Excerpt from You’re Always 39: How to manage and recover from late career job loss and reinvent yourself, my book coming out in October 2026! Around ten years ago, I was in a video meeting focused on fixing an issue with a struggling product. Customer sales and satisfaction had plummeted, affecting the company’s core business.Continue reading “Hags, Witches and Grams: Images of Aging Women in Popular Culture “
Category Archives: Into the Wilderness
Bob’s Your Uncle
Into the Wilderness: Story 61 The scenario. You’re eating Cheerios with oat milk, stepping snow-logged boots onto your commuter bus or simply sitting at your desk with a nice cold foam brew when it happens. A memory laden with rage or despair roils out of your synapses and your lungs clench in a breathless remembrance.Continue reading “Bob’s Your Uncle”
The Ghosts of Christmas
Into the Wilderness: Story 60 Christmas Past My father sits in an avocado-green velvet chair, a large Waterford glass with bourbon on the rocks in his hand. In the kitchen, my mother rushes from the oven to the fridge and to the marble confectioner’s table she uses as a kitchen island. She is finishing ChristmasContinue reading “The Ghosts of Christmas”
Crevice
Into the Wilderness: Story 59 I’ve been thinking a lot about attachment. Some people can cut people out of their lives as simply as lancing a pimple. Slash and the connection is gone. Not me. I’m more like the grown-too-big baby kangaroo no longer able to fit in its mama’s warm pouch. I keep tryingContinue reading “Crevice”
I failed my MRI, and I’m alive because of it
Into the Wilderness: Story 58 Ten years ago, I was hospitalized with acute abdominal pain. My temperature was 105, and I was vomiting and crying with pain. Less than an hour later, after an MRI with contrast, the young, extremely tall doctor pronounced: “gallstone-induced pancreatitis.” A gallstone had lodged in my biliary duct. The resultContinue reading “I failed my MRI, and I’m alive because of it”
Please, And Thank You
We are entering the holiday season when gratitude, gatherings and gifting carry us to year’s end. I rarely ask for favors or gifts, but I am boldly asking for one now. If you have not done so, will you please, dear readers, directly subscribe to this blog? It’s simple to do. Just go to walk-the-moon.comContinue reading “Please, And Thank You”
Ghost Story
Into the Wilderness: Story 57 The political landscape has been such a roller coaster that I couldn’t bear to dwell on it. I’m both heartened by the democratic “wave,” as it’s being called, and terrified of the possible increases in my ACA premiums. So I have decided to write about something more predictable than today’sContinue reading “Ghost Story”
Get Thee Behind Me
Into the Wilderness: Story 56 My fourth grade teacher scared me. I grew up in Oklahoma in the center of the Bible Belt. Although church and state were supposed to be separate, I had many teachers preach the gospel in public school. I was a Greek Orthodox Christian, a pomp and procedure religious practice veryContinue reading “Get Thee Behind Me”
Lost and Found
Into the Wilderness: Story 55 A close family member and I have not spoken in almost 20 years. His children are adults with careers. He looks as he always did with less hair and a slightly bigger paunch. His wife— forgive me— looks like his mother. She hasn’t aged well, though it could be theContinue reading “Lost and Found”
Bad Girls
I haven’t shared a poem in years. Here’s a new one. Here’s to the bad girls, The ones who rise at midnight, Twitching for a fix Of wind in the valley or snow in the city. They rise and watch for ways to break Crystal and ceramics and stand- Ards forced by birth. These badContinue reading “Bad Girls”
Walk the Moon 