The blog is on hiatus for a while as I work on other projects. Thank you for reading!

A few weeks ago I visited a friend whose husband had just lost his father. They have a five year-old boy and a girl of seven months. While I was packing for the trip, my friend sent me a text sharing her son’s effort to brighten her husband’s day.

“Daddy,” he said, “I have two surprises for you!”

“Really? What?”

“I got Shrinky Dinks, and Kaitlin is coming!”

My heart warmed to be included with the esteemedShrinky DinksI remembered from childhood, even more so when I pulled onto their street to see her son standing in the driveway waiting for me.

I don’t fall in love with other people’s pets easily. I need to see what they’re made of before they’ll be enjoying my undying affection, and I want to feel connected to another soul before it will cuddle on my lap.

If people gravitate toward pets that are similar to themselves, I was surprised to fall hard for two pitbulls who were not even mine. When a close girlfriend got married ten years ago, dogs Timmy and Georgie came with the husband.

I did not like pitbulls.

For two months a spider has been trying to steal my car. Every night it builds, and with a few days of absence from me, it constructs whole cities of webs along the outside: from antenna to side mirror, side mirror to door. I walk into its spun doorways, tricked again by the thin webs and forced to part the strands like beaded string entryways of new-age shops.

What the spider builds by night, I destroy by day. My weapons are stacks of Tim Hortons napkins, which I swipe through the air broadly until I can open all four doors without eating the webs or the bugs caught inside.

[See alsoEulogy for MargaretandWindmills, Truckstops and Transitions - Living in the In-Between (For Margaret, I)]

The week before last, I held my grandmother’s hand while she died in a quiet room at Mercy Hospital in South Buffalo, New York. Her son and his wife, my uncle and aunt, stood on her other side.

She had seen her mother, she'd said.

“It’s ok to go with her, Mom,” my uncle said. “You did a good job. We love you. We’ll see you again.”

We repeated how much we loved her.

                                                                                                                                                         

I have been offline for the past week due to a family emergency and will be posting a new blog soon. In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy this guest blog I recently wrote for StudentsFirst.org, thanking the public school teachers I was blessed to have growing up in Barrington, RI. I will always be grateful for the energy and passion they brought to their students every day!

Expectations were high. This was the Dalai Lama after all. Was it too much to expect the most profound insights we'd ever heard, solutions to the problems of the world at large and our smaller worlds within it?

This past weekend theTibet House, theDrew Katz Foundation, Columbia professor and Buddhist scholarRobert Thurmanand Newark MayorCory Bookerhosted His Holiness theDalai Lamaat theNewark Peace Education Summitin New Jersey. With the heightened security, bows of deference and the craning of thousands of ears toward his every word, it was hard for me to imagine what it would be like to face such out-sized expectations when traveling--feeling their weight in the very air between you and everyone you meet, people who want something important from you that they cannot quite name but expect nonetheless.

 

This Friday I will attend thePeace in Education Summitin Newark, New Jersey, and as one local journalist described it, now is“a curious time to talk about peace.”

Nonetheless,His Holiness the Dalai Lamaand like-minded Nobel laureates will join poets, educators, other peacemakers in their fields, a few thousand attendees and most importantly, 1,000 of Newark’s students to discuss what it will take to get to peace and, I hope, to get started in making it happen.