Reading, writing...that's what I do.

Love for the printed word, love and belief in ideas.

Facts of Life: Grounding Lessons for Sexual Health

May 4, 2025 2 Comments

An older survey of 2,200 women found 35% of them admitting that fitting into an old pair of jeans after losing weight was “better than sex.” The study was related to Special K cereal and weight loss. Are you laughing yet?

But I can’t help but ask—who are their partners? How can weight loss replace intimate human contact? Maybe there’s something wrong in the couples’ overall perception of sex. Or to take it further, maybe there’s something wrong with the sex information that in general, people are getting at the start of their sexual lives.

Each person’s introduction or discovery that sex exists is far different. There’s the gentle instruction and revelation from a parent to an innocent child—and the absolute opposite of which is the terrifying introduction through childhood sexual abuse. Hopefully there are many in-betweens—the neighbor kid’s incorrect information, the health class in school, the almost accurate answers given to the child or teen asking a series of questions. Enough said.

SEX IN OUR WORLD TODAY

Many people in our culture learn about sex and sexual behaviors through visual images. Obvious ones: TV, movies, the web, and renditions of sexual behavior that they see in the people around them.

The later was the way my student, F.S., learned about sex. He was 17 when he stood at my desk protesting a story I had his class read in summer school. It contained moral platitudes, condemning sex outside of marriage. Yes, F. S. was a high school student—and I was an ingenue teacher, just following the curriculum.

But F.S. liked me; he was bright, articulate and he realized that in return for my efforts, he could teach me, a naive, young teacher with a totally different background from his, the true facts of life.

So one day after class he told me: “I have sex whenever I can. Sex is good. There’s nine people in my family. My parents and seven kids. No space. We sleep in the same room, all of us. So my whole life I am hearing my parents have sex. Nice sex. This story you are teaching me? Says nothing to me. Nothing.”

You might not immediately understand, but I was grateful that F.S. was being open with me. It’s what teachers rarely accomplish with their students. But then…what could I say in response to his honest statements? I know I said something, probably mentioning how my life was the exact opposite, that I was raised by my mother, a widow, and there was no sex in my home at all. I didn’t mean to put forth a puritanical agenda, but this was my life story and his was his. And writing this now? No agenda.

As a former RN, I do believe that ignorance about sex, sexual behaviors, also the side effects from unprotected sex, violent sex, and even casual sex always need to be considered. If all a child learns about the facts of life are images from a movie or at the other extreme, pornographic images:

either he or she is not going to have a very realistic idea of sex in a regular relationship;
will not understand that true sex between human beings contains a mental and emotional component;
will fail to understand that a true human sexual experience involves choice;
and they will not understand that sexual behavior becomes part of a person, even when it occurs under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and thus affects memory; because the act of sex, whether pleasant, fulfilling, or not…at some level, remains.

F.S.’s early experience of sex was probably more positive then that of children left alone to discover things through the internet or by watching TV. The images today’s youth might see make sex super-sized…like everything else. Sex often is portrayed as a fast-moving, tension-filled dance ending in a quick orgasm for both partners. Or it’s a pivotal moment of a storyline, blocking out every other concern a person might have about his or her entire life—it is heightened, overblown, over-fantasized, blasting way beyond the borders of reality.

So when a woman or girl experiences sex for the first time, but it is sex that does not include tenderness and caring…treating herself to a purchase that makes her happy, or just sitting and talking to someone she might want to fall in love with…would be better choices.

Because as mothers, grandmothers, older sisters, brothers and fathers… we need to teach those we love about the good and loving aspects of sex. We need to stress the emotional bond, the commitment and love that sex can bring to two persons. My mother always said that sex is the glue in a marriage. It can also be the glue in a long-term relationship.

Thus in the cramped rooms of his teen years, I believe F.S. learned about true love, realized his parents were in love, caring for and bringing his siblings into the world. That made him know that sex was good. If he resented the circumstance of his living situation, he never said so. And I don’t think he and his parents discussed what he was experiencing—it was just their life; it was the way it was.

I hope F.S. found the right woman and experienced great love in his own life. His parents gave him the beginnings they were able to give. And those beginnings, that introduction to sex was knowledge heightened in a very real way, complete with emotion, but also commitment—because what F. S. experienced in that cramped bedroom were the true facts of life.

Childhood and the Building Blocks We Never Forget

April 27, 2025 6 Comments

If you think about it, we build much of our adult lives on fragments of our childhood. No matter who raised us, or where we were raised, elements of those early years are more permanently imprinted on our brains than what we did yesterday.

Just try it. Think about yesterday, especially if it was a rather ordinary day. Then think about your childhood. What pops up first? For me, it’s always my neighborhood, though maybe that is truer now, because I am again walking the same sidewalks, passing through the same parks, and noting those street corners where in grade school, high school my friends and I would stand, chat while waiting for a certain group of boys to join us. This is certainly part of my past–as well as my careers, my marriage and my family.

Because I am a writer, I often focus on those life moments that helped create who I am, and it is also logical that they often make their way into my fiction.

ONE EXAMPLE: THE FACTS OF LIFE

SEX, learning about sex, is a major part of growing up. Even in the lower grades, I began to read or hear some strange words, not knowing or understanding what they meant. And because I somehow knew they were adult topics, I didn’t always ask my mother. Instead I looked them up in the dictionary. I looked up sex, intercourse; I also looked up rape after reading an article in the Chicago Tribune. I was trying to understand…

WRITERS USE PAST EXPERIENCE

Below are paragraphs from my novel, When the Cottonwoods Blew. In this selection, you’re in the mind of my MC, Ella Singleton. She is remembering an event when she was pre-adolescent; then later, we have her thoughts as an adult nurse who works in the maternity unit of a major Chicago hospital :

Sex, something about two people and genitalia? So look up that word..but why would you let anyone, except your mother or maybe your father, see your private parts, your genitalia thingies? Weird, scary. Was that why the boys tried to lift the girls’ skirts? And when Jean’s mom and dad were kissing, right in front of us, in their living room…was that sex?

Then, the kids at school: It’s not the cottonwood trees, Dumb Ass. It’s RAPE. A kid got grabbed off the street and raped, near the Courtyard building. Don’t you know anything?

But rape, the word, the sound so blunt, something you weren’t supposed to know or say as a kid, a word I did try to understand reading the dictionary… and now an adult, on the maternity unit, that unspeakable word, a violation that could disturb the smooth functioning of the unit, our patient care…something we could not control, something we were furiously angry about…

It’s true, that when writing fiction, we often pull from life experience. As children, my best friend Jeanie and I liked to pretend we were scared, so what could be better than pretending the rock garden in Jeanie’s yard was really a boiling oil pit, one that might kill us, if we fell into it. And to deal with life’s many questions, unknown answers…to feel freedom, push away fears, we explored our neighborhood on bikes. We became The Two Tornadoes of Wood Street and Our Country.

And do you REMEMBER: Step on a crack, break your mother’s back?

Once I stuffed Kleenex in my sweater to look like the my older cousin who had just been married. Come on Beth…I was in Kindergarten! Such decisions always come back to haunt…at the dinner table, my mother asks why my sweater is fitting me differently. Embarrassing?? Yes, and awful. But I was just a kid growing up with questions, and questions always feed our writing lives, and our fiction.

From Cottonwoods… Ella’s childhood memory…

She had looked up the word in the school dictionary: Rape: sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury.

Sex. Intercourse.

Okay, look up those words, try to understand…sex, something about two people and genitalia. Look up that word. But why would you let anyone, except your mom or maybe your dad see your private parts, your genitalia thingies? Weird, scary. Was that why the boys tried to lift the girls’ skirts?

But Ella grew up, became an RN, her patient on a given day a pregnant teenager…

And there was her patient Candy, young vulnerable, frightened, the older man with her, not her father, but maybe her abuser…maybe why she was pregnant. Did it ever end?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Because of our modern media, we have even more access to frightening stories that still happen to children, to young girls…but in some ways it also provides an awakening. We no longer live in a fog of what shall I do, a fog of worry. Instead, we can use our phones to report something untoward, some fear, what we have seen. Often we can photograph aspects of the evil that is occurring, or call the police. We can be women and men who protect children, both girls and boys.

Though this is a serious piece, containing some serious life aspects…LIFE IS OFTEN ABOUT EXPERIENCES, both good and not so good..THAT WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FORGET. As parents, older sisters, brothers, even neighbors it is our duty to protect the young, the innocent, both boys and girls. In time, we all learn about sex…and we hope that the young have an explanation of what sex is before they experience any of it. Parents need to provide some explanation about sex before children might be faced with some decision; the explanation must be gentle, truthful, positive and not frightening. And because of what is available in media today, it would be better to bring up aspects of sex before our children and grandchildren encounter it with no preparation. Knowledge can be POWER, but also PROTECTION. Thanks for reading.

What Good Friday Teaches Us About Cynicism

April 20, 2025 12 Comments

With all that is happening in our country, I am reposting this piece. I am also praying for the father who is being wrongly held in a prison in El Salvador.

This post offers an opinion written by the late Michael Gerson. It appeared in the Washington Post. Mr. Gerson was an unabashed evangelical Christian who believed in the importance of faith in public life. A speech writer for President George W. Bush, the two men could not have been more different — Mr. Gerson cerebral, reserved, fidgety; Mr. Bush folksy, outgoing, relaxed — but they shared an almost psychic connection, especially when putting shared values into words.

WHAT GOOD FRIDAY TEACHES US ABOUT CYNICISM

The story of GOOD FRIDAY—the garden, bloody sweat, sleeping friends, a torch-carrying crowd, the kiss, the slash of a sword, the scourging, mocking…the nails, the despair of a good man—is an invitation to cynicism. Nearly every human institution is revealed at its worst.

Government comes off poorly, giving Jesus the bureaucratic shuffle, with no one wanting to take responsibility, until a weak leader gives in to the crowd in the name of keeping the peace.

“What is truth?” asks Pontius Pilate, with a sneer typical of politics to this present day. Professional men of religion do not appear in their best light. They are violently sectarian, judgmental and turn to the state to enforce their beliefs. “Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy,” theologian Barbara Taylor sharply observers. “He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix.”

The crowd does not acquit itself well, turning hostile and cruel as quickly as an Internet mob, first putting palms beneath his feet, then thorns upon his brow. Even friendship comes in for a beating. The men closest to Jesus sleep while his enemies are fully awake. There is betrayal by a close, disgruntled associate. And then Peter’s spastic violence and cowardly denials. The women—all assorted Marys—come off far better in the narrative. But Jesus is essentially abandoned to face his long, suffocating death alone.

And, for a moment, even God seems to fail, vanishing into a shocking silence…

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” asks Jesus, in words that many of his followers would want to erase from the Bible. How could the Son of God be subject to despair? G.K. Chesterton called Christianity the only religion in which “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

WAS GOD ABSENT ON GOOD FRIDAY?

Consider how the world appeared at the finish of Good Friday. It would have seemed that every source of order, justice and comfort—politics, institutional religion, the community of friendship—had been discredited. It was the cynic’s finest hour. And God Himself seemed absent or unmoved, turning cynicism toward nihilism. Every ember of human hope was cold. And there was nothing to be done about it.

Then something happened. There was disagreement at the time, as now, on what that something was. According to the story, Pilate posted a guard at the tomb with the instruction: “Make it as secure as you can.” Then the cynics somehow lost control of the narrative. There was an empty tomb and wild reports of angels and ghosts. And the claim of resurrection.

EASTER

Even those who believe the body was moved, must confront certain facts. Faith in the figure who Rome executed has far outlasted the Roman Empire.

(Comment: I love this major point.) The cowardly friends became BOLD missionaries, most dying torturous deaths (according to tradition) for the sake of a figure they had once betrayed in their sleep. The faith thus founded has given the mob—all of us, even the ones who mock, especially the ones who mock—the hope of pardon and peace.

For believers, the complete story of Good Friday and Easter legitimize both despair and faith. Nearly every life features less-than-good Fridays.

We grow tired of our own company and travel a descending path of depression. We experience lonely pain, unearned suffering or stinging injustice.

We are rejected or betrayed by a friend.

And then there are the unspeakable things—the death of a child, the diagnosis of an aggressive cancer, the steady advance of a disease that will take our minds and our dignity.

We look into the abyss of self-murder. And given the example of Christ, we are permitted to feel God-forsaken.

And yet…eventually …or so we trust…or so we try to trust: God is forever on the side of HOPE! ( my capitals)

If the resurrection is real, death’s hold is broken. There is a truth and human existence that cannot be contained in a tomb.

It is possible to live lightly, even in the face of death—not by becoming hard and strong, but through a confident perseverance. Because cynicism is the failure of patience. Because Good Friday does not have the final word. Thanks for being here. May Easter bring you health and joy.

(artwork by Harold Coping; unknown; Gustav Klimt)

THE CASTLE IN MY LIFE

April 13, 2025 9 Comments

When growing up, I lived near a castle, one I could easily walk to or ride my bike. And thinking about it, that was amazing, considering I also fell in love with tales of kings and queens, only to discover there was a real live queen, who had my name: Elizabeth.

BUT A CASTLE? Really? Yes. Here’s the story…

I grew up in the Beverly neighborhood, part of the southern end of the city of Chicago. A man named Robert C. Givins, who was a successful real estate developer, decided to live out his dream and build a castle on the HILL, that is part of the area’s ecological history.

Givens and his ego, certainly knew what to do, the location of the castle being on the highest point in the city of Chicago. But how can that be?

The castle is situated on part of the Blue Island Ridge, geological remnant of a prehistoric glacial island and a former lake shore. This history made the Beverly area uniquely “hilly”…compared to the mostly flat Chicago landscape. And for those who know more about early land formations, the Blue Island Ridge’s distinct geology and strategic location along the Vincennes Trace attracted early settlers, shaping the area’s development and thus the reason the area was called Beverly Hills. (No relation to the Beverly Hills in California.)

FUN FACTS

The official name of this edifice is B. Givins’ Beverly Castle, built in 1886. It is unique because it is the ONLY castle structure in the city of Chicago. And it was modeled after an Irish castle…which makes perfect sense, many of the families in the area being of Irish extraction when I was growing up. Through the years, the castle has been used in different ways. Though initially a private residence, when I was growing up, it functioned as a church and is now a school.

Landmarks in a community always make them unique. They become a marker for the world you live in.

“On we’re easy to find, our house is just up the hill from the castle.”

Landmarks such as this also provide amazing material for local artists, Jack Simerling being one of them. The painting of THE CASTLE was done by Mr. Simmerling, who for many residents was considered Beverly’s artist. He developed a passion for historic Chicago architecture and the finely detailed architectural elements found in stately old homes.

He was dismayed by the destruction of residences such as the Potter Palmer Castle and many of the fine homes in what would become the Prairie Avenue Historic District of Chicago. Thus, he worked to preserve these homes through through his paintings before they were demolished. And in 1958, Simmerling opened The Heritage Gallery, which is now located on 103rd Street in Beverly. His daughter, Vicki, continues the business to this day.

The Simmerling Family actually owned the historic Blackwelder House on South Prospect Avenue in Morgan Park, a premier examples of Victorian-era architecture in the Beverly/Morgan Park area. Jack’s love of art and history expanded as he rescued antiques and architectural ornaments from many older Chicago homes.

Simmerling’s works and a collection of architecture are on display at the Glessner House Museum. A National Historic Landmark, the Glessner House Museum is located on the corner of South Prairie Avenue and East 18th Street in Chicago.

Thanks to our daughter Caroline and her husband Ben, we know how a print of a Jack Simmerling and THE CASTLE in our home.

My Compulsive Habit…Organization

April 6, 2025 5 Comments

I have been told that it started when I was three years old. We had two throw rugs in a pass-through to the kitchen. I was constantly bending down to straighten them.

I am not a psychologist, but as I grew and heard this story, I found the answer to that compulsion.

Many of you know I lost my father at the age of three. He was there holding me, loving me, and then he was missing. Where did he go?

ANSWERS

Many psychologists would find a link between my compulsive “rug” behavior and the event that shook my world. Where did Daddy go? Is he coming back? Why did he leave me?

Of course, those were not questions I asked at such a young age, though later I would ask them.

But in those first months of loss and change, my mind and body did not like things being OUT OF PLACE. Enough of that! No more change. Let’s keep things the way they were, the way they should me…and that might explain the thought process of a child. That certainly explains my thumb sucking, crying fits and rug adjusting. WHY CAN’T THINGS BE LIKE THEY WERE? Even today in my older age, I hurt for that child who was so angry and confused by this loss.

BUT MAYBE THERE IS AN UPSIDE?

We can form bad and good habits early on, habits that often stay with us. I must have subconsciously looked at the rug straightening habit as a way to KEEP THINGS IN PLACE, AVOID UPHEAVAL, DEAL WITH CHANGE.

My mother might not have realized it, but she fed this need in me by asking that I always bring my young brother Bill’s empty formula bottles to the kitchen…which I did. Such a request and my rug straightening fed my desire, my absolute, desperate need to bring some order into the present chaos of my life.

Thus, I always complied, my mother then praising and thanking me, thus accomplishing two lessons I would take into my future life: first, despite upheaval, you can find calm in organization, routine. And second, any child, your own or one you are caring for…needs to feel part of the world around them, needs to feel they are contributing to life.

Saying thanks might sound too complicated for children under the age of five…but it is not.

Human beings thrive on love, yes. But they also thrive on praise. The smallest acknowledgment that I was being a good girl…being a helper…caring for my baby brother—worked a small miracle. Yes, my mother had her moments when she went into her bedroom, closed the door and cried. But those were moments I wasn’t privy to.

In my little life, I was a helper. Which of course now makes me think of Mr. Rogers, who often talked about the Helpers. Why? Because as humans we come into this world with a desire to help. It is simply part of our DNA. When I raised my own three children, I made sure they had part in caring for one another, and their bedrooms, their possessions. Maybe that’s why so many families have a dog or a cat…we had a bird!

So in the end, being human requires we learn responsibility, we learn how to organize, take care of our things, do our school homework, complete our daily chores….and thus in the end, someone will always be there to say THANK YOU or WELL DONE…and if not, we will simply feel we are doing what we can to make our lives better.

What in your life has made you a HELPER?

Joan Didion, My Days of Magical Thinking

March 30, 2025 4 Comments

Joan Didion is a writer and thinker whose work has stayed with me. The Year of Magical Thinking was a book that made me cry, not only for Didion, but for myself. Because this is book of very personal feelings…the experience of being with a person one moment, then finding him dead the next. And yes, Joan Didion wrote about this in her skilled, beautiful way, she being the one to put into words what many of us have felt. Yet, Didion having the courage to set down her feelings, the horrendous experience of speaking to her husband on moment and then finding him dead the next.

Didion wrote: I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable.

I remember saying, Don’t do that.

When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and chocked. I remember trying to lift him far enough from the back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the sense of his weight as he fell forward, first against the table, then to the floor. In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the New York Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.

Someone else.

I called the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said Just come.

Didion then relays the arrival of the ambulance and the procedures the team went through. They had set up a computer monitor on the floor and were watching it, but then in seconds made the decision to take her husband to the hospital. Though Didion wanted to go with them, she had to wait for a second ambulance to take her. She writes: “I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived a the emergency entrance…the gurney was already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the driveway. Everyone else in sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. “Is this the wife,” he said to the driver, then turned to me. “I’m your social worker,” he said, and I guess that is when I must have known.

A TIME FOR HEALING

What does a woman who has watched, evaluated, then written about place, time, birth, life…what does she do when faced with death? Some time had to pass, but then Joan Didion wrote….

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

LIFE….REALITY

I cried when reading Didion’s book. I cried for my father, a man I barely knew. Because we all have lost someone. But have you ever thought of writing a memoir to honor that person?

I am no Joan Didion, but I wrote a memoir when my children were young. Searching that work I found the following…my way to cling to security, to do some MAGICAL THINKING…

My mother gives us a record with the story of the PIED PIPER of HAMLIN. I play this over and over. It is a strange story about a town infested with rats, about a piper who can rid the town of these pests. But then when he is not properly paid, he plays his pipe once more, coaxing the children to follow him out of the town, along winding roads and over hills to a long tunnel. It leads to a place where honey bees have lost their sting. This detail lingers with a very young me…but all of it…the tunnel, the honey bees that don’t sting. And I keep picturing all the children lined up in darkness before emerging into this place of light, this place of flowers and trees, warmth and sunshine…and those marvelous bees.

And sometimes when I lie awake and the hallway of my childhood is dark, I worry that I’ll hear that strange alluring music, that I will disappear into that tunnel. It is in the dark of my childhood bedroom that I discover how dry my lips can get, the existence of uneven spaces between my teeth, the clutching pain of stomach cramps before vomiting. It is in the darkness of that room that sheds on me the light of human discovery.

Reading, writing...that's what I do.

Facts of Life: Grounding Lessons for Sexual Health

Childhood and the Building Blocks We Never Forget