Having A Gratitude Attitude

It is not an easy thing to be grateful for everything in your life. It requires a little perspective, an understanding of how all events, people and emotions are interconnected and most of all it requires the act of getting your head out of your ass. (For me, that’s the hard part.)

I’m not sure if it’s my Irish DNA or my short-lived but permanently influential Catholic training, but I am hard wired to focus on what isn’t going right, rather than what is. As much as I try to deny it, I live in my head way more than I need to, and I focus too much of my energy on worrying about things that don’t really matter.

While I would like to say I have found a way to fix it, I have surrendered to the reality that there is a part of me that is this way and always will be, rather than exert effort to change (which feels like the emotional equivalent of rewiring your house) I have been trying to balance it.

In researching Balinese Hinduism for my second book, I was struck by the foundational belief that balance is what is important, that without the dark you cannot have the light. Without evil you cannot have good. And without obsessive compulsive fixative behavior, you cannot fully experience gratitude and peace (okay they don’t say that I added that…)

Discovering this made a huge difference in my life. Instead of giving up the long list of To Dos and hyper focus on goals, I have added an additional task of keeping a gratitude list and reviewing and adding to it every day. So along with…Call about overcharges on dental insurance statement…I write, Grateful I have good teeth, a job that provides me with Health Insurance and a dentist who takes good care of me.

Yes, I write a gratitude statement next to most of my To Dos.

I have been doing this since my surgery over the summer and have been amazed at how well it works. In addition to forcing me to take a moment during a time in my day where I can think clearly (I update my ToDos in the morning) it also sets the tone for rest of the day. It helps me see that in spite of all the stressors, goals, objectives and tasks, everything is ok. It is as it should be.

While I can’t say I have not had my share of meltdowns and feeling overwhelmed, I can feel myself recovering from the panic faster. In fact, I shocked myself last Friday night when I opened a letter from the IRS that said they wanted me to produce documentation (meaning EVERY receipt) from my Schedule C from 2010. “This sucks,” I said, as I put the letter down. As I started to feel my chest tighten and damning thoughts admonishing me I heard a different voice that said, “the worst that can happen is that you will have to pay more taxes, which you shouldn’t because you have the receipts – remember? You are compulsive about these things.”

Number One on my gratitude list for that day: I am grateful for being detailed oriented and fiscally responsible.

I needed a few glasses of wine before I was able to eek out a small shout out to the IRS for pointing that out to me. (And when I take a big picture view, those expenses were connected to promoting my book which was a great and happy experience.)

While the holidays can often be a time when we feel more of what is missing from our lives than what is there -- I wish you an abiding and lasting feeling of gratitude and appreciation of the wonders of your life. And as you feel the stresses of the season wear you down, take a moment to sneak away and recharge by pulling out that gratitude list and jot something down even if it’s how grateful you are the holidays only come once a year.
If that doesn’t work for you…I find wine helps too.

Navigating the storm…

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."-- Louisa May Alcott


Two days before Irene was scheduled to make landfall on Long Island I was standing in my living room trying to figure out what I needed to take with me if I evacuated. Aside from important papers (like the deed to my house and insurance documentation) there was very little I felt I could live without and yet my house is filled with stuff.


In truth the contents of my house are not as meaningful to me as my house itself. I have a close relationship with my home, I think of myself as its’ guardian and caretaker. I try to keep it in good repair, and looking as good as it can. In return, I expect it to shelter me, and offer me refuge from all the storms of life. My house represents my ability to take care of myself and the by-product of many years of saving and hard work.


If my house could speak it would have reminded me that it has withstood a great many hurricanes in the 112 years it has been standing, even the big one in 1938 which wiped out so many homes and businesses in Greenport Village. It would have told me it knew how to weather a storm as I have learned from the multitude of blizzards we have endured together, some with winds gusting up to 40 miles per hours and once winds so strong it made my house sway. And it would have reminded me that even though I love it, a house is still an object, a thing, and if I were to lose it to a hurricane, I could rebuild it.


Thankfully Irene did not cause the damage on Long Island it was supposed to, it moved upstate instead and devastated the homes and livelihoods of so many farmers and families. They were not given the luxury I was given to take a moment to consider whether to stay or to go. The raging rivers crested and flooded before many people could get to dry land.


In the end, I decided to go. I took enough clothes for a week, a tote bag of documents, and a valuable ring I inherited from my Mom and Aunt. I took a backup of my hard drive which had all my writing and photos, about a thousand chargers for all my electronic equipment, and cash.


As I drove in the car to my brother’s house in Philadelphia I imagined how my life would be with just the contents in my trunk, instead of feeling sad, I felt lighter. All those boxes from my apartment in the city I have not opened since I moved were filled with things I had no attachments to, all those papers in a pile on my kitchen island, things I needed to follow-up on, didn’t seem so important anymore and all those clothes in my closet I sort through and obsess about whether to donate or to keep, just seem like silly distractions.


Perhaps it is a factor of being fifty, when you can see more honestly how futile it is to hold onto to anything too hard, especially objects. We try to make things stake our claim on this earth – that boat, car or house tells the world we exist. We were here. And yet all those things can be washed away in an instant.


The one thing we can count on, that is with us every step of the way, every moment of our journey is something we dismiss as not good enough, strong enough, worth enough. It is our spirit, our self. That is what gets us through.


Driving on the New Jersey turnpike I realized that everything I ever was, could be, or would be was inside me, not in a box, a bag, a carton or an envelope.


Everything else was just stuff.

Recovery Road...

Sitting in the car, heading home, on the Friday of my first week back at work after my surgery, I put my head in my hands and started to cry. I was exhausted both mentally and physically. I felt like I had just been through a week of boot camp. I had totally underestimated the amount of stamina I needed to get through one simple day of work. I was frustrated with myself for being tired. What was wrong with me? The surgery was over, I had rested at home for a week and worked from home for another, why wasn’t I one hundred percent?

At three weeks I still couldn’t chew very well, my lower lip was still (and is still) numb which made everything from speaking to eating to crying an effort. Everything felt like an adjustment -- from wearing a seatbelt to talking on the phone, to the clothes I could wear, to rinsing out toothpaste. I was overwhelmed and depressed.

It took me a while to realize the problem was not with my recovery – the problem was my expectation of what should happen.

I have a long history of ignoring what my body is trying to tell me. I have an arrogance about my will being able to drag my body along regardless of any illness or injury. I’m that person who never gets sick for a day, because I don’t let myself be sick. When I’m under the weather I tell myself to buck up, I deny the sniffles, ignore the sore throat and open the window to cool off from a fever. When I do finally succumb to illness it isn’t pretty. It takes me out for a week, lands me in the doctor’s office listening to a lecture about how close I had come to being hospitalized.

I guess at my core I believe I am useless if I am not contributing to society in some way. Clearly my sense of safety is predicated on being in the world, making a contribution, working until I drop. Being sick makes me feel like that wounded antelope you see in all those nature films that gets eaten by the lions. Who wants to be that guy?

Yet who wants to be the woman crying in the car at the train station because she has pushed herself too hard? Frankly, I’d almost prefer being the antelope.
It is hard to face your own limitations and to respect what you need to heal, I’m afraid it is even harder to continue to ignore the small still voice inside you that asks you to breathe, to listen and to honor the amazing vessel that enables us to live fully in the world.
I am lucky I have people in my life who remind me to slow down, and who are patient with me when I cancel plans because I am too tired.

I am now seven weeks out from the surgery and take great pleasure in sleeping on my left side again, and being able to turn my head without using my whole body. The sensitivity in my left back molar has returned, something that used to annoy me but I now take as a reminder that my nerves are slowly coming back to life. Worrying about what I still cannot do, takes the focus of what I can do again, chewing came back just in time for the best corn of the season and because it is often hard to talk when my lip is acting up I save my words for when it is really important (and honestly, I like the challenge of taking less and listening more.)

Yesterday, after being able to take my first long walk, it occurred to me that I had been looking at this whole recovery thing all wrong. Instead of thinking it was taking me away from my job, I realized it was my job to recover and it warranted my total and complete focus and priority.
I stopped wishing I could get back to my old self and made peace with this newer, modified version of me. With any bit of luck she won’t met that crying woman in the car anytime soon.

Letting go...

In early July I had a surgery to remove a tumor that was growing on my left jaw. The tumor was benign, the surgery, although delicate, was a success and had a side effect of some temporary paralysis in my face mostly in my lip and ear lobe. The hardest part of the recovery is dealing with limited mobility in my neck, some pain and the inability to eat most solid foods for a while. Still, as I keep reminding myself, it beats having a tumor growing out of your jaw.

Going through this experience has given me a profound respect and admiration of anyone who goes through life changing illness, accidents or surgeries. It takes a tremendous amount of fortitude to keep yourself focused on your health and well being when there are so many reasons to get distracted and depressed. I think of people I have known who had months of recovery after accidents and am newly impressed by their strength.

For me, the work began as soon as I discovered I would have to have surgery. Until I got a second opinion I was hoping I would be told it was just a big cyst that could be removed on my lunch hour in the doctor’s office. When I heard the exact same information from the second doctor, and saw the image of the tumor on the MRI I knew I would have to face my fear of surgery.

It is a lucky thing to say the last (and only time) I have been in the hospital before this was when I was five years old to have my tonsils out. Unfortunately, that experience traumatized me and influenced the way I feel about myself and being taken care of.

Forty five years is a long time to avoid facing a fear and as much as I would have liked to have gone ninety, it was not realistic for me the think I would never have to revisit those terrifying feelings of a five year old alone on a gurney without her parents to comfort or explain to her what was happening.

My anxiety over the surgery was palpable and it expressed itself in a spike in my blood pressure that was so high my doctor was concerned I would not be able to go through with it if we couldn’t normalize it. For anyone who has ever had anxiety, you know how hard it is to quell it when it is expressing itself physically like that.

Friends and family offered to be with me but everything they said upset me. While they were trying to help I only heard conditions. No matter what they said I felt like abandonment was inevitable. To avoid that feeling I had learned not to depend on anyone. I even asked the doctor if I could be released the day after surgery on my own as I didn’t want to ask anyone to pick me up.

Before I even had the surgery I was suffering and deep down I started to think this tumor was trying to teach me something. On my bad days I thought it was telling me I was alone and always would be and on better days I thought it was challenging me to test the waters again, to be willing to let go of many of my outdated beliefs. Maybe what was true when I was five did not have to be true at fifty.

The shift began when I made a decision I would do whatever it took not to be afraid of what was happening to me. I sought the counsel of everyone I could. I spoke to friends who had been through multiple surgeries, life threatening cancers, and long rehabilitations. I talked to my doctor about my anxiety and he helped me break it down practically, assured me I had made solid decisions about my care. I spoke to my therapist about the experience and my commitment to change how I felt. My yoga teacher offered kind words about surrender and acceptance.

And then, one night, in a class I take on Buddhism during a meditation I felt something inside me start to change. I saw that little girl at five and felt love and compassion for her fear but I also saw a five year old that survived and learned how to take care of herself. And instead of making me sad, that revelation made me happy. I learned how to be safe in world that didn’t always feel that safe. Until then, I had never seen that experience in that way. My memory was locked in the trauma not in the survival.

The truth I saw after that meditation was that my suffering was not coming from the surgery but from my inability to accept what was inevitable – whether or not I wanted it to happen – the surgery was unavoidable and I had to a choice to either resist it and suffer or accept it and trust
I would be okay.

It came down to a decision and a leap of faith. (And let’s face it, what else is there when facing the challenges of life?) Did I want to live in a world where I was abandoned and afraid or a world where I was loved and taken care of?

My friend Donna stayed with me in pre-op and although the surgery was delayed by three hours, my blood pressure was steady and normal. I did not need an anxiety medication. When asked how I wanted to go into the operating room I opted to walk-in and shake the hands of my surgical team before I lay down on the table. When the anesthesologist promised they would take good care of me, I believed her and thanked her.

I have accomplished many things in my life but nothing made me prouder than learning how to surrender to surgery and to the outcome. And nothing honored the memory of that frightened five year old Teri more than the fifty year old version walking in on her own, ready, willing and able to face the challenges ahead.

As crazy as it sounds, I had a moment just before I left for the hospital where I thanked that big round tumor growing out of my jaw, thanked it for being benign and for showing me how to let go of my fear and accept the love and kindness that was all around me.

Little did I know…there would be more lessons to learn as I recovered.

You are NOT done learning

It takes a long time to be good at something and most of the time that road is paved with quite a few potholes and bumps. Still, when we develop an expertise in anything, we forget what it took to get good.

I was good at my old job, very good at it. I was there for eighteen years and worked my way through the ranks, held a variety of positions, grew as the organization grew and had relationships with many people. There were few questions I didn’t know the answers to, and few problems I could not navigate my way through. I knew the best time to catch the subway to the office, the locations of the best lunch spots and the fastest way to get cross town. In short, I had become an expert at my work life.

And then I lost my job.

In a few short hours I went from being an expert to a complete and total novice. From the time I was sixteen I had never been without a job, had only taken one vacation longer than a week, and had listed “losing my job” on the top five things I never wanted to go through in my life. (Note to reader here, if you want to avoid something don’t make a list of what you are trying to avoid, the universe has a way of delivering all those items to you when you least expect it – which is why I no longer remember any of the other items on that list!)

On top of that I was about to experience the release of my first novel which I had been working on for over ten years and was thrilled beyond belief and also in the dark about what it would mean to me and how well it would do.

The first thing I realized was how invested I was in my routine, in my expertise at my life. Sure, it had gotten a little boring, and I was utterly miserable at my job. But it was familiar, it was safe, it was… my life.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the only mistake I had made all those years was thinking there were parts of my life I could partition off and think of as solid and unchangeable and that it was okay to stop learning and growing in one area if I was trying in another.

The problem is not that life is changing all the time, that every minute of every day something is shifting that will impact how our trains run, or what someone at work says, or how good that pork chop will taste at dinner. No the problem is that we EXPECT that everything will go as we wish it to, that our path will be clear, that each day will be without challenges. And, on some level, we think our learning is over, that the reward for hard work is stability. That being an expert in routine is living.

I am now at a job that allows me to bring the best of my abilities to task every day, but it is so new and the challenges so vast that at times I find myself stricken with doubt, and unable to answer questions off the top of my head. I have had to learn to say, “I don’t know but I will find out.” And in doing so I have discovered that my talent is not in knowing, it is in finding out.
I don’t have a straight path to work anymore, I gave up my apartment when I lost my job as I wasn’t sure if I would work in the city anymore. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that yet but I have a good friend who shares her apartment with me whenever I need it. I know a few good places to go for lunch but I work in area that is changing all the time and is so far removed from my old work neighborhood that it feels like I work in a different city. I am not an expert in my routine anymore, not an expert at my job, or even in knowing how to run my life.

My novel has done well, and has opened up worlds to me, and connected with me many incredible writers and readers. I am working on my second novel. I worry it will not be as good, it won’t be what I want it to be. I struggle with the doubt and with an expectation I have that I should be feeling something different, I should be further along, should be through learning about writing? Free of doubt?

I see more clearly now that the learning is never over, that the only thing worth being an expert in is being open to change, open to where the day takes you, and trusting your worth is not in your knowledge, your looks or your talents, your worth is in your heart and what you bring to each new day.

The Right Words

I used to say my favorite three words to hear were, “You are right.” No matter what the circumstance or relationship, hearing I am right, used to give me great satisfaction. I didn’t care about the cost of being right or the benefit either. I needed to be acknowledged as the right one, the only one.

The problem with wanting to be right all the time is that you aren’t right, you are just you with your point of view, feelings and life experiences. There is not a universal truth committee reviewing all sides of every situation determining who the ultimate winner is…there is not one truth, there are many.

I learned this the hard way in my relationship with my sister and I lost a few years of time holding my ground and fighting for acknowledgement of my “rightness.” Even after my father died, after we had reconciled and worked through a lot of our issues, I could not give up my need to be right.

The turning point came a few years ago when a small incident became a large one and soon we were in conflict again and not speaking. The longer we were separated the harder it became for me to believe in the value of being right, and after realizing how much I had hurt her feelings, it didn’t seem important whether or not I had a point, it seemed stupid and petty.

It became clear to me I was giving up a vital connection to someone I loved to be right. And in wanting to be right I was choosing not to see my own culpability. I was choosing to be the righteous victim.

I remember the exact moment when everything changed for me. I was sitting in my living room listening to a bird singing and I felt a great sadness take over me. I wanted to speak to my sister. I wanted to be connected to her again more than I wanted to be right. I decided I would do whatever it took to make it right with her.

I started with an apology and I listened and acknowledged her hurt. I made room for her perspective and I worked at understanding her point of view. What struck me the most was when she said, “I knew why you were so mad, and I wasn’t upset with you for that, I just didn’t understand why you couldn’t see it from my perspective.”

I told her the truth. I told her that it was more important for me to be right than to understand.
“How’s that working for you?” she said. We both laughed.

The great gift she gave me that day was making room for my feelings, and acknowledging that I had a right to my anger and reaction. It was only fair for me to do the same for her and then, something incredible happened, I heard three words that have become my new favorites.

“I love you.”

Go with your Gut

I can classify all the major turning points in my life into one of two categories. I either went with my gut or I ignored it, both choices taught me valuable lessons about trusting your instincts.

One of my earliest memories of having a strong gut reaction was the first time I walked into a classmate’s house as a freshman in high school. The house was dark, musty and had that warm smell of all the food that had been cooked in the last ten years. As soon as I crossed the threshold I got this overwhelming feeling that bad things were going on in the house and this friendship I had struck with this girl was not a good idea.

Of course, by that time, through rigorous indoctrination at school and at home, I had learned to doubt most of my feelings. Instead of accepting my reactions and responding accordingly I had developed a complex system of assessment which began with questioning why I was even having the feeling and usually ended with a harsh denial of the validity of it.

I told myself I was crazy and made up excuses whenever I was invited to her house.

I guess you know where this story is going…six months later my friend was hospitalized after having a nervous breakdown and after making harassing phone calls to the new girlfriend of the boy I liked posing as me. Her story, as it turned out was rife with abuse, secrets and darkness.

What ended up taking months for my head to figure out...my gut knew in an instant.

When my gut has a good feeling, it is easier to go with it. Looking for apartments was easy as I let my brain take a break and trusted my instinct. Most of the time, I knew before opening a closet door or seeing the kitchen whether I would live there or not. When I saw a picture of my house, I knew that was where I was going to live before I stepped through the door. (And the house I bought was the ONLY house I ever looked at.)

Maybe it’s hard to believe that so many of our choices in life can be left up to our gut. How can it be more accurate than our logic which we have cultivated through education, self-help books and Oprah? How can it be right?

Even the location of our gut, somewhere in the belly region is a source of a lot of discomfort for us; let’s face it who really likes their stomach or abs. We are always trying to change it, to make it leaner, more defined, less soft and pliant, less, “gut like.”

As I get older, I question a great deal of the assumptions I have lived with most of my life. I don’t see much value in denying your feelings or measuring your right to have a reaction. I tire of the constant battle of the ego and/or brain over the gut and/or heart. I am interested in cultivating a life that relies more on my gut and less on my ego. After fifty years of having my back, I figure it might be time to let it take the lead.

FEMINIST is NOT a Dirty Word

After an author event a few weeks ago where I spoke about the importance of women to give voice to their stories, a woman came up to me and said it was refreshing to hear someone speak who was an unapologetic Feminist. “I hope you’re not offended by that,” she said.

“Offended?” I said, “I’m flattered.”

No matter how bad the connotation of the word Feminist gets in our culture, you will never, ever hear me say I am not one. In fact, you will never hear me say that I have moved beyond Feminism, (honestly what is beyond the true equality of the sexes?) And please, don’t start with me about how being a feminist makes me a man-hater. I’ll just yawn in your face out of boredom. You want to tell me women have achieved as much as men in this country, this contienent, this world? Then I will seriously have to ask you to pick up a paper and read it every now and then.

The mere fact that feminism is a term men and women shy away from should be enough of an example of how bad things have gotten. It’s like saying the civil rights movement made everything okay for African Americans – oh wait, some people believe that too don’t they?

Feminism is a hot button topic for me. Consider yourself warned. It has been since I was a young girl. No matter what the world has tried to teach me, I fervently believe that I am second to no one and that I have an unalienable right to make the same amount of money for doing the same job as a man or a gorilla.

I do not believe that men and women are the same in the way they see the world, approach relationships, business or their feelings. I don’t want to make men more feminine or women more masculine. I want the same pay for the same job. Let me rephrase that, I DEMAND the same pay for the same job.

I want to live in a world where women and children are not repressed, are not trafficked, sold, abused, degraded, oppressed or killed simply because they are women.

I want to live in a world where girls are not bombarded endlessly with images and expectations of perfection which are not only impossible to achieve but not worth achieving. Feeling beautiful is the essence of beauty and any woman over thirty knows that doesn’t happen with the right mascara.

Being pleasing does not give you happiness, turning yourself into an object of adoration denies your own humanity – why are we asking our girls to do that?

The truth is women are assaulted, molested, raped and abused at alarming rates. When bodies are found in unmarked graves, chances are they will be the bodies of women, and most likely they will be women who worked in the sex trade and lived a few blocks away from any address anyone cared about.

Many of the plots of TV shows, bestselling novels and movies revolve around the mutilation and murder of women. As if all the pampering, makeup and primping we get from these so-called “women’s magazines” is just preparation for becoming an ideal corpse.

I am a feminist and will be one until the day I die – and if I have done my job right I will leave behind a new generation of feminists who know the fight is not over, it is just beginning.

Look, the math here is simple, take care of women, you take care of the world. That makes me a feminist – what does that make you?

You Treat Others As You Treat Yourself

Years ago my sister said this to me during a time I was struggling with a boss who was not very kind to me. This person was not compassionate, nasty, and was never satisfied by anything anyone did. “Imagine how he must feel about himself,” she said. “We treat others as we treat ourselves.”

At that point in my life and in my relationship with this person I was not able to understand the power of that statement. It took many years (and a lot of therapy) for me to finally accept this fundamental truth.

I have not always been kind to myself. In fact, I have always been my harshest critic. My personal bar of achievement has at times been so high you would need a telescope to see it. I viewed mistakes as something people did because there were not paying close enough attention. And failure was not an option. Viewing my past through this harsh lense, I often blamed myself for not knowing better, for not being more adept at preventing hurtful things from happening to me. I took the notion of personal responsibility to an extreme. I believed everything was in my power to control, so any hurt or injury was my own damn fault.

And yet, I also believed I was capable of achieving anything if I worked hard enough and was clear in my intention. I thought the secret to my success was a result of my high bar, critical judgment and unreasonable sense of personal responsibility.

As a manager, I employed this approach to my staff. I assumed everyone had a bar as high as mine and was not willing to settle for anything short of perfection. I could not understand how someone could give me a document that was misspelled or without page numbering and tell me it was their best work. At times, instead of stepping back and trying to see it from their point of view, I handled these transgressions with the same harsh criticism I applied to myself.

This did not seem unreasonable to me, why wouldn’t I be as hard on someone as I was on myself (in fact, I believed I could never be as hard on a colleague or friend as I was with myself – this was how I justified it.)

By the time I hit my forties I started to feel the effects of my self-judgment. It was exhausting to always have to hit a home run, to work harder than everyone else and still not be satisfied, to never, ever, allow yourself to fail or make a mistake and be okay with it.

As I began to work through the causes of these feelings, my perspective on my own life and self slowly started to shift. I began to see how important it is to fail, how much freedom there is in allowing yourself to be human, and how forgiving yourself is the greatest thing you can ever do.

And, as I began to make small changes in my own approach, I noticed how many of my relationships started to shift as well. As a manager, I got better at being able to tell the difference between my personal expectation and what was good work by “normal” standards.

Perhaps my greatest achievement was my ability to give voice my own struggle. I learned that sometimes the best thing you can do is just admit you are a hard ass and tell the truth about how tough you can be on yourself and others. And, when you go too far, apologize and move forward.

There is no downside to loving yourself more deeply, no excuse not to learn how. The love we give ourselves just ripples out into the world in the way we act, the deeds we do and the intentions we set. Let us treat others the way we treat ourselves and let that be with love and compassion.

Teri's 50 Sense: Everybody Has A Story

Welcome to the first entry to Teri's 50 Sense - 50 things I've learned on the road to 50.

I collect stories like some people collect stamps or coins. Chances are if I’m a passenger in your taxi, or seated next to you on a plane or waiting at the doctor’s office, I’ll get your story. Not just the one you tell everyone that covers the basics of who you are, what you do, and what your relationship status is…no I’ll get that one thing out of you few people know about. I’ll get you to tell me what your spiritual beliefs are or your secret wish. At some point during our conversation you will find yourself saying, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this…” and then you will go on because once you know you can tell me, once you see the glint in my eye urging you on you won’t be able to stop yourself. You will tell me you used to shoot heroin while you ran a successful consulting business. When I ask you how it feels to get high, you will tell me.

You will tell me about the time you cheated on your wife and how sorry you are…when I ask you when it was, you will tell me it was when you were in the war. I will ask you what war and you will say the big one, WWII. Your wife passed away twenty years ago and still you feel bad, “worse than killing a man,” you tell me. I don’t ask you what that feels like. I can tell you don’t want to go there.

Maybe you will tell me about how much you cried after you had your baby and how you didn’t feel anything for a long time and how you worried there was something wrong with you until one day the fog lifted and you thought your heart would break from loving her.

Or you will tell me about your debt and how you lost everything from wanting too much and as we drive down the LIE with the meter ticking, you tell me how good it felt to let that desire go…to only own what you have paid for…and to know your wife loved you no matter what.

People tell me these things because I believe everyone has a story…and most stories are more dramatic, interesting, funny and inspirational than any book you’ve read or movie you have seen.

I don’t start the conversation most of the time, but I am open to where it can lead and I’m not afraid to ask a probing question if I trust the willingness is there to answer it. My intent is not to pick at a wound or throw gasoline on a fire…it is to understand more fully.

My friends tell me I am like this because I am a writer…but I think I am a writer because I am like this. I am not in love with language the way many writers are, nor do I yearn for historical accuracy or mass appeal, I am a story junkie. I want you to tell me yours and I want to tell you mine.

I am honored to hear anyone’s truth…even when it is painful. I am willing to listen because the telling of a story, no matter how dark or tragic, is a triumph. There is no greater achievement than living to tell the tale.

That is the whole point isn't it? The joy of living is not just in the doing, it is in the sharing.

Everyone has a story and if you are lucky you might just get to hear it.

Teri 5.0

Over the last few months, I have been struggling with turning 50. While there is a lot of credence to the argument that it’s just another year, it’s hard not to look at hitting the half-century mark with just a little bit of ambivalence and wonder.

The dictionary defines the word ambivalence as having equally conflicting feelings about a person or a thing. I define it as being emotionally log jammed. I have so many opposing emotions that I end up feeling stuck, not wanting to move forward and not wanting to go back.

See, the thing is, I don’t really want to BE younger and for the most part, except for those sagging bat wing things I have under my arms (thanks for the genetic code on that Grandma Coyne!) I actually FEEL pretty young. I’ve never been one of those people who thought my best years were behind me, never felt I had peaked or realized my fullest potential. When it comes to aging, I am definitely a glass is half full kind of gal.

As for the future, I generally have an optimistic view as well. So it’s not that I’m afraid of what is to come, at the moment I just feel a little worn out and a little too aware of the inevitability of change.

I remember when I was just out of college, working at one of my first jobs. I had lunch with a temp receptionist who was in her mid-thirties planning her second wedding to a man who was her hairdresser. After only a couple months of being on her own, she agreed to marry a man she openly admitted she wasn’t sure she loved. When I asked her why so moved so quickly she said, “you don’t realize this now because you are so young but time speeds up the older you get. You don’t have forever to get the things you want.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “The measurement of time is constant. A minute is a minute.”

“Yes, but our experience of time speeds up. You’ll see. When you were a kid summer vacation felt endless and now, all you have to do is blink on Memorial Day and it’s Labor Day.”

She was right.

When I think about my life up to forty, all the milestones, and high and lows feels evenly spread out over what feels like a hundred years but my ten years in my forties feel like they happened in a year. Maybe it is a factor of getting older, but the changes I experienced in my forties were profound, more so than any other decade of my life.

So here I am, on the brink of 50, feeling like the only thing I can count on is that this next decade will probably go by faster than my forties and will be filled with challenges and changes that will continue to amaze me.

Don’t get me wrong…I want it all, the good, bad, and ugly. The older I get the more committed I am to living my life on purpose, with an intent to grow and expand. To be the best Teri I can be…call it Teri version 5.0 if you will.

I am glad we don’t know how our lives will unfold, that we don’t know who will stay, who will go, who will come back and who will show up. I am grateful that the older I get the less I care about pleasing other people. I am happy to know what I know and feel what I feel.

But for now I would like to take a moment, however brief, and not think about the past or look toward the future. I would like to just be still and take shelter inside this ambivalence for a little bit longer.

Love is in the Air...

Whenever Valentine's Day rolls around it's hard not to hearken back to the days when whether or not I had a Valentine was a very big deal. Back in high school, the day was synonymous with the distribution of carnations in homeroom. Carnation Day was the brainchild, of cheerleaders and anyone else in high school whose birthright was a gorgeous loving Valentine every year. It was a perfect event, humiliation in disguise of a fundraiser.

Right after the morning announcements a bundle of carnations would arrive for the teacher to distribute. While there were always more than enough to go around, that's not how it played out, like most distribution in a free market, the most carnations went to the fewest girls.

While the sentiment of Valentine's Day is pure, the execution of it is more about showing the world how much you are loved than actually expressing or feeling it. Walking the halls in high school with no carnations felt like a statement of worthiness.

The acknowledgement of being loved is a wonderful thing and almost as valuable as demonstrating your love to others but love is not something that can be felt from a box of candy, a carnation or a diamond necklace. And love doesn't always come in the form of the captain of the high school football team, sometimes the carnation comes from the quiet guy who eats alone in the cafeteria.

This sounds fundamental and yet, it took me many years to understand it.

As I approach fifty I feel the force of love in small things and in the ways my friends and family care for me and hold my best interests in their heart. Instead of believing that love is something you earn or deserve, I understand that it is like air, there for the taking if you just open up and breathe it in.

If you believe you are loved, you are.

While it would have been nice to have gotten dozens of carnations on carnation day, in the cosmic universe of love we are drowning in them.

Extraordinary Women Writers I Worked With in 2010

I dont' know about you but this is the time of year I spend a good deal of time thinking back on the past twelve months and give thanks for lots of great opportunities and experiences. One of the most exciting things was hosting a great reading series with She Writes called Ordinary Women: Extraordinary Heroines. For those of you that joined us or follow the blog you know the purpose of the series is to spotlight great women writers who are telling interesting stories about ordinary women. In the coming year I hope to bring the series back to NYC and to a few other locations around the country and along with She Writes, I hope to continue to be an ambassador to the wide wonderful worthy world of women and their amazing adventures.

So as you plan your holiday purchases or plan on what books you will be curling up to over the holiday break consider these great women writers and their terrific books -- all of which I have had the pleasure of meeting this year.

Hyatt Bass

Tess Callahan

Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant

Louisa Ermelino

Amina Gautier

Masha Hamilton

Diane Meier

Audrey Niffenegger

Deborah Siegel

Gail Straub

Terese Svoboda

Emily Gray Tedrowe

Kamy Wicoff

Zoe Zolbrod

Mirror, Mirror

Last night I had a dream I helped a man and woman pass through a portal to another side of reality. (It beats the dream I had a few weeks ago that Ray Charles had put a dead horse under my bed.) To get to the other side they had to walk through a full length mirror. In the dream I told them they would be happy and I would clean up the broken glass.

I sat down to write this morning and couldn't get the faces of the man and woman off my mind (or the dream memory of picking up the shards of broken glass.) It didn't take long before I realized the couple in my dream were the characters in my second novel which I am rewriting.

Using a full length mirror as the portal is interesting (way to go subconscious!) as I would assume it means that in looking at my own reflection (or going inward) I can give birth to new realities. That reminds me a bit of the wicked queen in Snow White (or Sleeping Beauty?) that uses her mirror to tell her the truth -- who is the fairest of them all? "Not you," the mirror responds.

Passing through the mirror portal made my characters come alive but it also broke the glass - of which I had the job of "picking up the pieces." I think that accurately reflects the process of releasing your stories into the world. While it is liberating, it is also scary and leaves you with an intense vulnerability. Who wants the reflection to answer back in a negative way?

The dream ended with me tucking the man and woman into bed. It was my childhood bed complete with my old comforter and the backdrop of bright green apple tree wallpaper. What better way of showing me my responsibility to these characters than to have me safeguarding them like a mother does her children? What is more comforting than being tucked in?

In the end there is little that distinguishes the land of imagination from our dreamworld and even reality, in all those dimensions (including the spirit world if you are so inclined to believe) we are aching to tell our stories, to make something inside us real, to experience the transformation that comes from being known. Writing is a magic wand, a truthful mirror, a way in and a way out. As the Yogis say...all is one.

Now if I can just figure out how Ray Charles got that horse under my bed...

Our Relationship to Reading

While so much in my life has changed over the years the one constant has been my love of books. A passion for reading is a thread that connects me to so many friends, extending all the way back to elementary school where my friend Julie Rucker and I shared our love of books.

Recently Julie shared an essay she wrote on reading that reminded me of how important it is to share our favorite stories with each other. Like most of us, Julie has gone through lots of changes over the years, while husbands and jobs have come and gone, her boo

k collection and emotional connection to the stories remains true. I hope you will connect to her passion as much as I do and please feel free to share your thoughts as well...

Julie's Reflections on Reading

Read-such a simple word that has so many implications, connotations, emotions and goals. There should really be eighty unique words for it, like the Inuit have terms for types of snow. There are casual reads and forced reads, private reads, and those done for the appearance of privacy like on a crowded airplane, administered purposefully to avoid talking with the guy in the seat next to you. Where did the peaceful exploration of a new novel go with its fresh, inky smell and crisp virgin pages? “No time to read,” “Have to read,” these are the phrases going through my mind now. I long for the time when the hubbub of the day was merely interference to settling down with that novel that my sister just sent in the mail. But chaos runs its course and I know another novel will find its way to me. Maybe simply out of exhaustion I’ll put down the tools of the job of daily living and pluck one of the many mysteries from high upon my plant shelf, plump a pillow and be absorbed by a new place, another time, and an exhilarating adventure that I just would not otherwise have time for.

Growing up, books were everywhere in my family’s house. Mom and Dad were always building or dragging in new book cases for the ever expanding library. Each holiday, birthday, and any day for that matter, books were customary gifts for us. Even the tooth fairy brought me a book once. It was Nothing Ever Happens on My Block. I still have it. I still have nearly every book ever given to me which explains the plant shelf overflow. There’s an entire novel assortment given to me that I’ve nearly made a dent in and books categorized by subject. My library is noticed immediately, but not always favorably by those entering my home. Several people have suggested I get rid of them, but with the exception of gifting one now and then, the collection remains. It has outlived two husbands (they’re still alive, just no longer my husbands) who just could not fathom why I would keep a set of encyclopedias published in the 1950’s. Either you get it or you don’t. I’m sure there’s still valid information in those resources that not only did my older siblings and I use to do school reports, but my own kids have used them as well. And why would I keep those novels given to me by a dear elderly friend? Alright, some books are kept for sentimental reasons, but I swear I will get around to reading them someday.

There is a beautiful consumption that swells over me when I’m immersed in a new book. Almost obsessively I cannot wait to return to it again, and it’s such a rewarding moment when reading that last page. That is true of the good ones, anyway. For those that border on lame the compulsion is an optimism that it will get better, so I finish those too, generally. But that lovely, faraway place between the pages might as well be in someone else’s house when life gets just too darn busy.

Why isn’t reading a priority? It certainly should be. It calms the body and sharpens the mind, an anecdote to the stressors and pressures of all those other things like working and raising children. The read does take a back seat to the looming responsibilities. I think if there is indeed a literary crisis today that it is an issue of time management, not so much empathy for the practice. Understandable too is the interference of stimuli such as electronics. If I am not currently absorbed in one tale or another I’m more likely to turn on the television or play a game of Texas HoldEm on the computer to end the day. That is really a little surprising to realize given that just a few months ago those lonely novels were my sleep aid of choice.

It was a passion for a while of which I give the credit to a childhood friend who had just published her first novel. I couldn’t attend the debut and book-signing, so I sent my sister from New York in my place. Soon after that I received my autographed copy of The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne in the mail, and I gobbled it up like a box of Cheez-its. The read launch me into a whirlwind of books, one after another. That era continued for quite a while. Looking back, it may have ended right around the time that I lost my job. Also my rickety, old, wooden ladder broke, so I couldn’t reach the plant shelf anymore.

Come to think of it, there must be plenty of dust up there. Note to self- buy a new ladder and start reading again; the dust can wait.

The perk that unemployment has awarded me is the freedom to return to school, thus the forced read comes into play. I was awaiting my Mentor’s arrival at the café and reading bits and pieces from a book on a Pueblo ruin that I had just picked up at a used book store in town when he arrived. Having chosen a text for his course that won’t arrive for another week, he asked me to finish reading the one in my hands. “The whole thing?” I said to myself. While it is my desire to absorb the information, I planned for the technical compilation to be a behind the scenes reference support, not an assignment. Alas, the forced reading has begun. It’s funny the way components of life fall in to place.

Already this LAS class has been good for me. It has reminded me of a constant throughout my life-books. I can picture the day Mrs. Heinz took our first grade class to the Washington Elementary School library where I watched Caps for Sale waiting for me on the shelf while the librarian spoke. (Teri Coyne was there too.) I remember a Fiction and Fantasy class years later when my proposal for the subject of a book report was denied because The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was too short, so I wrote the report on the entire seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia series. I can recall my Mother telling the story of how she and her cousin, Dolly, would make butter and lettuce sandwiches, gather a stack of books, and read for hours. Reading is a wonderful thing, really. It transcends time, binding humanity together in the literary universe.

I’ve always admired those who take, or make as it were, the time to sit down with a good book. It’s a pleasant past time for sure, but there is also a certain beauty in coming across someone reading; they appear serene. I imagine others notice the peace in such a view. When my daughter was learning to read, and struggling with her fluency and expression, I heard her talking one afternoon on the back porch. As I came closer to the door, I noticed that she was not only seated beside the littler boy from next door, but that she was reading to him. Her words flowed like music. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I crept away and snatched up my camera to capture the glorious event on video.

She, like her mother, wrote her name completely backward for the longest time. My mother used to marvel at the way my writing was in a complete mirror image of how it should be. While teaching Gracie, I often thought if Mother wondered if my dyslexic ways would carry on or subside. Eventually and gradually letters face in the right direction, and someday the little girl will be sharing the wonders of a book with another child, maybe her own. For now, she’ll keep mixing her d’s with b’s and p’s with q’s just as I did, but before she knows it she’ll be engaged in a forced read for a college class, eating a butter and lettuce sandwich.

What's Old to You?

I don't think too much about getting older. For the most part I think of it as a good thing and although I have my moments, I wouldn't trade the benefits of self-acceptance for the advantages of youth. Still, some parts of aging are harder to take than others.

A few years ago I went for an eye exam and was told by the doctor I had the eyesight of a thirty year old woman. This pleased me to no end as I confessed to him that I did not want to wear glasses as that would be the milestone that would make me feel old.

The doctor was at bit older (and wiser.) He assured me I did not need glasses yet, "BUT," he said, "I suggest you find something else to feel old about because sooner or later you are going to need glasses, at the very least, for reading."

"But not today," I said as I enjoyed three more blissful years of reading fine print, menus by candlelight, and emails on my phone.

A few weeks ago, I was engrossed in a biography of Dorothea Lange and noticed it was hard for me to get into reading at night. That nagging voice told me it might help if I put on some magnifiers. I told myself my eyes were tired and since I had no problems reading in the morning but come nightfall it was a struggle.

I put on a pair of magnifiers I got just in case this day would come and presto I could see clearly. And just like that I was old.

I could lie to you and say it doesn't bother me, but it does. I accepted sagging skin, drooping body parts, gray hair, strange spots, night sweats, and falling asleep on the couch before eleven o'clock. I understand what is happening to my body and for the most part I am happy with how well I am holding up -- that is until I put on the glasses. It's only a matter of time before I wear my glasses on a chain around my neck and stuff tissues in the sleeve of my sweater just like Grandma Coyne used to do - -hell -- I got her flabby upper arms I might as well have her eyesight too.

I'll get over it. Just like I got over all the other transitions. And like most aspects of aging, when you consider the alternative -- adapting is always better than perishing.

Dealing with aging is a lot about wrestling with your pride and vanity. I don't want gray hair -- it doesn't look good on me so I color mine -- but I cannot give up reading just to appear to not need glasses.

The only thing worse than wearing glasses was having a book in my hands and not being able to read it. Reading is one of the great loves of my life and there is no end to what we are willing to do for love. I guess I'll just have to pick something else to feel old about...

Any suggestions?

One door closing...

On Thursday I said good-bye to my New York apartment and moved everything out to my house on Long Island. Although I was ready to make the move, I did not expect it to be as difficult as it turned out to be.

I lived in that apartment for over fifteen years and before that I lived in the studio next door. Moving to that building was a big step in my adult life. I was in my late twenties and until then I had lived with roommates from the time I came home from the hospital with my mother. I was afraid of living alone, I wondered what I would do with myself without someone to eat with, make plans or be annoyed at.

The movers were barely in the lobby before I realized that living alone was one of the most fantastic experiences I would ever have. I loved my L-shaped studio and reveled in the luxuries of being independent including drinking the milk out of the carton and knowing whatever I left in the fridge would stay there. Television and movie choices were not negotiated and I never had to wait for the phone to free up or the bathroom to be empty.

When the one bedroom next door opened up I was ready for more space and moved myself in by dragging my furniture across one threshold to another. I brought my boxes and my memories and settled in to a space that allowed me to have more guests, space and freedom. I had four large closets in that apartment and over time I filled them with stuff, lots and lots of stuff.

When I turned forty I yearned for more outdoor space, to be more connected to a community and to finally own something of my own so I bought my house and instead of moving everything out of my apartment I gradually brought the essentials and left the "stuff" there.

It was only a matter of time before I started to realize that I wanted to be at my house more than I wanted to be in my apartment and in the city and last year after losing my job and getting my book published I knew it was time to let go.

The process of packing forced me to go through the documents, trinkets and mementos of my life. I found my college ID and remembered that first day at NYU when I wondered how I was ever going to find my way in the city and a few papers I had written with incredibly supportive comments from my professors that helped me see my own potential. I found birthday cards, one from my father whose box-like distinctive printing made me tear up. It wasn't a big birthday just an average one, back when I thought we would never get along and he would be around forever.

I found my Aunt Rosemary's chocolate cake recipe which we thought was lost, in her hand writing that was so hard to read and so undeniably her. She is gone now and suddenly that recipe card felt more precious.

I found love letters, gifts, and incredibly sweet notes passed to me from men and boys I have loved and dated. Drawings from all the amazing children I have loved and I marveled at how silly some of their baby outfits were and how joyful my life became when each one of my nieces and nephews were born.

I found pictures so many pictures and so many good times spread out over so many years.

I found myself overwhelmed with sadness for all the people who have passed or have drifted out of my life (some for reasons I can't remember and others for hurts that still sting) and amazed at how fast all the years have gone.

I asked my Aunt Rosemary a few years ago on her eightieth birthday if she felt different. She said she didn't, that in her mind she was always the same young person in her twenties and often when she looked in the mirror she was surprised at what she saw.

I understand what she means, going through the small touchstones of your past it isn't so much remembering as it is reliving, as if the past is not gone but still with us, I am still that NYU college student and still a stand-up comedian, still me.

Yet, holding on can fill up too much space in your life can't it? And what if that leaves less space for more adventures and more love and light?

In the end, I took what mattered most, gave away a lot and tossed even more and a took a moment before closing the door behind me to say good-bye.

I would have stayed longer but the future is waiting.

SRO for our Summer Reads Event at Book Revue!

Judging from the turnout at our Book Revue Beach Party last night, the only thing better than going to the beach is sharing your favorite reads with fellow readers.

The event last night was one of those rare occasions when readers and writers have a chance to get together to share their love of stories while munching on cookies, sipping cold drinks and winning prizes.

Julianne Wernersbach (first photo,) our host from Book Revue, kicked the evening off with some words about beach reads and shared her enthusiasm for the theme of the night and for the authors sharing their debut novels.

Tess Callahan (second photo) began her talk by recommending On Chesil beach by Ian McEwan and talked a little bit about the origin of stories and how the discovery of objects, like a

shoe from a ship unearthed at the world trade center site is one of those moments of magic that be the beginnings of a story. Tess read a scene from her novel April & Oliver between April and her grandmother .

Hyatt Bass (third photo) followed Tess with a beach read recommendation of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. Hyatt read two scenes from her novel The Embers, featuring a great twelve year old voice.

I brought up the rear with comments about what a summer read meant

to me, including memories of being caught crying after I finished To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time so many years ago. When my brother asked if I was crying because it was sad I said I was crying because it was over. I read one of my favorite scenes from The Last Bridge, where Cat goes to the neighbor's house for dinner.

We raffled off some great prizes which included, two $25 gift cards from the great wine store Bottles and Cases and a beach bag of goodies including wine, treats, beach towel, and three signed novels of RITA award winning author (and good friend) Gwyn Cready.

A lively discussion followed spurred by great questions from the crowd and then Tess, Hyatt and I signed books next to a grab bag box of books for anyone who purchased one of our novels.

There is nothing better than being in a book store like Book Revue where everywhere you turn you see books. Last night was even better, as in addition to being enveloped by books, we were talking about them, sharing our favorites, and signing our own! No one left empty handed!

Tess, Hyatt and I agreed that as far as author events go, the more authors the merrier. In addition to having the chance to share our stories, we loved having the chance to compare our experiences and give readers different perspectives.

I wish I had more pictures to share but as you can tell I was caught up in the moment!

For those of you that could not be with us check out some of these links and for those of you in book clubs why not consider having a similar theme event? It was great fun.

Links of interest:

Book Revue (aside from a great bookstore they have great author events!)

April & Oliver by Tess Callahan

The Embers by Hyatt Bass

The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (on the front table at Book Revue!)

Flirting with Forever (and other books) by Gwyn Cready

The Stragedy of it All

Among the many things I used to do to pass the time in long, frustrating planning meetings back when I worked in IT was to come up with new words to describe the awfulness of whatever was happening at the moment. While most of the words are lost to me now the one that has stayed with me was "stragedy." I accidentally said that in the midst of discovering a major project was collapsing under the weight of bad planning and poor decision making. I said, "so this is our stragedy?" What I meant to say was, "strategy" but mashed it with tragedy and made myself a fancy new word to describe exactly what happens when a lack of strategy meets reality.

At the risk of stating the obvious, we got ourselves a whole big stragedy going on right now in this country.

Shortly after 9/11 when I had heard one too many conspiracy theories about what happened, I realized I had been working in the Corporate world too long as I no longer believed that anyone was smart enough to plan a conspiracy let alone execute one.

I guess you could say I had an "aha" moment when it finally occurred to me that the people running the government, post office, hospital, Oil Companies, etc. were not a different grade of human than the ones I had been working with all these years.

Oh sure maybe you get more of the best and the brightest at the White House level but that is just a matter of degree. There are just as many people at the White House who don't respond to email, just like in your office.

Once you realize this, everything you hear on the news and know about the world changes. It's kind of like finding out Santa Claus doesn't exist, it's hard to imagine how you believed in him in the first place.

So although I believe there are people who conspire to do evil (usually in the name of God) I am not surprised that BP did not have an adequate contingency plan and that they still don't. I am not surprised that Congress doesn't seem to know what to do about it. And the New York State Government not passing a budget? Well who can blame them for thinking it's all about their agendas and not about their constituents. How is that any different from the folks you work with who don't care that they are leaving you high and dry when they punch out at 5:30pm and leave you to finish the project?

The stragedy of it all is that we want to believe there is someone, a leader, a guru, a teacher, a boss, a company, an institution that will show us the way and in doing so, make our lives and the world safe. We assume everyone who makes more money or has more power is smarter than we are and we definitely don't think our government is run at all like our places business, but guess what, it is.

I guess it's easier for us to feel outrage at BP for not having a better handle on the situation, for showing an astonishingly low amount of concern for safety over money, for not fixing the problem sooner (if they can ever fix it at all.) The alternative is to feel complicit. Our hunger for oil got us where we are and the people we sanctioned to drill for it are not going to get us out of it.

Everyone is talking about who is going to pay, who will be responsible and no one, has really stood up and said, I am, We are.

In my time working in Technology I had many successes and failures but what I was most proud of was taking over the management of a project that had gone horribly wrong and was causing a tremendous amount of pain for everyone in the company. We had a huge technical issue we were prepetuating without understanding how or why. On a team of eight support people, I had five quit in one day. I had chest pains and a lot of moments in the ladies room where I wondered why I wasn't drafting my own resignation, but I didn't.

The problem was beyond the scope of my technical abilities, or so I thought, until I met with the engineers who were stymied. Suddenly the high paid experts were not so expert anymore.

The solution took the combined efforts of all the IT people on our team, it took collaboration, respect, an openness to new ideas and most of all it took a lot of guts to suggest a solution and be wrong. I was wrong a lot, but I was determined to get to the bottom of the problem, I did not want the situation to defeat me.

We all have those moments in our lives when our best laid plans or intentions go terribly wrong...sometimes we run or point the finger or shut down but sometimes we rise to the occasion and show ourselves and the world our best. We say, enough. The buck stops here. It stops with me. You don't need a degree, a fancy job or permission to do that. You just need balls.

Giveaway Fever!

Who knew that giving away 25 Free copies of The Last Bridge would result in so many great stories from readers. Thanks to all of you who participated -- the stories of how you gave the books away were great!

And the winner is...

Laurie Morris was the lucky winner of the $100 Target Gift Card. She gave her free copy to her daughter as part of a beach bag of goodies for her trip to Florida to prep for her wedding. Congrats to Laurie and her daughter!

The lucky recipients

Based on your feedback, when presented with the chance to give a book away most of you will give it to a relative (8 of you did that) -- and if it's a relative chances are it will be a daughter (3.) The next most popular choices were friends (6), Co-workers (2), Book Club friends (2), Neighbors (2), Student (1) and my personal favorite a Stranger (1)

Reasons You Gave

The reasons you gave the book to your recipient were the best part of the giveaway. A number of you chose to give the book to someone who was struggling with an illness, or taking care of someone who was ill. In those instances you all cited the importance of reading to take your mind away from your troubles. (So True!)

A few of you also chose to give your books to daughters, sisters-in-law, nieces and even a few sons. How great it is to share books with another generation - one of the great joys of my own life is swapping books with my Mom, Sister and Brother.

Aside from working together a few of you enjoy sharing and discussing books with your co-workers. You gave your books to those colleagues.

One of the great categories of friendship is a "book friend" someone you swap and share books with -- a few of them were lucky recipients.

Book Groups also got their hands on a few of the giveaways as well.

My favorite giveaway was from a reader who was traveling regularly to a hospital to visit a sick relative - she left the copy in the family waiting area with a note to please take it, read it and share it!

Amazing adventures...

The most amazing part of the giveaway was hearing of all the places The Last Bridge has and will travel. It went on a cross country journey from Arizona to DC (with lots of stops along the way!) and made it on a European jaunt (Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands) and was sent to over 20 States and 40+ Cities. Check out the Google map I made of all the stops you told me about.

The real winner is...

I can't tell you how much I appreciate the wonderful notes I got sharing your feelings about the book and your enthusiasm for getting the word out about The Last Bridge. I appreciate the time you have taken to let me become of part of your world and for your honesty and kindness.

I am the true winner of this giveaway!