no lunchroom, no happy hours, no bouncing off of ideas, no promotions. There are no scheduled hours, breaks, sick days, vacation. There’s just this weight on the right side of the brain, this gnawing to motivate, a yearning for a finished product.

But then what? So you’ve written nine thousand pages or painted one hundred paintings or written five hundred songs. If no one sees or hears them, do they matter? How is art measured?

How is success measured? Money? Happiness? Do artists have to settle? If artwork is not monetized, is it a waste of time?

All these questions keep me wondering why…why create at all?

For me, the love-hate relationship isn’t a choice, but a necessity. I cannot imagine not having words or the way they string together to form sentences of thought and intention and idea. I cannot imagine not having lyrics to listen to, music to move me, paintings to peruse, photos to ponder upon, cuisine to savor, statues of stone, patchwork quilts.

Author Stephen King said, “Life isn’t a support system for art; it’s the other way around.”

Oh…and Misery loves company.

ps thanks Keith Rose for the editorial input!

July 26, 2022

My brain and body are on a sumptuous staycation, so I offer this stream of summer…

…Fourth of July celebrations with giant watermelons and sparklers and punks…my Uncle Bub burning the hell out of the chicken on the barbeque and the char of it all tasting like heaven…bullfrogs and blueberries…blowing whistles through crab grass…riding my refurbished bike with banana handlebars and streamers and a horn, headlight, and side view mirrors from morning till night…chasing the mosquito smoker truck and getting lost in its thick white cloud…sitting on the front steps…walks with Mom and Dad "just around the perimeter, Schnapps"…hanging siding with Mom and Dad, in fact, most house chores with Mom and Dad…sleeping late…staying up late…music from the headphones…sleeping on the living room floor with the screen door wide open for air…Twizzlers and giant Pixie Stix…parades…boys…kick the can after dark…the hill…the woods...Sun-In to bleach my hair and sunbathing…no school no homework no bullies no uniform no nuns…mini golf for free cuz I got A’s…first time seeing the ocean and eating Chinese…rides downtown to check the progress of the arterial…tagging along when Dad drove Nana home lying on the backseat of the car with the windows wide open watching streetlights go by…daddy long legs…fireflies...June bugs...walking to Colonie Center and The Village Pharmacy and the green stamp redemption center…giant ice cream cones in Galway…swimming in our neighbor’s pool…movies and Twilight Zone till 3AM…waiting for Aunt Mary who owned the family’s first air conditioned car to drive up... (OG)

…kiddie pools and Grafton and Milton and park pools…Lake George always in the rain…jumping over waves on Long Island…picnics with McDonald’s…drives to nowhere…games at Old Heritage…Kurvers and L-Ken’s…Grand Cayman…regents exams…last days at Holy Cross in the parking lot with moms…skateboards bikes and scooters…fairs…graduations and parties…sleepovers...the Great Escape…Colonial Hills hangs and the kids playing dawn to dusk...deck wine…movies...staying up late and sleeping in…countdowns hanging in the mudroom…TV…coffee mornings on the deck…attempting to see fireworks…gardening…. (KT2)

Maybe memory is simply perspective.

July 19, 2022 Rainy Days and Mondays

Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, it would rain. As a kid, this meant that there would be no loud sound of the lawn mower outside my bedroom window at whatever ludicrous time my dad thought it reasonable to begin this Saturday routine. (So grateful for unborn weed whackers; he would have whacked all day every day.)

And when it rained, there seemed to be some sort of unspoken reprieve of sorts, some invitation to let go of regiment, an excuse to let go and breathe. The house itself seemed a little bit relaxed, a little less stressed, a giant umbrella shielding us from ingrained obligation.

With silence as its background, the rain’s din lulled me back to sleep.

If I were lucky, it would rain all day, and when I finally emerged from my room Dad would be sitting in his chair reading, a side light illuminating the pages. Mom may be knitting or preparing some amazing meal she’d craft to slow-cook the day away.

“Whatcha studying?” Dad may have asked, which really meant was I actually sleeping that long (lazy), reading (acceptable, and if so, what?), or for what subject was I perfecting my grade by using the rain-hours by actually studying (admirable, yet adamantly demanded)? For me, it was always a cocktail of the three: some deliciously sleepily perfected rain-induced preteen or teenaged coma, wherein sleeping, reading, and elevating my grades seemed like a choice and not an expectation.

Sleeping was luxurious and warm. Perfecting the grades was easy. But the reading…

Oh…the reading. A dark rainy Saturday morning was the most brilliant invitation to be lost inside someone else’s words and world for as long as it lasted. And there were the best books back then (middle school and young adult, I suppose)– not too long, a beginning middle and ending that could be finished in a day.

Perfection.

Yesterday morning was such a day. I awakened sleepily to a dark room with rain as the backdrop. I breathed in, held my breath, and exhaled for 4, 7, 8 seconds like my son suggested I do. (Or maybe it was supposed to be 7, 4, 8…anyway, I am still breathing.) Besides the sleeping cat beside me, I was alone. One text awaited, the one telling me I would continue to be alone.

I remembered.

I grabbed my iPad as soon as I could and opened my Kindle. And I read. But I did something even more self-serving - I read something I wanted to read - not something I had to read, or wanted to read because I was supposed to read it or expected to have already read it, not news, not emails, not trade journals or websites with instructions on how to be better. I didn’t read a book club book or a borrowed or recommended book. I READ A BOOK THAT I WANTED TO READ WHILE LYING IN BED IN A PRETEEN OR TEENAGED COMA. It felt as indulgent as eating forty noncaloric cheesecakes in a me-sized and designed soundproof closet with a variable volumed rain backdrop. It felt like love.

The expected happened. Some pages in, perhaps three quarters of an hour at best, the cat clawed, the bedroom door opened, the house phone rang, the work from home people began (as if cued) to make their work from home noises, I fought resentment, my caffeine addiction justified all of the interruptions by walking my reluctant legs to the kitchen to pour coffee, and I crawled back in bed in an attempt to continue or maybe recreate the heaven I had been in. But it was like a dream. You know, those ones that are so good and you awaken just as they get amazing and you try to lull yourself back into delirium but yeah, you’re awake, telling yourself it’s over, and you’re feeling sad for your own state of subconsciousness and regretful that there’s no way to actually recreate the dream in real time? Yeah. That one.

I’m trying to be a half-full person with my half-empty coffee cup, now writing this (or then writing this since I wrote it post-delerium post-interruption yesterday), but the rain has ceased. My phone is vibrating, a setting that seems more gentle than tones, but it’s vibrating nearly non-stop. Also, it’s flashing with a vehement beam, a silent setting my son (the breathing son from above) finagled so that during meetings or times away from the kids I could still see a text come through with no noise or vibration. It’s electronic lightning. Ring (the security thingie) is vibrating, which could mean either a burglar is entering its eye, or maybe just a bee or a wasp mistaking the bulbous nest-like camera for potential safety. Or love.

Thank you rain. Thank you respite. Thank you darkness and silence. Thank you memory. Thank you Nick Hornby* for hanging with my former coma-self, my authentic self, whom I rarely see but whom I remembered briefly in a dream delirium of words and comfort in a bed next to a cat for perhaps a quarter of one hour with only the rain as the soundtrack. I have missed you.

• @Nick Hornby

• #Nickhornby

*Nick Hornby is a British novelist, screenwriter, and essayist known for his sharply comedic, pop-culture-drenched depictions of dissatisfied adulthood as well as for his music and literary criticism. Hornby’s novelistic tone combines the reflexive irony and self-deprecation of his often-floundering protagonists with a buoyant belief in the redemptive power of art (especially music) and of human contact. (Reasons to read him.)

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nick-Hornby

July 12, 2022

For years and years and years and years and years, I struggled to write. Even as these minutes pass, I struggle.

Decades ago, a mom of a best friend gave me some great advice.
“When you’re moving the toaster to clean behind it,” she said, “it’s time to write.” With toddlers clinging to my legs, I knew she knew something I didn’t know yet, and I trusted her. She was a mom, too, and a writer challenged by babies and time.

Not long after her passing, her daughter gifted me one of her writer’s books, 𝑨 𝑾𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓'𝒔 𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒐𝒇 𝑫𝒂𝒚𝒔. It was filled with writing advice and daily prompts, and bookmarked with a lovely note of encouragement and sentiment from her daughter, both of which have never waned.

There are times when the right words cannot be found, when feelings cannot be fathomed, when the necessary presence of mind is absent, when squeezing out enough minutes strung together is an impossibility, and inevitably I find myself cleaning behind the toaster. I smile every time I wipe the crumbs, remembering her non-judgmental annual question, “How’s the writing?” It was rhetorical, mostly, a pat on the back, although she was always willing to listen to my struggles and worries. She knew.

Another producer friend (and husband of another bestie) was more direct, “When the hell are you going to hire some help and spend your time writing?” It took me decades (like until the pandemic when I was at-home-hired as a document/mail clerk to help keep a law firm afloat) to fully grasp how spot-on he was about the usage of time. No regrets, really, just awareness.

I mourn the ability to tell them both how right they were.

Throughout the pandemic when my agent was attempting to sell 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆, I got a bit insecure about the authenticity of being a writer. Yes, only I could doubt the label while having a novel shopped around.

But then I attended a Masterclass (I know it sounds corny, but I could not escape my intrigue) given by author Judy Blume.
In those dark days of doom and despair, both globally and in my writer’s psyche, she brought a beam of light. Her writing process sounded strangely familiar, scribbles here and there, sentences that had yet held meaning, notebooks filled with scenes and ideas and characters and their traits and troubles. Nowhere was there an outline or a beginning, middle, and end. There was no rule book, just words and the will to write them.

It gave me a sense of relief to know that it was OK to be unconventional, OK to attempt to understand that things happen in their own time, OK to simply love words and try and try again to string them together.

All this to say what? Inspiration and encouragement come in many shapes and sizes: sometimes it’s an author or their Masterclass, a pandemic, a best friend, or a book. And sometimes, the Garden State Parkway in the state of New Jersey reminds you.

July 4, 2022

Happy Fourth of July!!!!!

I’ve always had a penchant for birthdays.

I love the ones with double meanings: me born on Dad’s; me having two sons on the same day; two daughters three days apart (I tried to hold her in!); neighbors on the same day, two of their siblings one day apart; a brother born on Mother’s Day; my sister’s children born sequentially (like 3/4,5/6, etc); a sister born same day, different month; Halloween husbands and the best dog ever born on the 4th of July, holiday birthdays; palindrome birthdays, repetitive birthdays like 8/8/88.

Growing up, we were allowed to choose a special meal and cake - Dad paid for it, and Mom made it happen for us. These were days of abundance and opulence, food being a way we showed and received love, and we all chose the best foods, taking full advantage of these opportunities! Roasts of beef, lasagnas with sausages and meatballs on the side, chicken ala king, waffles with cucumbers, Carrol’s cheeseburgers by the dozens and small French fries, anything you asked for!

Mom made spectacular cakes – Boston cream, lemon on lemon, angel food stuffed with strawberries and whipped cream, German chocolate with butter pecan filling and frosting, applesauce cake with cream cheese icing, and sometimes the simple and dependable chocolate over gold (two 9x12’s). These were days of love and security.

I don’t remember the gifts too much because it was the comradery, the people, the celebrations which mattered most.

I carried on (with the help of my husband) the same tradition for my family, and added on a few touches: bedrooms filled with balloons overnight, specially themed tableware and decorations, a whole day to celebrate called “your special day.” I hope they felt loved.

I remember the Bicentennial well, America’s 200th birthday. There was an enormous parade down Wolf Road with elephants and marching firehouse brothers. Cars were filled with waving neighbors – auxiliary members of something or other. Horns blasted and bands boomed. I remember really wanting one of those unaffordable double filled balloons, the ones with the character inside the balloon, but quickly forgot about that fleeting desire after being given cotton candy and a free fag to wave at the parade participants.

Cotton candy, a flag, and a parade – what more could I ever have wanted?

I wish it were that simple. As life goes on and birthdays pass, things complicate. Lives are lost and traditions become memories.

America has changed a lot since 1976. Her life seemed simpler then, when parades and special meals brought happiness and love.

I don’t mean to seem cynical, but it seems to me that lately America’s babies are bucking her traditions and testing her patience. Maybe we should be grateful that she was born. I know that I would like to remember her birthday, and celebrate it simply with love, sing to her, for her, wave her flag, say thank you, fill a room with balloons and maybe not argue with her for at least a day. As our mother country, I bet she’d like that.

Happy birthday, America!

Don’t forget to visit my Facebook page to view the photos associated with these blogs. Follow and like me while you’re there!

www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor

June 28, 2022

A handful of years ago, I read an article about serial killers, and one of the tell-tale characteristics they all shared was that they displayed no family pictures in their homes.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am horrible with pictures – taking them, developing them, or putting them on whatever those things are called and plugging them into some dime store’s (I mean to say Walgreens, Target, Walmart, etc) something machine, or uploading and downloading or maybe it’s the other way around and printing and picking up from above dime store. Oh, and that part about giving them to people or framing them or organizing them in albums or boxes…yeah…forget about it.

At that time, I had looked around, prematurely alerted my husband that his life could be in danger, and searched my walls for family pictures. I was convinced I had none hung, but I found a framed wedding photo of my son and me that he had given me as a gift on a shelf overlooking the piano that has fallen silent. I found a small area in the dining room decorated with a collection of kids, whew. But that all seemed sparse and too close to call.

Quickly, I unearthed a portrait package of the kids, a gift from them to my husband circa who knows when. Immediately, I hung the BIG portrait, which could easily have been the free one you get when you spend $95.00 on the other seven bad ones, except as I was hanging it, I remembered that we all hated the free giant one and paid $65.00 extra for this montaged piece. Over it I hung a rectangular wood inscription which aided in evening out the fact that the montage family was hung too low. Above the family it reads, “These are a few of my favorite things.”

I was no longer a suspicious suspect. I did come to the realization that, as with all or most things in my life, I hang just what I feel. (This is the character trait I love most about myself but find that it is most detrimental to just about everything and everyone else, alas.)

Anyway, all this to show you my office walls! There was a time when old album jackets hung, ones whose content provided writing inspiration, with 12x12 corkboard in between them, like a checkerboard. I loved that wall, but I outgrew it suddenly one summer day – the same day I discovered that they lied when they said that that double sided stuff didn’t cause damage. This is true if you’d planned on replacing the wallboard at the same time as removing the adhesive, just saying. (My dad was right about walls and adhesives, he who never allowed scotch tape on walls, he who masterfully hung all of my teenaged posters with a level and teeny tiny matching white-headed thumbtacks.)

Anyway, here’s the walls within I wrote these words. May you find unsuspecting inspiration.

PS For the record, during pandemic I did manage to print 4,000 photos and put them in plastic boxes bought for me by my wonderful sister for such use, many thanks! Progress!

June 21, 2022

FATHER'S DAY. I know I am late to the party. But so is Dad – he hasn’t shown up for the past 39 years.

The first Father’s Day without him was weird, rough, and silent. I bought him a card out of habit, filled it out, left it by his gravestone, and swung back around to put it in my trunk before even leaving the cemetery. It’s in a box in the basement. It has a turtle on the front. Slow poke.

For three days now, I have read on Facebook about how amazing everyone’s fathers are, or their husbands (even mine), or their sons (even mine). And I ask – was my father wonderful? (Of course.) But what would I say about him if I had to post it on Facebook?

Dad – you were an enigma.

Dad was an enigma. None of us – none of the seven of us kids, his kids – is really positive of what his name was. Sometimes it was an initial followed by a full name, or an initial followed by a shortened version of the full name, sometimes both full names, sometimes the second full name followed by the first initial, and the tricky one – both full names inverted. I don’t even know if Dad knew what his name was.

His mother and sister called him the shortened version of the second name, and that’s how he introduced himself (it appeared consistently inconsistent on various legal documents), and I can still hear him answering his office phone so dignified and assured, indeed, the shortened version of the second name, followed by our last name.

No one was allowed to bother Dad at work, but I did, I gave myself permission, risking the rule. Was the rule even set by him? I don’t know. I broke it anyway. I called only in extreme matters of emergency, “Dad, Mom has a migraine and cannot cook us dinner. Shall I cook, or do you have to take us to Lum’s?” I was concerned. I cannot remember why else I called him, but I did so just to hear his voice. I am grateful that I can still hear it.

Dad smelled like an office and yelled about everything, even when his worry lines lifted in some show of approval. The black and white photos of him look like James Dean, but the guy I knew was ancient, well into his forties, early fifties, and then he vanished. He was probably handsome (women we ran into seemed to think so), he could dance, sing, play the trumpet, cook, and was well read. He loved movies. He loved wine but couldn’t drink it, he loved cigarettes but couldn’t smoke them, he loved food and consistently worked it off with exercise. Hand grippers sunk alongside his chair cushion, and he threw punches in gloved hands when he thought that no one was looking. He loved Mom.

So, I don’t know what I would post about him, probably nothing. He’d hate anyone knowing anything about him. I guess I broke another rule.

I visited the cemetery yesterday and cried probably the hardest I ever cried over his Father's Day no-show. I got upset because he didn’t know my kids. I told him all about them like a Facebook post. He would think that they were cool. He would love listening to them. He would argue everything. He would smile after they left. He would fix his glasses on his face as if reconfiguring the emotions he was trying to hide.

I tried to dig out his footplate with my bare hands, regretting not having the proper tools in my car, and busting a bunch of fingernails. He’d yell about my dirty fingernails and wonder how anyone could leave the house without the proper cemetery tools, especially knowing they were cemetery bound. Touché. I fixed the fake flowers we’d set in the ground that had been ravaged by the wind. I pulled some weeds and dusted off some dead grass clippings from the base of his stone. I looked for his veteran’s flag and only found shreds of red white and blue fabric decimated by a careless weed whacker. (Note to cemetery weedsmen: don’t whack the flags, there’s an amendment that protects it and it’s a crime to destroy it, but yeah, just that).

I heard Dad ask me (or did I ask myself?) why I hadn’t extra flags in the car just in case random cemetery workers whacked his, or someone else’s (civic responsibility), and I smiled because we were the same person at that very moment – asking and knowing and kinda mad at our collective selves for not being cemetery-ready. (My sister, I won’t say which one, would have been; all due gratefulness and much respect.)

I read his name again, carved in stone - initial, shortened version of second name - and asked him aloud, “Who are you?”

June 14, 2022 Happy b-day, you know who(s)

Let’s talk Juneteenth.

The word itself is a marriage of June and nineteenth. But here’s the deal: President Lincoln declared an end to slavery on January 1,1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation, which feels positive, life-changing, and glorious, right? However, in reality, the Civil War was raging and it took over TWO YEARS for federal troops to reach Galveston, Texas to free the last of the enslaved people. That day was June 19, 1865. It took an additional 156 years for June 19 – Juneteenth - to become a federal holiday.

Big sigh.

To my shame, or perhaps to those before me, I didn’t know anything about Juneteenth growing up. I didn’t read or watch "Roots" until after I was married (thanks to my then-progressive spouse). So I started thinking, and maybe this is ignorant of me, but I started thinking about how I could help the Juneteenth cause, in some small way, in the tiniest of ways, any way I could, for today, and maybe for forever.

One small way I can contribute is by sharing some works that have changed me in profound ways:

"Roots" by Alex Haley

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker

"If Beale Street Could" Talk by James Baldwin

"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett… because we all need it.

Many of these are Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winners. That’s cool.

My friend, Hal Tulchin, got the Juneteenth memo over 50 years ago, filming what he called black Woodstock. He was turned away again and again, until finally, posthumously, his footage made it to a film called "Summer of Soul," an Oscar and Grammy award winner.

Not that awards matter, but BEING SEEN DOES.

Red is the celebratory color of Juneteenth; it stands for sacrifice and transition. According to my research, red velvet cake, watermelon, red drinks and barbequed meats are foods used to help celebrate Juneteenth, along with collard greens and cornbread and bountiful foods symbolizing health and wealth. But my son-in-law says it’s all about family – just the being together and celebrating. The gift of time, the giving to the cause.

I hope I help in small ways, even seemingly meaningless ways, but I think maybe it’s one step at time.

Once upon a time there was a man-boy, a friend of a friend, whom I watched across a table over ballooned giant-glassed drinks command the table with his intelligent wit and confident charm. That day was June 19 - Juneteenth of 1983. I married him a little over two years later. We put down roots (and "Roots"), we made babies, and they made babies of all shapes and colors.

Do something small and maybe it will become huge.

June 7, 2022

Glass Frogs

Thin skinned.

Translucent like a glass frog,

Internal organs visible -

Pumping heart, swollen stomach.

Skin of seeds, external ovum

Like a strawberry,

Burst into life, sucked,

Confected onto shortcake.

Peaches wrapped in tissue paper

Protected from people’s push

People’s pull, and then

Damaged, discarded, cobbler-ed.

Voices ricocheting:

“Don’t take everything so personally…

Lighten up… chill out… relax…

You need a thicker skin.”

Frogs breathe through theirs.

Thin skin allows feelings. It allows permeation of compassion and distribution of empathy. It allows creativity and seconds (hours!) spent saying hi or how are you and meaning it. It allows depths of wonder and want of understanding and endless words in every format.

Thin skin. Ricocheted voices do not need it in order to do all of these things, granted. Have at it.

But me? I’ll breathe like glass frogs.

May 31, 2022

I’ve gotten pretty down lately (and by lately, I mean since March 8 about the local bookstores not carrying my book. I was disappointed beyond belief, it was part of the dream – seeing my book on a shelf somewhere. Anywhere. It remains almost embarrassing because I don’t always have all of the answers, all of the reasons why, at my fingertips.

I did my part, as did my book’s publicist, so I really don’t know what happened. I know the reasons I was given – corporate NY has to order the book or a store manager needs to request it, no one is reading, no one is shopping in-store, most people download on Kindle, there’s only premium shelf space allowed on shelves for known authors, but what about the local sections?

I don’t know. I did what I could – I called, I went in several times, I left press kits – I did my part (see my "Death of a Salesman" post from February 8.

"Death of a Salesman" seems to have turned more into "The Glass Menagerie" for me, perfect glass figurines awaiting and realizing their fate. I guess the supposed glamorous life of an author is an earned commodity like everything else, and one to which I am not yet privy. (And by glamorous I mean having a book on a shelf.)

I’m so tragic today. It’s OK.

I looked around this morning as I was on the phone with a friend from my deck, glancing at and thinking about a piece of editing, pouting about my book not being on shelves.

And then I remembered to remember May again. And on this last day of this favorite month of mine, I considered the juxtaposition of NOT seeing my book on shelves vs what I saw and what I remembered from May.

I saw happy faces this month – outdoor family visits and proms and good news shared. I saw faces of students doing their best to hear me. The pitter patter of tiny feet ran through my house, a long Covid-awaited tap-tap.

I saw cottonwood snow in the air and along the edges of roads and sidewalks. I saw lilacs bloomed and flowers and flags set before gravestones. I saw maple-seed helicopters fly through the air, gathered by the handful and thrown by giggling grandchildren. Seedlings awaited their homes in my garden beds. My inbox filled with inquiries and compliments about the book and a video of a grandson who said "cat." Clover grew by the bucketful so bees could be bees. I stepped over and over ant villages, tunnels of life. Sweet Kate opened and closed daily like sunrise and sunset.

And before me I saw a mug, still half empty, and still half full.

May 24, 2022

Angry cleaning. You know, when you get so mad at whatever or whomever over a comment or a changed decision or an unheard sentence or a human freight train (or one freight train filled with multiple humans?) that you clean like the Tasmanian Devil? (Is he trademarked? Do I owe someone money for saying that? I shall never tire of my own copyright jokes that nobody but me gets.)

Anyway. Recently, both of my daughters, independently, spoke of this angry cleaning phenomena. My friend spoke of it earlier today, “Best time to clean,” he said.

But I wonder, what’s the cost?

The angry clean is a stiff shot of adrenaline, not unlike two extra shots of espresso from Starbucks. It’s two Hershey bars in a row, a mad dog or rock dog or star dog or whatever those cans of liquid energy are called. Angry cleaning is a rocket blastoff of “OH YEAH? TAKE THIS!”

But as I was embarking on today’s angry clean, I paused for some real energy, some Mush. (FYI, see pix below, it’s insane delicious, especially the coffee coconut and vanilla bean flavors, who has time for fruit flavors…?) Anyway, I peeled back its plastic topper, on which read some inspiration – Mush provides fortunes like fortune cookies, but overnight oat style.

Oddly, or poignantly, mine said this: “You are what you repeat.”

Man, was my Mush MOCKING me?

But then I thought about it. Mush is right. If I keep repeating the angry clean, then I get a clean house (or car or manicured lawn or garden or whatever).

But where am I?

It’s cool if you find solace or satisfaction in the angry clean’s result, but does it speak to the issue? Are you any further ahead? It seems self-deprecating to me though, because yeah maybe the goal will be accomplished but my stance may be under rug swept. (Insert copyright joke from above, please.)

I wonder, at what cost, do we provide for others a desired result but lose that adamant kicker and screamer who hopped to perfect the angry clean to begin with?

Maybe Mush is right. You are what you repeat.

Don’t forget to rinse and swallow.

May 8, 2022

Ahhhhhh! It’s me!

https://www.timesunion.com/books/article/A-writer-by-any-other-name-17145573.php?fbclid=IwAR0QIwzRyv6UCRpc3Akv_ZBFR_RHxcyEfOi4Ut5vH6_3CyGxmK5lq3ltEl8

May 3, 2022

This wasn’t even what I had prepared to post today, but overnight I awakened remembering melanoma awareness month, and how May stealthily appeared and seems to be falling through my fingertips already.

So in an effort to honor May and to be all inclusive, I asked Google what May was known for, surely not just melanoma and moms (huge weights on me, perhaps in balanced doses),

and I even began to list them for you all to read here, somehow feeling as if I had a need to become the May awareness information portal for everyone who sees this (shout out to my Fan Base 54 and to those of you who actually read these).

But instead, I got really overwhelmed and worried that I might miss someone or something, so I ended up taking some really crude computer photographs of lists for you all to read (below). And even these lists miss things like May Day and Lei Day, Cinco de Mayo and Memorial Day.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all about mental health awareness, asparagus, strokes, barbeques, bikes and perfect posture (as seen on photos below).

But for me…

May smells like lilacs that as a child were picked and brought to the feet of the Blessed Mother at school for as long as they blossomed, and at month’s end, there was a May Crowning in which the court (eight or ten popular eighth grade girls) processed in floor length dresses to crown Our Lady with a wreath of flowers; May smells like those same lilacs cut and bunched and wrapped in wet paper towels and tin foil handed to me by Mom (alas, where have all the lilacs gone?); May is wonder and field trips and First Communions and sometimes proms and graduations; May is a tragedy - something I will never forget, something I feel as if I almost embody sometimes, the visions and memories of youth, of you, you know who you are, and you are so brave; May is Mother’s Day (Mom hated it, but I tried to honor her and ignore her steadily on our love tightrope); May is birthdays for my brother and his wife, a nephew in law, my mother in law (that’s the first time I have said that, for the record); my beautiful nieces made me an aunt in May; and rainy and cold Memorial Day picnics pre-pandemic.

And finally, in May I celebrate the kitties that we love – Tatum (today!) and Dakota (the 28th!).

Happy May! Aloha!

(and please wear your sunscreen)

April 26, 2022

The Brooklyn Public Library has launched their #BooksUnbanned initiative, which allows teens who live anywhere in the country to obtain a Brooklyn library card which provides to them free access to their entire collection of ebooks and audiobooks.

Neat, huh? I wish I were a teenager again!

This got me obsessing over lists and lists of books that were either banned or challenged.

Here’s a few that caught my eye:

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou (me too!)

"The Hate You Give" by Angie Thomas (on my wish list)

"The Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger (ahh, the stream of consciousness...)

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer (amazing perspective on 911)

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker (an eye-opening journey!)

"The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins (family bonding beach reading for us!)

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky (a beautiful book and movie)

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (seemingly ubiquitous fave)

"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck (old school, still stands)

"The Holy Bible" (what to say?)

"Goosebumps" (series) by R.L. Stine (eek!)

"Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank (life changing game changing read especially as a seventh grader)

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess (others express themselves differently?)

"A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway (wish list)

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain (tenth grade opener)

"Thirteen Reasons Why" by Jay Asher (great parallel read with a teen)

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" by Ken Kesey (Nurse Ratched, 'nuff said)

There are so, so, many more - you'd be astounded by the volume, which leaves me with some final thoughts:

- Thank you Brooklyn Public Library.

- Thank you advocates and writers.

- I wonder, have any of your favorites been banned?

and

- Hey – My Book Club (we need an official name) – let’s read some banned books!

April 21, 2022

I've been thinking lately (apparently too much) about writer’s block again. For me, it’s such a misnomer. People love to label me with it, like it’s some common rite of passage that they are privy to, or as if they are giving me an out if I haven’t been prolific.

In truth, I have lifer’s block. You know – that thing called LIFE, common to us all, kind of gets in the way of writing for pretty enormous blocks of time.

Sometimes it’s thoughts, a worry or an apprehension, or stress over health (mine or someone else’s); or an event like a holiday or a wedding or even tons of simple errands stacked up and saved which then can become nearly too overwhelming to check off; even emotions like sadness or anger; or fatigue; or meetings and publicity work; or all of those house projects that await someone’s attention - eyes staring as if alive; or simply the daily chores of my existence – cleaning, groceries, cooking, correspondence, routine appointments, exercise, showering (huh?), even caring for the cats, talking to and visiting the kids or siblings or friends or babysitting the grandkids, or gasp – God forbid - spending time relaxing alone or with my husband.

So yeah, maybe I yearn for a deeper look behind labels. Or maybe just throwing them out altogether and recycling their contents into something more gentle would be a kinder way to see others.

What do I know?

label

verb 1 label each jar with the date: tag, attach labels to, put labels on, tab, ticket, stamp, mark, put stickers on, docket, flag.2 tests that will label him as an underachiever | he'll always be labeled “bluesman”: categorize, classify, class, characterize, describe, designate, identify; mark, stamp, pronounce,

brand, condemn, pigeonhole, stereotype, typecast, compartmentalize, typify; call, name, term, dub, nickname.

Gosh, even the dictionary uses “categorize” and “condemn” in the same sentence.

These are the things with which blocks are made.

April 14, 2022

Hormones and Hypertension 

Clearly, I have turned into my mother - specifically, Holiday Mom.

I remember her tired, worried face, her cutting up endless food: chicken for salad, mountains of celery, olives, eggs, potatoes, cherries, peaches, grapes, and melon (with the baller, perfectly round melon balls).

I remember arriving at her house and her monologue: "Don't look at me, I've got the old bra on and the old shirt. You can see right through it." You could. Her arms had turned crepey and her hands were weathered by years and years of washing dishes. She left the kitchen late and arrived to it early, rubbing lotion into her dry hands and massaging her sore fingers, wrists, elbows...

I remember her taking on too much: deciding at last minutes that there wasn’t enough food and making more, or deciding some bathroom or guest room needed a face lift, and just before Holy Thursday mass – her washing out the paint brush or making the last of the beds up with new linens. A new bathroom rug or a stray curtain that was too wrinkled to yet hang hung on kitchen chairs waiting for her attention.

“It’s no wonder I’m dizzy, look at the dust in here,” she’d say of the coffee table or the secretary whose dust was illuminated always by the late afternoon sun.

“It’s filthy,” she’d say, flailing her arm or arms (depending on the degree of filth) referring to the house in its entirety. It wasn’t. It was home, and it was perfect.

“I just need to swish the toilets,” she’d yell after you if you ventured down the hallway to find one. “I’ll do them,” I’d say, and swish toilets that were already gleaming.

Minutes ago, I lifted pounds and pounds of chicken out of boiling water and it smelled like her. I heard her, “The chicken is ready, Kate,” which meant it was time for me to make the salad. It had become my job probably by the tenth grade or so. “You’re better at it,” she insisted.

“Look at the dust in here,” I said to Tatum (the cat), flailing only one arm at the dining room because it wasn’t horrible, but maybe only because the sun wasn’t highlighting its faults.

And then I stopped. I looked around the house, which was (and is) in that state of near shambles just before it looks like a holiday. I saw Mom’s love seat and debated whether I should rearrange the furniture in the foyer and decided to wait for someone to lift an end with me, someone to tell me how it looked, someone to tell me that you could see my old bra right through my threadbare tee, someone to wonder and remember that in the midst of the shambles I was searching the basement for photographs and writing.

 April 13, 2022

Thank you to everyone who made their round table talk reservations!

I’m excited to hear your comments and questions in person and virtually!

For you far away folks who have scheduled a talk, don’t forget to send me your snail mail addresses so that I can send you signed bookplates (stickers with my signature) for your 𝐾𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑑𝑦’𝑠 𝐺𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑏𝑦𝑒 copies!

Email me at katiroseauthor@gmail.com for more information.

April 12, 2022

 John Irving's novel, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑡, is being released in October 2022. Irving says it's his last novel, which got me thinking about lasts: Irving's last novel, the last first day of school, Tom Petty's last performance, the last time I saw my mother, the Last Supper.

I'm haunted by the title 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑡, because although the cover shows a normal chairlift suspended over snow and a mountain, I cannot help but think of the kinds of chair lifts the are not so snowy - the kinds that replace stair railings, the kinds that are hammock toddler-like swings that carry people across rooms, wheelchairs, strollers. Beginnings and endings all wrapped into one.

In 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑 𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝐺𝑎𝑟𝑝 by John Irving, Jenny Fields says, "You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life."

I wonder how Irving knows it's his last novel. Because he has run out of words? Because he is running out of time? Is he at peace with his last? Is it better to know something is the last of itself? Would Tom Petty have sung "American Girl" at the Hollywood Bowl had he known it was his last song?

Me and lasts are not friends, just in case you were wondering.

I'll leave you with my friend Merriam-Webster's take on it all.

Peace out.

April 5, 2022

𝐖𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤.

Announcing: 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆 𝐑𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐬

Gather your book club members, your friends, your family, your neighbors, your cats and dogs, and let’s talk 𝐊𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝𝐲.

This is your opportunity to have the author (that's me!) join your round table book discussion.

I am currently scheduling appearances for May and June for all - near and far - via Zoom.

(Live local appearances negotiable, Covid pending.)

Limit 6 people per group.

Discussion topics (beware of spoilers) can be found on my website:

www.katiroseauthor.com

Email me so that we can schedule a mutually agreeable time at katiroseauthor@gmail.com

Grab your coffee

Pour your wine

Choose your company

Pick your time

Bring your 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆 book

(perhaps it's on your Kindle or Nook)

… 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐞𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤.

******Special thanks to all of you local folks who have already hosted me! It has been a rare and fun adventure being on this side of your book discussions!

Shout out to my own book club - yikes – got you on the schedule!

March 29, 2022

Thank you so much to everyone who has purchased and/or read 𝐾𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑑𝑦'𝑠 𝐺𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑏𝑦𝑒, and for all of your insane praise! I am humbled and overwhelmed.

If you haven't, thank you for your kind and supportive shows of friendship and loyalty.

Also, I want to give a shout out to my blurbers Paul Young, Helen Fremont (helenfremont.com), Laurie Graff (lauriegraff.com), and David Ritz (ritzwrites.com).

They have published some great (and pretty famous!) reads, and have accomplished some kick-A things in their personal lives.

To obtain a blurb is an honor, and I am so grateful to them all. They make me proud.

 
March 24, 2022

My agent, David Vigliano, was termed a "superagent" in an article I read this morning. It made me smile loudly, and for those of you who have read my book, 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆, you may chuckle, too.

Here's to superheroes and congratulations to my agent for his continued success and acquisitions!! Go Vig!

March 22 at 10:08 AM ·

March is designated Women’s History Month. The month is set aside to honor women’s contributions in American history.

Women’s History Month started as Women’s History Week,

beginning as a local celebration in Santa Rosa, California. The Education Task Force of the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women planned and executed a “Women’s History Week” celebration in 1978. The organizers selected the week of March 8 to correspond with International Women’s Day. The movement spread across the country as other communities initiated their own Women’s History Week celebrations the following year.

In 1980, a consortium of women’s groups and historians lobbied for national recognition. In February 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first Presidential Proclamation declaring the Week of March 8th, 1980, as National Women’s History Week.

Subsequent presidents continued to proclaim a National Women’s History Week in March until 1987 when Congress passed Public Law 100-9, designating March as “Women’s History Month.” Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month.

From: womenshistory.org/womens-history/womens-history-month

For me, there are so many women to remember and commemorate every day, way beyond the bounds of March. Those close to me – my daughters and daughters-in-law, my granddaughters, my sisters and sisters-in-law, my nieces, my friends and extended family, and My Mom (1927-2015) – I hope I have made you feel seen.

Below are a few famous ladies who have struck my fancy today, the list, by no means, is all inclusive. I hope you find something meaningful in their insights.

Marie Curie (1867 – 1934)

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Rosa Parks (1913 – 2005)

“No.”

Anne Frank (1929 – 1945)

“Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because the regret is stronger than gratitude.”

Georgia O’Keefe (1887 – 1986)

“To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968)

“I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”

AND

Virginia Woolf (1882 -1941)

(It feels impossible to narrow down anything that she has said.)

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

 Kati Rose 

March 8 at 2:55 PM ·

Well. Today is the day. It's out. Kennedy has been unleashed into the world.

Everyone asked me what I was going to do today. I didn't know. What was there to do but sit and wait like a new mom who has just sent their baby off to school...holding her breath until word came that it had gone ok, it was safe, and they were back home where they belonged. (They aren't; all those words escaped forever never to return home again.)

After realizing that none of the local bookstores stocked my book (that's a whole sad post for some other sad day, not today, but one really needs to ask where THAT disconnect happened, thanks for nothing and all that, but ok), I did what felt right.

I drove to the cemetery. A frigid breeze blew through my borrowed-from-my-daughter-Kennedy-blue cable knit sweater and it wasn't cold. The wind didn't go through me, it enveloped me as I stared at the dead names.

"We did it," I said to Mom and Dad.

"We did it," I said to the headstone's other side to my brother.

And then I walked about ten feet forward to the solid stone cold statue of the Sacred Heart of the Blessed Mother.

I stared at Her eyes, the kind that follow you wherever you go like the Mona Lisa's. "We did it," I said.

That was it, that was what I was doing today. And then Pink Floyd paid perfect tribute to Them, to us, back to back, two for Tuesday, reminding me to Breathe with their heartbeat and their soul.

So I did.

 February 22, 2022

Wow. Thank you to everyone who viewed and “liked” the book trailer on both YouTube and Facebook! What a response! I’m humbled and happy, and yet I cry every time I watch it as if it is my child walking off alone to kindergarten.

“We have art in order not to die from the truth.” ~Nietzsche

Over the weekend, I came across the above quote by a controversial philosopher who was accused of being a lot of things he may not have been. I don’t know - maybe he simply dared to speak his truth, or maybe his philosophic questions were too daunting for people to hear, or maybe his statements were just too onerous for the times.

I breathe and live out Nietzsche’s quote daily, and nearly mourn the fact that I only found it just a day or two ago.

It got me thinking - what is art? A flower? Or its confectionary cupcake replica? The deer at the dead end? A singer songwriter or the silent screen behind her? Drawings pressed into picture frames for posterity? A sculpture? A book? A book’s video?

Maybe it is the truth in art wherein we find salvation.

 February 15, 2022

Check out my trailer!!!!

https://youtu.be/l2-RAZmvjCg

 Kati Rose 

2-8-22

“Death of a Salesman begins in the home of Willy Loman. Willy returns home exhausted from his latest sales excursion. He worries because he is having difficulty remembering events, as well as staying focused on the present.”

(From CliffsNotes, Summary and analysis of Act I, Scene I, 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑚𝑎𝑛, Arthur Miller.)

I came home ravenous, having checked my phone feverishly for the hour until which McDonald’s stopped serving their big breakfast, having resisted every urge to stop at Dunkin for a breakfast sandwich.

“You’re stress eating,” I kept telling myself. “Make something healthy at home.” “You should have eaten before you left the house, you didn’t even finish your first cup of coffee, you dummy!” “Wait, that’s negative self- speak, stop that.” “I’m starving.”

𝒀𝒐𝒖'𝒓𝒆 𝒆𝒎𝒑𝒕𝒚.

I inhaled a dry English muffin and the rest of the pot’s cold coffee.

I sat. I breathed. Wow. That was rough. I felt just like Willy Loman, exhausted and unfocused.

I had just been to a handful of local bookstores attempting to introduce and familiarize my masked face to their managers.

“You’re your biggest sales tool, your face,” my publicist told me, “Make yourself known.”

Whew. I tried. I know I know, there’s no such thing as trying, according to Dr LauraSchlessinger. I DID. I went in, all teeth-whitened-masked smiles, all confident, all friendly, all me, all ready to fist pump and hand over my media kit.

“Who?” “What?” “You really need to speak with a manager?” “Are you in our system?” (uh…?) “Bring in two copies and we will split the sales 60/40.” “Keep your papers, I’d hate to take something from you that we have no use for.”

It was raining. I’d hid my folder beneath my coat and ran back to my car, time after time. They were going to throw out my media kit. They so much as told me so. Willy Loman. His overcoat and brief case mocked my mind. I had one more run in the rain left in me before my hair turned into a giant frizz. I had one more bookstore left in me before my folder was soaked through.

I thought about salespeople and how for them every day was like this. Smiling, putting on that face, that maybe-fake handshake, that veneer, that everlasting hope of success. I thought of my uncles - one with bibles, another with something from Prentice Hall or knives or ads, I thought of a family member and pharmaceuticals, a friend in a shoe department. How did they keep it up? How did their daily consist of this ever-presence, this hopeful openness and convincingness? This constant optimism? This perseverance and need for tenacity required to support themselves?

And then there was me and my media kit. I thought that whatever salespeople had, I hadn’t. I’m not much one for smiling or fakeness or everlasting hope. I thought it would be easier for me to live out of my car homeless and hungry than to walk into another book buyer’s den. And then I thought: am I Willy Loman?

I was exhausted and unfocused for sure. I was wet and disappointed. How much of an impression had my masked half-face made?

It wasn’t a complete loss: one manager did find me in their system for whatever that is worth, and I was able to leave a media kit with one lovely and helpful clerk. But as far as the 60/40 people are concerned? Well, I’ll go solo for now, schlep along with my soggy media kit I saved from their garbage bin.

It was humbling, for sure. I’d thought I’d had a grip on that sales venture. It’s not that I won’t persevere, I will. But in the meantime, I’ll honor loyal uncles and daydream about being on the purchasing end of shoe sales. I’ll be nicer to salespeople, even hold the door for them at doctor’s offices, if I must. I’ll eat breakfast more readily. I’ll try, try again, even if Dr. Laura thinks I’m semantically not. I’ll think about the likes of Willy Loman and their creators, knowing I am not such stuff as salesmen are made. And that’s ok with me.

 2-2-22

I hit 100 followers on my Facebook page today, which may not seem like many to anyone, but to me it means the world. I am humbled.

Kati Rose 

February 2, 2022

I’ve been walking around the house for two weeks wondering what I am going to write about, more specifically, about what I should post here on my page. I’ve had ideas, glimmers – love, February, the fact that it’s staying lighter longer, favorite books, why my author bio says what it says (what was I thinking???), and all I came up with was a post about a discount for my book. Bleh.

Is that writer’s block?

Let's ask Webster.

WRITER'S BLOCK: a psychological inhibition preventing a writer from proceeding with a piece

Ouch! That's pretty harsh.

Big sigh. 

Kati Rose 

January 21 at 10:48 AM ·

What an amazing hour spent last evening via Zoom with authors Randy Boyagoda and my man, John Irving.

I am BEYOND grateful that I was able to hear from Irving himself his personal account of the undertow/"Under Toad" from 𝑮𝒂𝒓𝒑.

Big moment for me. Tears and everything.

Just to be clear: this was a Zoom event, with Boyagoda and Irving as speakers; I did not have one on one conversations with them!

#damnedfunny ##pencanada #wordfestextravaganza

January 18, 2022

 So many signs along the way.

I struggled with what to name my protagonist. She had so many different first and last names. But when I saw this street sign, finally, I knew it was right. “Her name is Kennedy,” that little voice whispered. And soon after that, things began to fall into place draft-wise. Reasons and purposes became clearer for Kennedy. Concepts solidified; characters came into her life as quickly as others left. 

Sometimes all it takes is a sign.

(see photo on Facebook of street sign at www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor)

 Kati Rose 

January 11, 2022

January. Bah humbug.

The 𝑂𝑥𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝐷𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑦 (great read, btw), refers to a humbug as a trick; as something pretending to be something it’s not. A wolf in sheep’s clothing of sorts.

𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐽𝑎𝑛𝑢𝑎𝑟𝑦?

Admittedly, January rocks because some very special people in my life were born in it: a grandson, a sister, a nephew, two best friends, a classmate from grade school I remember to this day, kids of friends, etc. (If I forgot you, give a shout in the comments!)

But then what? If you live in the Northeast, it’s cold and dark, usually icy. Christmas gets stored and the house seems clean again, yet barren.

Promises and resolutions dangle like ornaments – will they hang around and give beauty and satisfaction or lie dormant and smothered and packed away?

For me, time stands still in January. It’s like a mean trick, a humbug. There’s all this champagne and promise and new leaves turning and then Valentine’s Day and more birthdays and yay spring is coming and Easter and wow it’s the eleventh already. Eleven whole days have gone by. That’s not even two weeks from champagne toasts at midnight yet!

Bright sides:

1) I made no resolutions that I need to worry about keeping. I promise nothing to no one ever, including myself (but for that one marriage vow).

2) I’m reading a terrific book from 2013 whose title shall remain nameless to prevent spoilers, something I despise and know I cannot survive in January.

Are any of you spoilers? If so, please help me to learn and grow and understand why you do it. Please enlighten and teach me.

In 1973, I was told that there was no Santa Claus by a girl of all one color: Crayola green yellow. (Duh, as if THAT’S true, ask Virginia. Spoiler misnomer.)

In 1975, I was asked this while holding a novel, “Did you get to the part where Blank dies?”

To this day, if a family member starts to spoil, I halt them with, “Did you get to the part where Blank dies?” and they stare at me like I’m crazy, but at least I have averted a spoiler. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. God forbid I raised one.

I’m pretty sure these spoilers (both the people and their statements) changed my life forever. I’m also fairly positive that said spoilers will never read this post, or anything I have written or will write, so no potential hurt feelings there, as if they would even remember their words.

I don’t know what the point of this is. Oh yeah, listing bright sides. (This is a tough exercise for a realist, and I apologize in advance for bringing up exercise.)

3) I have all those things for which I am grateful: I am healthy and I have a loving husband and cool kids and even grandchildren now, and y’all know how much I love babies!

There’s no point here, and this is bordering on boring. Even I know it. (It’s the third post in as many weeks that I have struggled with and not posted. One was about Crayola crayon colors and lyrics, and another was about how my agent cut most of the content from my original drafts…neither very exciting topics, and now this one, the third, which may or may not get posted.) Generally, when I border on boring, it’s time to write. Oh. Maybe THAT is my January’s bright side.

4) From darkness comes light? From boredom comes creation? From despair, hope? Oh, I don’t know. I’m guessing.

PS. check out the lyrics to “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” by Elton John. It kind of mirrors my unrelenting January mood. I’d love to quote them for you, but I haven’t the permission. Nor can I afford it. But I can say the title without asking, and use those words without paying, which was kind of part of my unposted bad post about lyrics. And now I am sounding a bit like Dave Eggers which is really not a bad thing, but only in his absolute epic, 𝐴 𝐻𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑜𝑓 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑢𝑠, and not his other works, just so you know.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Is January bah humbug to you, too?

Are you a spoiler?

Does the new year cause a time warp?

Is it different if you live in a warmer climate?

What are your resolutions?

Have you kept them?

Are you reading a great book?

Did you get to the part where Blank dies?

 Kati Rose 

January 5, 2022

A visual foreshadowing into my soon to be released novel, 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆.

In the words of my daughter, "It's everything!"

 Kati Rose 

January 1, 2022

It wasn’t 2021 that let me down; it can’t help that it existed as a number.

After all, great things happened to my family within it – a bunch of “news”: new humans, new homes, new job opportunities, new and different types of bonds of family and friendship.

I think the problem is that because of distance and our family’s collective care and concern for Covid, I kind of missed it all in the traditional sense.

I wasn’t able to be close to my kids who became parents. I couldn’t see the joy of their faces when they came out of delivery rooms to tell us they’d had a baby and that everything was OK. I wasn’t able to hold their newborns. I wasn’t able to see grandchild feet disappear into schools on first days. I wasn’t able to help pack or carry boxes into new homes behind adult backs carrying similar burdens. I wasn’t able to run and shout and grab and hug anyone when they shared via video chats their enormous career changes (even my own). And although new ways emerged of continuing bonds, they were 2-D, apart, half-faced, antisepticised.

All this is not to say that I am ungrateful for what we shared, or what we achieved through adversity. But aren't we doing that or tweaking toward that shared goal on the daily already?

I don’t know. I’m disappointed that there seemed to be - from my little-town perspective, from my not-so-current-event savvy mindset, from my humble longing for human connection and hands-on fostering – absolutely no collective soul in 2021.

What happened to those basic creeds? Do onto others as you would have them do onto you? Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do onto me or Jesus or some other guru in the sky or a newborn baby?

I realize from the dissent that I have received when almost meekly voicing my thoughts or feelings that these archaic ideas of heartfelt humanity and simplemindedness could be met with anger and yelling and harsh disagreement. But, maybe if we all got back to basics then we would all be back to basic, to square one. (As if I'm the first to think or say this...)

A teacher once said to us as a class, as mini-collectived souls, “When you pass by a car accident, don’t you always check the models and makes of the cars to confirm that no one you know has been involved?” We all shook our heads ‘yes.’

“Well,” he said, “why is that your determination of concern? Say a prayer, give a shit. It’s somebody’s someone there behind the wheel. It’s someone’s someone’s mangled car. It could be somebody’s mother who perished. It’s always somebody’s someone – pray like it’s yours.” (thanks, Brother Dausch, of ND-BG fame!)

I never forgot that, and attempted to impart this concept of caring to my kids or any other willing listener. I hope they heard. I hope they remember.

And that’s all I’m saying. I wish everyone had said that prayer, walked that walk, done onto others in 2021. And for those of you who did, and continue to do, know that I am forever grateful. I hope our souls are collected somewhere someday in some way, even if we never met.

 Kati Rose 

12/28/21

Let’s talk about gifts. After all, as tradition continues, it wasn’t just the Wise Men who gifted.

Gifts come in all shapes and sizes and are not always wrapped: a tear brought forth, a squeal, the warmth of appreciation, the joy of togetherness, the sacrifice of strength or solitude. And sometimes they are tangible like gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

As a kid, I remember on Christmas morning walking down our hallway, turning the corner to a scene completely transformed. A previously bare Christmas tree had been decorated with giant colored bulbs, balls sparkled in shiny splendor, and tinsel hung one by one from nearly every branch. Presents galore surrounded it (there were nine of us). Santa Claus, who was somehow ever generous (it seemed as if he worked miracles, that guy), did not wrap even tangible presents.

One of my best memories ever was turning the corner to find a Velvet doll standing along the tree awaiting me. I will just never forget that feeling of joy, I had wanted her so badly, and could not even comprehend that Santa had brought her for me. I was 6 or 7, and completely overwhelmed by his generosity, and was humbled by his omnipotence. It was a moment of pure joy that I will never forget. Maybe it helped me learn how to give, and eventually, how to receive.

What were some of your most memorable gifts, or moments, or giving experiences?

(Always remember, sharing is a gift, too, unwrapped.)

 Kati Rose 

December 22,2021

I’ve been thinking a lot about Christmas movies and songs. Movies like 𝑅𝑢𝑑𝑜𝑙𝑝ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑅𝑒𝑑 𝑁𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑅𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑒𝑟, 𝐴 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑒 𝐵𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑚𝑎𝑠, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝐷𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑟 𝐵𝑜𝑦. Songs like “O Holy Night,” “Silent Night,” and again, “The Little Drummer Boy.”

I was thinking about what they had in common, why those were the ones that have stuck with me, the ones that changed me.

Then I got thinking about O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” which reminded me of that classic song “We Three Kings of Orient (Are).” As a kid I asked, “Are what?”

Well, the kings are actually bringing gifts to the Magi. They travel on foot to find the newborn Jesus, arriving the twelfth day of Christmas, or Little Christmas, January 6. Even then, people brought gifts; even kings to newborns.

Gifts. They can be huge or tiny – a large inheritance or an outreached hand. Gifts like Rudolph’s act of service with his beacon-like red nose; the gift of confidence that Santa gives to Rudolph; the gift of faith and friendship and hope that Linus gives to Charlie Brown, gifts of the Holy Spirit; and the greatest gift of all from the little drummer boy – he gives what he can.

Gosh, I don’t want to give out any spoilers, but that little drumming boy- his movie/book/song - really kills me every time. He gives what he can. And that’s it.

I hope you’ll share your favorites with me here or on my author page and remember that no gift is too small. Those are the greatest of all.

Merry Christmas!

visit me at www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor

 December 17, 2021

My husband walked in on us like a parent arriving home to three teenagers too soon.

“THIS is book club?” he asked.

Ummmmm…how was I to explain away the feast, the laughter, the tears, the friendship, the alcohol, the red AND gold Solo cups, the lack of a book?

“Ummmmm…yeah…?” I answered.

“You actually enjoy this?” he asked.

Ummmm…yes? Book club had carried the three of us into a new and deeper kind of friendship, as if the sustained forty-three year bond wasn’t enough! It was the reason we created to meet throughout the pandemic, over FaceTime. It became a new way of learning things - not only from the variety of decent books we read, but from each other, discovering even more about each one of us and what we’d been through on our own life journies.

I’ve been so surprised at the depths of our conversations, and humbled and moved by listening to my friends’ ideas and opinions. It’s brought us together in a new way, it’s kept us going.

“Honestly, it saved my life,” said one of us.

Ummmm….

I looked at my innocent husband,

“Yes, we like this.” My friends joined in, “Yes! We love this!”

“Seems like school to me,” he said.

I smiled. I thought maybe he had been judging our feast, our libations, our lack of books in hands as he walked in. But nah, it was the tipsy talking, the literary questions we were passionately pondering, the school-like nature of our conversation.

But we knew that it was just that comfortable fierce friendship, that fiery new glue that was holding us still. It was just book club.

see www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor for photos of book club feast!

 Kati Rose 

December 7, 2021

This was going to be a post about Laura Ingalls Wilder, about her struggles as a mom who wrote, and how she did not publish her first book until age 65, in 1932. Can you believe that?

I remember reading her books in the 70’s as a middle schooler, feeling so aligned with her characters and how easily I became immersed in her daily through her words. She changed my life, giving me a harbor of safety in sentences and a love for books.

(A big shout out to my classmates from Our Lady of Angels who let me borrow their books!)

Who remembers the television series?

Gosh, I loved those evenings watching 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑒 with Mom and Dad - Dad reading, Mom knitting, me crocheting. It sounds too good to be true, too 𝑂𝑧𝑧𝑖𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐻𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑡, but those moments happened. Our parallel play felt like love, so I clung to it, Pa and Ma and Laura our soundtrack.

Who can forget the fashion that emerged from the series: maxi-dresses with aprons and bows in the back, lace-up shoes and boots, knee-his, gauchos and Gunne Sax! Ahh!

Admittedly, I was a bit frustrated by my cat Tatum’s (of Tatum O’Neal fame) FB post interruptus, who wouldn’t be? She lay on the floor before me, knocked over my display, climbed on my Laura Ingalls Wilder books, refusing to leave the camera’s frame, and nudged her way into the post, after all.

But then I clung to the moment. Simply, maybe Tatum was channeling her inner Laura – staking out, thinking, growing from within, persevering, channeling, reaching, grasping – a mom writing and waiting for her universe to align.

Visit Facebook for photos of Tatum’s chronicles at https://www.facebook.com/katiroseauthor

 December 1, 2021

John Irving. Where to begin?

My best friend introduced me to him with 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑾𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝑮𝒂𝒓𝒑, in a dark theater where I learned what “giving head” meant, not by action, but by deductive reasoning. The point is, I was that naïve then. She was always so much more advanced in everything than I was: in music, she’d discovered Aerosmith and Tom Petty and we’d listen to them for days on end in her room; she knew current events as if it were her job; she knew boys and authors and artists and books. I always felt as if I was running behind her, trying to catch up on the latest anything, trying to be as informed. But she was always first, even in death, alas. I still admire those things - even that last lonely bravery - about her.

My love affair with John Irving is everlasting, his books like cherished children around my house – hard covered ones never opened, torn ones, four or five dogeared copies of the same ones, even his movies sit on shelves in various media formats.

All this to say that I am saddened that he has proclaimed to have finished his last novel. (see article below) That means no more new words, no more bathing in the ecstasy of his knowledge and know-how, no more Garps. These little deaths are hard to swallow.

To honor him, please consider taking a moment to follow the link in his article below to vote for his book, 𝑨 𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒚𝒆𝒓 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝑶𝒘𝒆𝒏 𝑴𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒚 (I was about to say his most readable, but pulled it back, I’m guessing 𝑨 𝑾𝒊𝒅𝒐𝒘 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝑶𝒏𝒆 𝒀𝒆𝒂𝒓 or 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑭𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒕𝒉 𝑯𝒂𝒏𝒅 are easier reads, but this is no reason to shun 𝑨 𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒚𝒆𝒓) to win Best Book in the last 125 years.

John Irving. Where to end?

John Irving 

November 26 at 11:53 AM ·

Dear Readers,

Since May, I’ve been rewriting what I know will be my last long novel. I think of my unwritten novels as boxcars in a train station; they’re waiting to be coupled to an engine. There are no long trains left in the station. In the future, you can call me Novella Man, but not yet. I’m delivering my 15th novel—from start to finish, just short of five years. I’m guessing—this is just a guess—it’ll be published in October 2022.

Yesterday was American Thanksgiving. In Toronto, I would never know—except for the football games on TV, and my American friends wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving. It was a happy day for me—I finished another novel.

I’ve learned that A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of 25 finalists for the Best Book in the last 125 years. The editors of the New York Times Book Review asked readers to help them to choose a winner—among novels, memoirs, and poetry collections. They received thousands of nominations from readers around the world. You can vote for A Prayer for Owen Meany, or for one of the other 24 books on the list, but voting closes in 9 days. The Book Review will announce the winner in December: https://www.nytimes.com/.../11/24/books/best-book-vote.html

Speaking of winners, my friend Margaret Atwood also has a novel on the Best Book list. My wife and I spent some of our American Thanksgiving attending Margaret’s “stamp unveiling” at the Toronto Public Library. How many writers—not to mention, living writers—get put on stamps? There is a wonderful picture of Margaret Atwood on the stamp—with her eyes closed, and the palm of one hand on her cheek, as if she is getting a sentence right in her head. Her own words are on the stamp, too: “A word after a word after a word is power.” Perfect.

—John

November 23, 2021

What a big career year! What a big year in general. Life has made one of its big shifts.

Feeling particularly thankful for my publisher, Post Hill Press, my agent, David Vigliano, my husband who has read and reread me ad nauseam, and for those who scrambled this week and last to provide advice and last minute blurbs to me. (If you'd like to be named specifically, give me a holler here on my page, otherwise your privacy will be respected.)

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Don't forget to show your love.

 Kati Rose

Many people ask me how long it took me to write 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆. In short, it took a lifetime. Since childhood, I have watched others around me negotiate their lives, listening and making mental and paper notes.

I suppose I began jotting down serious pieces for the Kennedy project around 1993, a year after my third baby was born. For years I scribbled on napkins and lost notepads and backs of report cards and grocery and pediatrician check-out receipts. I woke up predawn and went to sleep in the middles of nights trying to make sense of the scribbles.

Finally, back in 2009 maybe, I found myself home alone for three whole days, and I remember printing everything I had. I cut and pasted and stapled and taped. I laid out pages across the house and rearranged them into some type of order. And that was the first rough draft.

Naturally, I worked on it, rewriting and rearranging, and then in 2010 or 2011 I was acquainted through my magical husband with my agent.

Patient as he was (is!), he read and rejected. He read and gently suggested.

After he advised cutting nearly half the book, I became serious. Like, really serious. I knew it was the point of no return, my make-or-break moment. I knew I’d been given the break and the chance of a lifetime. Again, I worked predawn and middles of nights. I printed and pasted and stapled. I made charts and wallpapered my office with Post-its.

And then it happened. I sent my agent yet another (and final) draft we then renamed “the manuscript.” “We are in great shape,” he said, and asked if he could shop it out to publishers.

Thanks to his talent, persistence, and shrewd expertise, he spared me from enormous amounts of post-agent rejection, selling the manuscript within two years, within a pandemic! And thanks to Post Hill Press, Kennedy’s words will be told.

In math terms:

one lifetime

+ one decade

_______________

𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆

P.S. Did you know that these other famous works were once rejected?

𝑪𝒂𝒓𝒓𝒊𝒆

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒕𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑹𝒚𝒆

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒊𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝑨𝒏𝒏𝒆 𝑭𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒌

𝑳𝒐𝒓𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑭𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒔

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑯𝒆𝒍𝒑

even 𝑪𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒆𝒏 𝑺𝒐𝒖𝒑 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒐𝒖𝒍!

 Kati Rose 

November 10, 2021 

𝘓𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 by Louisa May Alcott opened my eyes to a whole new world, a new way of seeing words. I was young, maybe fourth or fifth grade, when I read it over a snowy weekend.

I remember getting maybe two-thirds of the way through and I thought, "Wow. Thoughts and feelings can happen with words, and words can keep going, cascading together into sentences and into paragraphs and onto pages for others to see, to read. Anyone’s world can be written, and anyone’s world could be read."

It blew my mind.

“Put books around,” a third grade teacher told me twenty-four years ago at a parent teacher conference at which I was the parent, “let them become part of your landscape. The kids will get the hint. The kids will learn to read.”

I’d already had books everywhere (and still do), and for years, two copies of 𝘓𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 hung around the house.

A couple of months ago I held one of them, the older, more worn copy of 𝘓𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯, and for the first time I’d noticed an inscription inside its back cover. It had belonged to my aunt, a gift from her aunt for her eighth birthday. The year was 1928.

It moved me so, knowing that generations of women in my family had held and read this book, and that Mom, who had undoubtedly read that very copy, had so eagerly recommended it to me as that fourth or fifth grader on that snowy weekend.

I quickly searched the other copy for inscriptions and found none, but just looking at that book’s cover, those sitting sisters, brought me back to days at home, Mom handing me that book (and many books over the years), Mom telling me I’d love it, "read this I think you’ll like it…"

It took me until those few months ago to realize that Mom had had books around our house, in her hands, in her mind, in our basement, waiting to be read.

𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑊𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛, the story of girls, of struggle and love, reminds us of how strong the bonds of sisterhood can be, of how deep run the roots of family. It reminds us of how words can change everything.

Thanks to Louisa May Alcott for her words, and thanks to Mom for handing me that copy long ago, and for changing my world in so many wonderful ways. Oh, and Mom? Happy birthday.

 Kati Rose 

October 26 at 9:45 AM ·

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒅𝒈𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝑴𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒐𝒏 𝑪𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒕𝒚 is a 1992 bestselling novel by author Robert James Waller which became a drama film of the same name in 1995 (screenplay adaptation by Richard LaGravenese).

Clint Eastwood produced, directed, and starred in it along with Meryl Streep.

The film won many awards, most notably an Academy Award for best actress for Meryl Streep, and Golden Globe Awards for both best motion picture (drama) and best actress in a motion picture.

Ⓕⓤⓝ ⓕⓐⓒⓣ: Novelist Robert James Waller and I share a book agent!

The bridge seen here is part of the Erie Canalway walking trail over the Schoharie Creek in rural Montgomery county, New York.

 Kati Rose 

October 5 ·

Want a glimpse into the mind of the narrator from my upcoming book, 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚'𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒅𝒃𝒚𝒆? Give this Spotify playlist - KennedysPlaylist - a listen. It's not all inclusive (obvies), but it sure helped moved Kennedy and me along on her journey of discovery.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/45Ht3GWIummK3kFBfSSbP3...

 Kati Rose 

September 28 ·

Hi everyone! Have you been to Goodreads? It's a great website with tons of fascinating information - it's like a virtual library. The cool part is that not only can you browse books and find suggestions and reviews, but you can connect with friends and authors and see what they love to read (and write!), too.

I'm working on my platform over there - adding and changing things daily. I have been selecting books for my bookshelf, and am completely overwhelmed. The books that I have chosen thus far are in no particular order, and really - who can possibly add all of the books they have read?? Alas, (or not alas, I suppose, depending on your glass half full/empty outlook) those of you who know me well know that I will attempt to accomplish this task of adding every read book.

So if you happen to be browsing the web, take a look at Goodreads.

Check out the "ask the author" section for all your favorite authors. Maybe you will have questions for them - or me!

Follow your faves, and don't forget to follow me!!!!

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21697848.Kati_Rose