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The Joy of Swimming

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by Jennifer Ross

Water is my comfort and joy.  If I can immerse myself in a body of water, I am happy.  I grew up in Cape Town where two oceans meet, and had beautiful beaches to choose from on both coasts:  the warmer, calmer Indian Ocean and the colder, rougher Atlantic.  Since then, I have also been lucky to swim in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, the Caribbean, the Pacific and recently, the Sea of Cortez in the Baja Peninsula, Mexico. I love swimming in lakes, lagoons, waterfalls, hot springs and pools, both indoor and outside.

I slip into the water and relive experiences, with those dear to me.

I remember long days with friends, cavorting in the crashing waves at Clifton Beach on the Atlantic, or lolling in the gentle ones at Muizenberg on the Indian, laughing with the delight of being young and free for the long summer holiday.  Other highlights:  Snorkeling side-by-side with my husband, in Akumal, Mexico, Hawaii and Bonaire, sunlight on our backs, a magical world of bright fish, coral reefs and suddenly, a giant turtle appearing, accompanying us for a while, then disappearing into the clear blue sea.  A night dive in Bonaire, our diving instructor revealing a different world, alive and mysterious under the sea, inky black now, where our flashlights uncovered such treasures as an octopus curled in its garden in the sea and phosphorescent fish sending flashes of light in the dark.

I smile thinking of ladies’ day at the Turkish baths in Jerusalem, spent with a dear, departed friend, sunbathing nude on the roof, then plunging into the long, cavernous pool decorated with once vibrant but now faded Islamic tiles, and an icy lake upstate, with sadly, a now ex-friend, just the two of us and an eagle in the sky.  I remember being in water in different seasons:  the Blue Lagoon in Iceland with gently falling snow, and floating in summer in the Dead Sea in Israel, then washing off the salt in the fresh water springs of nearby Ein Gedi.  In March, a friend of my heart and I were forced (persuaded) by a lovely teenager on our cruise, to put down our drinks at the water’s edge in the Sea of Cortez, and join her for a swim in the freezing water.  After much hesitation we did and felt exhilarated by our hour together in the pristine water, before being urged back to shore by an anxious crew member.

Lately, my pleasure has increased as I have introduced my grandchildren to the water.  I love hearing their squeals of delight as they run into and out of the waves, then venture into the rough surf of Long Beach, my happy place in the summer.  I loved taking them into the pool, as infants, their chubby arms around my neck and young bodies reveling in the water, and now teaching them to swim, so they too, can experience the joy of swimming.

 

Jenny is a retired English teacher who taught high school and college.  These pieces were written during the writing SG in Fall 2024, coordinated by Charles Troob and Susan Smahl.

Male Mentors For a 1970s Feminist

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by Carolyn Setlow

I began my business career in July 1970, just a month before 10,000 women marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue to mark the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The march was part of a “Women’s Strike for Equality,” organized by feminist leader Betty Friedan.

Younger women often ask me whether male chauvinism hindered my career, and whether I had any role models or mentors who eased the way for me.  I did but, interestingly, they were mostly supportive men of an older generation.

The first, and by far the most important, was my father, Herbert Setlow, a graduate of the Wharton School at Penn, who ran a family-owned work clothes manufacturing company, SetloWear,  founded in 1893 as M. Setlow and Son, Inc.,  by his grandfather and father, Morris and Joseph Setlow – three generations of Setlow men at the helm.  The women in this family were not in the business, but were “executives” in their own way. Herbert’s mother, born Dora Chernoff, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, founded the New Haven chapter of Women’s American ORT, a Jewish organization that provides education and job skills to immigrants. His sister, Ursula, earned a bachelor’s degree at Smith College in 1932 and a master’s at Yale and later ran her husband’s cardiology practice.

Not surprisingly, my father grew up with a respect for women and what they could accomplish. Remarkably gender blind, he nudged my sister Marcie and me toward business careers.  If not for the objections of our mother, we’d have had bicycle newspaper routes when we were teens.  He encouraged us to sell Girl Scout cookies door to door and pushed us to join Junior Achievement, a youth-development program that taught business and entrepreneurial skills.

In 1970, I headed to New York City with a newly-minted master’s degree in Public Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts.

My first job was with Lou Harris, who had been President Kennedy’s pollster and now ran a firm that competed with the likes of Gallup and Roper. On my second week there, Lou phoned me in my office one morning to tell me he was running late for a meeting with the editors of Japan’s leading newspaper and would like me to greet them and start the meeting without him.  He would join us shortly.  Lou had no doubt that I could handle this (but I was not so sure).  The Japanese gentlemen were unfortunately not like Lou. It became quickly clear that they were unwilling to engage with a young woman and preferred to await his arrival.

In the early 70’s, as the only female vice president of Louis Harris and Associates,  I was assigned an exciting project.  Philip Morris wanted to position their new brand, Virginia Slims, as the expert on American women (who “could never be too rich or too thin,” according to their tagline).  As part of their PR program, they commissioned the first of many annual Virginia Slims American Women’s Polls, definitive surveys of public attitudes toward the roles of women in our society and the emerging women’s movement, and I authored these studies.

In early 1973, I got a call from Gloria Steinem, who wanted to report on women’s attitudes in her newly-launched Ms. Magazine.  Would I coauthor articles with her, she asked.   With permission from Lou to mine the Harris Poll data, I submitted my first article to Gloria, on the women’s vote in the 1972 presidential election.

Gloria made only one edit. Wherever I quoted the “Harris Poll,” she crossed it out and replaced it with the Setlow Poll.  Ms. wanted to provide role models of successful women to their aspiring female readers, she explained.  I reminded her that Lou Harris, not I, was the famous opinion pollster, and we could not make this change.  Her final words to me, as I left her office, were “Go ask him.” (This was 40 years before Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.)

When I returned to my office, I told Lou of Gloria’s request,  He thought for a minute and, to my surprise, then asked, “Can you live with the Harris-Setlow Poll?”  Articles based on the Harris-Setlow Poll appeared regularly in Ms. Magazine for a couple of years. 

Another of my clients was a pension fund trade association, for whom we conducted a landmark study on corporate attitudes toward pension fund managers.  I had authored the study but they understandably wanted Lou Harris to present the results at a big industry luncheon at the University Club.  Lou asked me to write his speech and join him at the podium for the Q & A session. However, when we arrived at the University Club door, we were informed that the luncheon was on the second floor and the club did not permit women above the ground floor.

Lou expressed outrage, but the club wouldn’t budge.  He turned to me and asked whether I wanted us to walk out in protest. Aware that the client had not yet paid the final bill for the study, I insisted he proceed, and I listened to his speech (with no Q & A session following it), from a little room off the lobby.  (The University Club finally accepted its first female members in the 1990’s, more than 15 years later.)

Fast forward to the early 1990’s, I was a senior executive of The Roper Organization and a top business developer.  A new business call from the head of a leading Washington DC-based nonprofit was directed to me.  After a lengthy conversation, I offered to fly down to meet with the client and his team.  He said he’d get back to me.

An hour later, the vice chairman of our firm, Harry O’Neill,  knocked on my office door to tell me that the prospective client had called back, asked for Harry, and explained that he  had had a very productive call with me but that his team preferred to work with a senior male at the firm.  Harry reported that he thanked the man for the call but told him he’d already spoken with the most qualified member of our executive team and that he was welcome to take his business elsewhere.

Another of my clients was the Seagram Corporation.  The client asked me to fly up to Montreal to share a study’s results with the head of their Canadian business at his elite private club. For the occasion, I wore my first pair of expensive Ferragamo shoes.  As luck would have it, it began to snow as the plane landed in Montreal. As my taxi pulled up to the club, I saw with relief that the walkway to the front door had just been shoveled. I was greeted at the front door by a uniformed doorman who said, “I apologize, Madame, but ladies are not allowed to enter the club through the front door.” He signaled to me a yet-to-be shoveled path that led around the building to the ladies entrance.  Unwilling to ruin my new shoes, I smiled confidently at the doorman, pushed my way past him, and announced my arrival – silently thanking my father, Lou Harris, Harry O’Neil, plus a few other men along the way, for the confidence they had instilled in me.

In 1981, my 68-year old father urged me to spend just a little time at SetloWear, so that I would understand enough about the business to run it or sell it, in case something happened to him. I accepted the offer and, a year later, he insisted that I become SetloWear’s president. After five more years, in 1986, he gave me his blessing to sell the business to Williamson-Dickie, a Texas-based work clothes company. Among the conditions for their purchase were that my father would retire, and that I would continue as president.  While my dad was not happy to be put out to pasture in his early 70’s, he was proud that I had negotiated a successful sale and that the new owners wanted me to continue to run their new acquisition. I was grateful to him for his trust in me.

My father received public recognition for how he raised his daughters. He was honored in the early 1980’s by the NOW (National Organization of Women’s) Legal Defense Fund with their BUDDY Award (that stood for Bringing Up Daughters Differently) and featured in a Newsweek article about women in family businesses, with the headline “Like Fathers, Like Daughters.”

 

Carolyn was EVP of leading public opinion polling/marketing research firms (Louis Harris and Associates, the Roper Organization, GFK); VP of corporate planning at Newsweek Inc.; and President of a family-owned uniform company. She has served on several nonprofit boards (Northside Center for Child Development, Children’s Tumor Foundation, Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies) and been involved recently in refugee resettlement.  She is married to LP2 member Andrew Shapiro.

                                   

“Kayfabe” or Everything Real is Fake

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by Susan SmahL

Grandpa Izzy Brodsky loved “the fights,” otherwise known as professional wrestling.  That’s the only thing that I ever saw him watch on television, when back in the 1960s  we lived in a two family house with my grandparents, who were tasked with watching me and my sisters after school while our parents were at work.  After homework time, was TV time.

My grandfather would sit with us while my grandmother fixed dinner.  Sometimes, if she was making chopped liver, a Jewish staple, she would direct Grandpa to a folding chair set up in front of the TV.  Grandma would hand him an ancient wooden chopping bowl, nicked and carved with the scratches of a thousand meals and heaped full of cooked chicken livers and onions.  Grandpa would obediently chop the mixture with an equally ancient red-handled blade.  Chuckling gleefully while watching the professional wrestlers contort on the black-and-white screen, he would shout my Grandma’s name, “Rae, Rae,” whenever he saw a dangerous looking maneuver.  With each thundering slap on the wrestling mats, my grandpa would chop harder and faster.  As the fight escalated, so did the chopping. Grandma Rae couldn’t care less, she was oblivious.

To us kids, it looked disgusting; the chicken livers, greenish, slimy, the smelly onions and the wrestlers, with their bloody noses and buckets of spit, black bulging briefs, gross mouth guards and ominous sounding names.  We watched my grandfather watching, and were slightly terrified and totally entertained.  This was full-circle evisceration!

Short and stout with a heavy Yiddish accent, Grandpa Izzy seemed perpetually happy.  To me, he looked like a Jewish Louis Armstrong, bald shiny head, round face and the widest of smiles.  He radiated joy, so I was naturally confused as to why he would watch a seemingly violent activity on television and laugh hysterically. His only other entertainment was reading The Jewish Daily Forward, gambling a little on the ponies, and weekly Saturday synagogue always followed by a shot of Slivovitz with the other old men. Watching professional wrestling was a highlight.

As the eldest child, I recognized some turbulent days in our family and the world, conflict at home and constant talk on th6 o’clock news of the Cold War.  Duck and cover, life was more than a little scary. But, each day when Izzy would pick us up from school in his Dodge Dart, stopping to honk at every intersection in our Brooklyn neighborhood to warn the other drivers that he was carrying precious cargo, we felt safe and loved, even if it took forever to get home.

The television wrestlers were a spectacle.  They were pretending that professional wrestling was a true sport.  We kids didn’t know.  But Izzy knew, and he loved it anyway. There’s even a word for it in wrestling.    KAYFABE, That’s – “K A Y F A B E.”  The suspension of disbelief. Pretending something is real when it’s not. Izzy, once a 17-year-old immigrant from a little village in Ukraine had fought a war, lost family members, built a business, lost a business, found a wife, lost a child. Why remember the sad things in life when you could decide to remember to forget.  That’s Kayfabe!

Maybe we were ahead of the times. When we watched Gorilla Monsoon wrestling on TV in the 1960s, who knew he would be the one to fight in the legendary match against Andre the Giant in 1977?  Or that superstar Billy Graham’s style would be an inspiration for the now infamous Hulk Hogan.   I don’t remember every feeling moved by a professional baseball or football game (except maybe those first Mets and Yankees games after 9/11).  But, the memory of my grandfather chopping chicken livers in an old wooden bowl while watching the antics of professional wrestlers on Channel 5, brings a little mist to my eyes.  Or maybe it’s the onions.

**

* Kayfabe – (noun) – the agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events are genuine.

 

Susan Smahl enjoys writing short pieces about her life and this crazy world.  This piece was performed at a live reading at City Winery in New York in March, 2025.  

 

Rabat, Morocco

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by Charles Troob

In the summer of 1967 I had an internship in Rabat.  This clean and safe capital city on the Atlantic was the Third World on training wheels.  Even when the sun blazed there was a fresh ocean breeze.

My office—I was at the United Nations Development Programme—was closed from noon until four.  I’d lunch alone at a nearby bistro—I would pick one at random—where for five dirhams (about a dollar) I’d have three courses of simple French food, with couscous as an occasional plat du jour.  Some customers were at the same places each day, seated at the same table, as though it were a private dining room.

On the far side of the palm-lined main boulevard was the gate to the medina, the fragrant old city.  Here I would stroll past butchers and fishmongers; gorgeous arrays of spices and vegetables; fabrics in brilliant colors; rugs and baskets; wallets, belts and leather jackets; and metalware: bowls, pitchers, candelabra, and “hands of Fatima.”   In time I learned to shop and haggle.

There would still be hours to kill before returning to work.  One day I went to a public beach, but there I felt like a rich invader—foreigners and bourgeois Moroccans drove to swimming clubs down the coast.   So I’d usually visit the Jardin des Oudaias, a walled Andalusian garden with a teahouse.  A waiter would bring a metal pot filled with boiling water, sugar, and a large handful of mint.

I’d inhale the pungent fumes and sip slowly, admiring the shrubs, flowers and fruit trees, and pondering my uncertain future.   This summer in Morocco had been fascinating, but the long hours of solitude—midday and evening—were a heavy burden, and I didn’t think I could make a life of this kind of work.    I would be a closeted gay man in a foreign country, without a family to keep me company, too cautious to have a wild time….

 It was a privilege to be twenty-one and melancholy in such an exquisite setting, like a Romantic poet or a character in a novel.  My sadness was as sweet as the mint tea.

 

Charles Troob: This piece was written for the LP² Writing Workshop, which I’ve co-coordinated for over a decade.  I’m still learning to write!  

My Face

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by Charles Troob

 

  1. Age.

A year ago I attended the 75th birthday party of a woman who went to high school with my younger brother.   I was startled by an uncannily familiar face.  “Jane,” I said.  “What is it, 50 years since we saw each other?   You’re exactly the same, just grayer with a few wrinkles.  I’d know you if we met on the street.”  She laughed and said, “You, too, Charles.”

It’s in my genes.  My father, who lived to 96, looked pretty much the same at 80 as he did at 40.  Only at 85 did he show signs of advanced age, and even then, he was just a frailer version of himself.

I once looked unlike my two brothers; now there’s a hint of a family resemblance.  But on balance my face has changed so little that people have a hard time guessing my age.  I’m surprised when I’m offered a seat on a bus.

 

  1. Mustache.

At some point in the late 1960’s I grew a beard, because I could:  it seemed a badge of maturity.  Nobody hassled me about it, but nobody said it looked terrific.  When I look at old pictures with the beard, I think, “Eh.”

In 1971 I went to see “The Virgin and the Gypsy,” based on a D.H. Lawrence novella.  Franco Nero was dazzlingly handsome as the swarthy gypsy—but I was also drawn to an elegant young major with a bewitching little mustache.

I’d associated mustaches with cartoon villains, with Adolf Hitler, and with repressed and proper Englishmen, like Alec Guinness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and David Niven in almost anything.  In other words, not an appropriate look for a twenty-something during the early years of the sexual revolution.   But this mustache was different.  It beckoned and hinted:  my mouth is available for a passionate kiss.

That night I shaved off my beard, leaving only the hair on my upper lip.   No movie star—still, a definite improvement.  I’ve had that mustache ever since.  Twice I grew back the beard for a year or two, only to get rid of it.  I preferred my bare chin, and its cleft.

I used to shape my mustache myself, but now my barber Avi takes care of it when he cuts my hair and trims my eyebrows, which in recent years have grown bushy.   I don’t much care how long my hair is, so I wait until the mustache in the mirror reminds me of John Bolton, a very silly looking man.  I then head over to Chelsea for a reset.

From time to time I wonder whether I should get rid of the mustache and present my face as it really is.   But it’s as fixed in my image of myself as the eyeglasses I’ve worn since I was five….  I’d feel incomplete, naked without it.

 

  1. Skin.

In June of 1961, after my junior year of high school, I went to the beach at Rockaway with some classmates.  We spent the entire day there, and for over an hour I lay on my left side playing Scrabble.   Unfortunately, I had the harebrained notion that I needed sunscreen only on my face, arms and neck.  The next day my right leg was purple and sore.  It never blistered, but it looked sunburned for months.

I expected that this leg would be doomed to skin cancer or some other pathology.  It hasn’t happened.  Every six months my dermatologist does a full body check, but he never finds anything—except on my face, which requires constant attention.   If I’m lucky, he merely freezes off a pre-cancerous cluster.   But I’ve had half a dozen positive biopsies—basal cell carcinoma—followed by Mohs surgery, a procedure that sounds scarier than it is.   Dr. Mohs, whoever he was, developed a protocol for removing the surface layer of skin, then examining it under a microscope, and, if necessary, taking off a second layer, repeating the process until all is clear.

The face has remarkable recuperative powers.  I once had Mohs on the top of my left ear, and when the bandage came off it looked like a dog had nibbled off a chunk. The ear grew back, and now there’s only a faint scar at the site.  Other Mohs procedures usually end with an inch-long incision: the surgeon cuts beyond the cancer site to create two flaps that are sewn together to close the wound.  A month or two later it’s difficult to locate where the surgery took place.

When I have Mohs I feel like a car brought in for an oil change or a new battery.  It’s routine maintenance that leaves me as good as new.

 

  1. Nose.

My mother had a peculiar attitude about being a Jew.  Though nearly all her friends were Jewish, she was made uncomfortable by such markers of Jewish identity as Brooklyn accents and big noses.  As a child of immigrants, she needed to feel fully “American.”

Fortunately, none of her sons had big noses, and for some reason she particularly liked mine.   In addition, unlike my brothers, I was blond and blue-eyed.  She often said with great pleasure that as a little boy I “looked like a Polish prince.”  Mother was certainly aware that actual Polish princes oppressed Jews and serfs, and she wouldn’t have wanted one in her house.  What she meant by the Polish prince thing was that it was great that I didn’t look at all Jewish.

A people-pleaser by nature, I took to heart Mother’s message that it’s important to smooth any rough edges, blending in with the majority culture.   On first meeting, people rarely tag me as a Jew, as a gay man, or even as a native New Yorker.  I’m comfortable with all these identities, but I don’t embody them in my speech and bearing.   I travel incognito.

I’m a little sorry about this.  After all, I was raised in Queens, not far from Fran Drescher of “The Nanny,” and I’m perfectly capable of invoking her nasal whine: “Oh, Mr. Sheffield.”   In the early 1970s, when I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx, it gave me great pleasure to talk like my students–at least a little like them.

But I can’t do anything about my nose, not that I’d want to.

 

Charles Troob:  This was written in response to a prompt from David Grogan in his wonderful memoir study group. 

Back to School

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by Stewart Alter

I know it’s ancient history
but I can’t seem to forget
my teacher’s unexpected oration
addressing my report on Egyptian
measurements in our sixth-grade class.

Before that, and even more so after,
my ruler was the cubit length,
its logic the body’s, not some notched wooden strip,
a tower stretching from the elbow to the tip
of the steepled middle finger.

I enlivened my report cover with color,
made rainbows of Pharaoh’s fingers and nemes,
added sphinxes, pyramids, a blue-striped Nile,
crowned the verbiage inside with visual style,
thus animating my words like hieroglyphs.

But when my teacher drew my opus from the pile
and held it, like Antony bearing Caesar’s will,
my classmates were mesmerized, my artistry reframed.
“This colored-in cover is baby work,” she proclaimed,
as she buried me along with that long ago world.

 

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been contributing poems to Voices since 2021.

 

First Job

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by Stewart Alter

There’s an expectation about childhood
jobs which, when I had my first one,
I didn’t catch onto, as I dragged
a net at the end of a long pole
around the rectangle
of a swimming pool
skimming the water
removing the inkblot bugs
in the bungalow colony
my uncle owned.

Back and forth, back and forth,
I was supposedly starting to learn
about the grown-up world,
but I kept looking over my shoulder
envying my friends just hanging out
while they were talking about me
resenting my quarter-a-day job
secured through a family connection.

I didn’t work as long
as I was supposed to,
didn’t stretch for the hard-to-reach
insects lying dead among leaves
in the center of the pool,
and unless the lesson was
you didn’t have to finish a job
to still get paid
I didn’t learn much
about the real world.

When I felt I was through I’d take the pole
to the fence surrounding the pool
to shake the net clean into the tall grass.
The caught flies and mosquitoes
lay across the net
like black specks scattered
in a painting by Miro.
I think he would have
gotten more out of the job than I did.

 

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been contributing poems to Voices since 2021.

The Things That Return

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by Mark Fischweicher

 

1

Same as yesterday, he says,
“Everything bagel, cream cheese and lox,
slice of onion, tomato,
toasted?

and the creek, it still rushes
under the old railroad bridge
Just as it has
for years
It runs in the woods
behind our house
and we cross it often to get
through the maples and oaks and birches and pines
to the old iron ore pit
carved out of stone
after they finally
let the springs fill it in,

full now full
to forty feet deep
though the train no longer runs
as it had years ago,
bikers and walkers and runners fly by
on the paved over tracks,
and the spotted and painted,
the box and the wood turtles,
the goldfinch and catbirds
and sparrows, the waxwings
and swallows and warblers
still sing and the brook trail
still flows where it had

a history unchanged
off it flows to the Hudson
and back to the ocean
crashing on waves
and boulders and rocks

2

we can walk on the trail
as it runs by the brook
just where we’d seen, like a statue,
or a sculpture of sorts, a heron,
still as stone,
till it catches the fish
in one gulp

and down where the tracks still run
where we board for the train
going down to the city
there’s this one single woman
who walks out, on her lawn
across from the station,
who stands with her hands,
statuesque,
deftly stretched
there before her
balletically smoking her one cigarette
not to fill up the house with her ash
I suspect
these are the things that we look for in life

the things that return

even memories
and poems as such

3

The things that return
the seasons and waves the wind
and the rain –
cryst yf my love were in
my arms
and I yn my bed
againe

And in these steady
homeless winds
even the words sing
even the birds spin their tales
In these steady, homeless winds,
perhaps a breeze
will waft the clouds
away.

 

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats,  the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School  of Poets.

Tirade to dismiss my fall

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by Mark Fischweicher

As I get older
………………………my memory fades.
His name, her name, that place, this.
No matter how I try, I can’t recall.

The emptiness that fills my mind pervades
though some say this aloofness should be my wish
to be detached
………………..to let whatever comes to me be all.

I say my nimble wits have never been
………………..my ace of spades
My greatest attribute has always been my silly gibberish
just letting all my fears and cheers flow out without a stall

Not trying too hard to manage all my weird crusades,
my escapades.
If I am not remiss, that should be my bliss.
That’s all.
I think I’ve hit the wall.

 

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats,  the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School  of Poets.

 

 

All the Time

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by Mary-Joan Gerson

(Inspired by: Taylor Swift:
‘Honey, I rose up from the dead
…….I do it all the time’)

Hiding the ice cream behind the broccoli does
Not protect me from my nighttime forage.
All gone.
I do it all the time.

Calling one more friend in a crowded morning does
Not protect me from racing to the subway.
I’m breathless.
I do it all the time.

Knowing that one click can save me from series bingeing does
Not protect me from a sleepless night
I’m exhausted.
I do it all the time

And wishing and promising and hoping does
Not protect me from a lifetime of lapses
Perhaps I should accept who I am?

Well, maybe not all the time

 

Mary-Joan Gerson is a psychologist/psychoanalyst who has written extensively about couples/family therapy and coping with chronic illness.  She also has published 5 children’s books based on the folklore of Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico, one of which has been produced as a children’s musical. She loves learning at LP2 as well as travel, painting and photography, and the remarkable richness of New York’s cultural life.