Earlier this year and last, I wrote about having an abortion at 19 and dropping out of school.* I was depressed and went to work as a receptionist at an employment agency. My job was to answer the phone, sign in prospective clients, get them to fill out an application that I handed to the slick-but-hyper-anxious boss, and every Monday sit with the newspaper help-wanted ads to identify 50 companies to send a promotional letter to.

Twice in my young life I was introduced to astounding machines that lit a fire under my writing.** In that office I was in awe of my first Selectric typewriter.

At home I had a little Smith Corona (I almost typed Smith & Wesson) that I’d been given for Christmas in 9^th grade. I pressed its stiff little keys to start a gothic mystery novel but didn’t make it past a few pages. I’d lost the drive and unbridled confidence of my pre-teen writer self.

But back at the office: each week, after I’d finished my required letters – my bad typing skills meant 150 tries to get 50 good ones – I had lots of free time. I was depressed on a couple levels: unresolved feelings around the abortion; frustration at being in this poverty-wage, boring job; ongoing issues with my boyfriend. So I started writing poetry. I’d done it as a kid and in a handful of other spill-my-guts moments as a teen. This magic Selectric was easy to the touch and so fast it could keep up with the speed of my thoughts.

Down the street from my office was a little bookstore. Often after payday I’d go to the poetry section. I didn’t know any poets except the usual men studied in high school. I found the work of women on the shelves and glommed onto Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Add that influence to my already depressed urge to write, and I churned out page after page of poems about death.

~

What the hell did I know about death?

Our family dog died when I was in 3^rd grade. I cried in school, but I don’t remember it being devastating. I’d already lost a handful of parakeets in my even younger years.

The first family member who died in my lifetime was a cousin I didn’t know. My mother’s sister and her family lived in Ohio. We were in New Jersey. If I’d ever met them, I had been too young to remember. But when I was five, a car accident decapitated my aunt’s 17-year-old son. My mother related the gory details in front of me, probably oblivious to my presence.

We traveled to Toledo the day before the funeral, as did other aunts and my grandmother from Arkansas. How tall was I? Maybe up to their hips. Lost in a sea of mingling, crying adults, I was down by the floor, alone, trying to figure out what was happening.

As bedrooms were divvied up that night, I was put in my dead cousin’s room. His twin bed abutted a wall with a giant Alfred E Newman poster.

I didn’t know my cousin; I didn’t know Alfred E Newman. So I assumed the floating grotesque head was my cousin’s decapitated one. I was terrified. I cried and begged my mother not to make me sleep in that room. She was horribly embarrassed in front of my aunt, oblivious to my fears, and made me shut up. There was Janet Kay being a brat again.

The next day they all went to the funeral and left me with a neighbor and a Clark bar.

Eight years later that aunt died. We didn’t go to the funeral. I watched my mother’s upset for a few days. And that was that.

~

I kept that receptionist job for nine months. Not much about it changed. A memory: one of the account executives, after he’d won a huge bonus, offered to take me anywhere in the world for an upcoming long weekend. “Paris.” I didn’t hesitate, going along with the joke. Turned out he wasn’t kidding. In the few hours before we straightened it out, I don’t know what story he told himself about that trip. He was quite hurt, and I felt like an asshole. Albeit a confused one, since the guy knew I had a boyfriend.

But that was an irrelevant story. From September to June, I worked with most of my time free to read and write poetry. With the overwrought, melodramatic ridiculousness of a 20-year-old, I threw down several poems a day: angry love ones, odes to Plath and Sexton, and these dreadful, nonsensical emotings about death and insanity. Here’s one I found in a notebook:

Dementia

Extortionist!
Vulture of Souls!

How your voracious disease
has rotted my blood.

I cry for restitution, for God,
But taste only the stale bones

Of existence stripped of their flesh,
Carved into the vilest amulets.

Vampire of Brains!
You have devoured my hopes.

My mind lies a pulp
At the base of your ax:

Complete your abominable destruction.
I surrender to your eternal damnation.

It’s ok to laugh. I did. I was pissed at my boyfriend and telling him he was driving me nuts. Vampire of Brains. What a dork😄😄

Seriously, though, the gift that job gave me, besides the miracle typewriter and expanses of time, was the realization, dug from childhood, that I wanted to be a writer. I got back into Douglass for the fall ’75 semester, this time as an English major, specifically so I could learn to write and see if I was “any good.” It would have been my junior year, had I not dropped in and out again several times over the next five years before I finally graduated.

That semester I had Elaine Showalter’s Women Writers class, which I wrote about in my recent essay about Adrienne Rich. (Or maybe it was in my last abortion essay in March.) Elaine ran the Women’s Studies program, one of the first in the country, and thus I was introduced to feminism. My poems stopped being so death oriented and became more “woman’s diatribe.” It took a while to lose my melodramatic bent, which I probably replaced with sarcasm. At the end of that class, we did a unit on Rich, which culminated in her coming to read for us. Elaine suggested I apply for admission to the writing seminar Adrienne was teaching the next semester. I submitted a packet of poems I no longer have. Based on everything in these notebooks, God knows what embarrassing things I turned in. I only have the mental image of a long poem to my mother, broken up in short phrases scattered over the page. I later realized it had the cadence of sobbing.

As I’ve mentioned before, I got into the seminar and finally had some instruction on how to write better poetry. I started submitting to little literary magazines, which brings me to the reason I started this post. Recently I found the two issues of Carousel on one of my shelves of poetry books.

I still have them because my first published poem appeared in the January 1976 issue. I was thrilled to be published and shocked to get $5 in the mail for winning 7^th place in a contest I didn’t know the magazine ran.*** Another poem was included in the next issue. Both were written before I had the advantage of skilled guidance. But at least there are no vampires.

Fifty years later, that $5 remains the only money my actual creative writing has earned me. I made a meager living teaching writing for 10 years, starting the same year the poem was published.**** Then I had 16 years as an activist/nonprofit director where my writing was directed into grant applications and reports. When I got sick of having to manage employees (I sucked at it), I went simply for writing for nonprofits. And now I’m back to teaching, in the sense that I’m an editor***** and a writing coach. So writing has made it possible to scratch out a living, but it sure wasn’t on the back of my poetry.

As far as poetry and I went, I published a handful of others back then. But a couple years into studying with Adrienne, she recommended I send some poems to Ms. Magazine. I felt puffed up by that and sent three. They were rejected. By then Adrienne had moved away, so I had no one to consult. I assumed the rejection meant I sucked, so I stopped thinking of myself as a poet, rarely wrote, and didn’t submit anything until 2024. (Those were rejected too. Eff me.😀🙄)

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*https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/redux-march-29-1974-part-iii-of-iii

Sorry for referring so much to things I already wrote. Sometimes it’s necessary for context in order to make a different point than the last time.

**The second, even more amazing machine was a word processor. My first job out of college in 1980 was teaching in a business school that trained people on these relatively new machines. It blew me away to no longer need to retype a whole poem every time I made some damned little edit to it. I’d stay hours after work to write. And eventually taught some of my students how to use it to write their own poetry.

***Something I noticed when I looked at the first issue recently: I don’t think I ever read that list of contest winners. It has four Janets. I’d met two in my whole life and as a young kid was enamored of Janet Lennon on The Lawrence Welk Show because she let me feel seen. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but to me it’s so weird to see so many Janets in one spot.

****Seeing how cringey my poems were and how little I actually knew about writing, it made no sense that I got offered a teaching job. A woman in my seminar lived in Princeton, where she was part of a community writing program. She recommended me to that director as someone who could run a group for teen girls interested in poetry. So, as with every other job I’ve had, I learned by doing and built 10 years from there. Those poor girls, though - they about died when I brought in some poem about menstruation as an example of women coming into the freedom to write the truth about our lives.

*****Yeah, I have the skills to do a better job of editing my posts. But I’m a combination of lazy and wanting to enjoy writing here more than being uptight about it. Clients: Do as I say, not as I do🤩. At least when it comes to preparing your work for submission to editors and agents.

from our 1/24/26 candlelight vigil

Context: On January 24, the day Alex Pretti was murdered by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, I began standing at traffic lights every day with an anti-ICE sign. Then I got sick on May 23, and my vigil became erratic. Now it’s 2-3 times a week. I’m not happy about it, but I needed a break. My goal always was to keep that vigil until I figured out something better to do. That hasn’t happened yet. Any ideas?

Somewhere in there, I also hit the depression stage of grieving over losing Bodhi on December 24. It’s the undercurrent to everything these days. I’ve had a lot of work lately – manuscripts to edit, coaching clients to support – using all my higher-functioning energy. When my meetings are over for the day and after my half-hour conversation with my husband who lives 3,000 miles away, my lower-functioning self takes over, and I binge something until I fall asleep. These days it’s The Good Wife, in preparation for canceling Paramount+. (Thanks, billionaires shoveling extreme right-wing lies down our throats.) Alicia Florrick is annoying, but I’m looking forward to the spinoff, The Good Fight, which bashes Trump and the right wing in many entertaining ways. You take your validation where you can get it.

Meanwhile, I was in the process of writing the following when I got sick:

Last week I went to the protest that people in my town do every Saturday. They get about 300 people a week. On the March 28 No Kings Day, there were 5,000. It was noisy this week – each time, I imagine – with all the honks and cheers on the busy road.

Ten o’clock on a Saturday morning is early for me; I rarely go to sleep before four a.m. and often not until six. Getting up at nine sucks. But how pleasant it was to be in a like-minded crowd. I didn’t know anyone. I’m pretty shy, but as I did on No Kings Day, I went up to about a dozen people and mentioned my daily vigil and gave them business cards I’d printed with a QR code to my Substack article on why I do the vigil.* Some people looked at me like I was weird but most were friendly. Per Substack stats, it looks like I picked up two readers. Yay me.

One guy I talked to coordinates training for peacekeeping during protests. I said I’d been a peacekeeper at antinuke demonstrations 50 years ago. He was an old anti-nuker, too, and said, “I was arrested with Daniel Ellsberg.” I responded, “Cool. I was arrested with Daniel Berrigan.” We laughed at nostalgia and went on to talk about my becoming a peacekeeper now, though I’d like to go back and hear his civil disobedience story. And I do need to get involved with people in my own town. Three-dimensional human beings. I spend too much time alone. Most of my interaction is on Zoom, a few hours a day.

Those protests are quite different from my daily vigil by myself on the other side of town. I’ve written before* about the honks, thank yous, fuck offs, waves, middle fingers. The ratio is probably 5 to 1 for positives. But most people practice those deep American values: complacency and indifference.

Still, it’s uplifting when someone wildly pumps her fist through the sunroof or groups of people cheer and wave with high enthusiasm. It shows me some people are happy to see someone standing up for something. That’s how I feel when I see a random, rare protester.

~

One day this poor woman tried so hard to tell me off. My town has interminably long traffic lights, trapping me with unwanted company. This woman sat alone in her car with her window down, screaming.

“You’re a jerk! You’re a jerk! You’re a jerk!” she said. Over and over.

Each time, her face split-second morphed from rage to bewilderment, like she’d just surprised herself. Finally when the light changed, her parting words after a moment’s hesitation were deflated. “You look stupid.”

At first I laughed because it was ridiculous. Then I pondered how her language didn’t match her obvious rage. Maybe that’s why she looked shocked each time – she had a big firehose going in her brain, but when she opened her mouth, only a weak stream dribbled out.

She seemed as powerless as a child and could just as easily have been yelling, “You’re a poopy-head!”

How repressed she must be, that she can’t align her emotions with language that does them justice.

I almost felt sorry for her. I imagined teaching her the phrase ‘fuck you’ and coaching her through repetition until she could fully embody it and send it flying toward me.

Maybe not being able to express her anger adequately in the rest of her life is why she tried so hard to give it to a stranger on a streetcorner.

Somehow I’ve found myself living amid a conservative religious community. I thought I’d left that behind in Florida. On one corner is an evangelical church where the pastors and elders are – surprise! – all men. On the next corner is a Mormon church. Maybe this woman belongs to one of them. Maybe that’s why her language is so constrained. Possibly why her life choices and worldview might be equally constrained.

Yeah, it would make me mad if I had to live that way. Especially if part of my brain worked hard to convince myself I loved it.

~

There’s another vibe I once mentioned that recently struck me as more specifically recognizable: frat-boy asshole energy. This happens when a car- or truckload of late teens/early 20s men drive by, gun their engines, and yell. If the noises are words, they’re incoherent. But these guys have the smug, rowdy tenor and sneers of people gleeful at believing they just owned a lib. This happens a few times a week.

Occasionally there will be random 40-ish guys, driving alone, who try to project that same condescending force. Always in a truck. Their shouts often are unintelligible; in any case, no more articulate than, “Go ICE!” They give the vibe of a guy who’d drug a woman’s drink. Would-be Hegseths. Kavanaughs. Gaetzes.

I ignore those guys. Fortunately I never have to spend more than a few seconds in their presence.

One afternoon it hit me why those rowdy young ones feel so familiar. Nearly fifty years ago I took a film class at Rutgers. I was a student at Douglass, the women’s college across town, and had to take the campus bus that dropped us at the student center a few blocks up College Ave from Scott Hall. Those five blocks held nearly all the fraternities. Frat boys leaned over balconies yelling at all the women who walked by. It was a tense-your-stomach, grit-your-teeth few minutes to walk that gauntlet of arrogant punks who felt the right to harass us.

The guys these days aren’t hurling sexual comments at dumpy-old-grandma me, but they have the same entitled delusion of ownership over the space we jointly occupy, over the literal airwaves between their mouths and my ears.

Yesterday four middle-school-aged boys rode their bikes past me and did the same pro-ICE hooting and hollering. They played off each other, building and cracking up like a gang of comedy kings, looking back at me for a reaction I didn’t betray. They were so sadly stupid. If my sign had said, “I hate dog shit,” they easily could have riffed on how much they love it. Anything to be contrary.

Throughout all of it, I’m polite and keep my thoughts to myself. The kids are just silly. But I want adults to drive on their way, not stop for a fight if I were to give them what I really think.

~

This essay as originally written goes on longer, questioning “how does this protest end?” and positing on the vast difference between the wild protest scenes at the Portland ICE building and my experience when young. Pondering the practice of using one’s body to stop oppression.

But I don’t know if anyone is even still reading this. So I’ll leave the rest for another time. Along with the second Bodhi essay that’s been running through my brain for months and various other snippets. I often feel I have nothing interesting to write about. I’ve thought about serializing some short stories or even my romance novel, but they’re not very good, and I’m too lazy to improve them. (Writers, don’t be like me.) There’s also the imagined life of a real woman who was murdered, but that’s not much fun for anyone to read.

Anyway, it’s Saturday. Traffic becomes sparse on weekend afternoons, so I need to grab my sign for an early stakeout.

*https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/heres-a-secret-you-can-do-this-too?r=9ofp6

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Today, May 28, 2026: I’m participating in A Writing Room’s 8-week beta reading program and dragged out the carcass of my romance novel that I thought was forever dead. It’s based on my activism as described in this little essay and the next two or three. And it reminded me that May marks 40 freaking years since this happened. So I thought I’d share it again to mark the anniversaries. This series originally came from a class I took on writing about resistance. The instructor suggested I write a memoir about that part of my life, but that felt like too much work. Instead I wrote these little blurbs, complete with photos. They capture the essence of it. (And weird thing to turn into a romance novel, especially for the highly unromantic me. A friend tells me I should write dystopian novels instead. She’s not wrong.)

7. Skipping ahead three years: By March of 1986, I have two small daughters and have been teaching in the Livingston College Writing Center but am bored after three years. I turn my attention to the annual march through New Brunswick to commemorate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

New Brunswick is home to the world headquarters of Johnson & Johnson. The march’s focus is on J&J’s racist policies in South Africa and their spearheading of racist revitalization strategies for New Brunswick that wiped out hundreds of low-income housing units.

The coalition agrees to hold a rally at J&J and build a tent city on their vast front lawn in the middle of downtown New Brunswick. This is an exciting change from usual activism in the city.

Meanwhile, the mayor has announced that the men’s shelter, which is set to close imminently until next December, will not be allowed to reopen. Legal Services wants to sue to keep it open; they tell my husband and me that they could use help from an activist angle. So we focus the tent city on the lack of shelter, demanding J&J provide the money that the mayor gives as an excuse for why it can’t reopen.

(Photos by David Antebi. That’s me in the sunglasses, pontificating about something.)

300 people attend the peaceful demonstration. 23 get arrested. It’s a glorious day and so much fun. We’re charged with trespassing, released, and told to come back for a court date in June.

A trial! Even more fun. We hold an organizing meeting next to the closed shelter to help Legal Services identify clients for their lawsuit and to ask the men to testify at the trial. The Plowshares trial had taught me to have justification witnesses.

I bring dinner – hastily thrown together sandwiches and fruit. We meet the next night, too, but don’t think about food because the men already had agreed to come…we don’t need an incentive. They’re disappointed, so I promise dinner the next night.

And thus begins an 18-month soup kitchen outdoors every night. For a few weeks we serve it in the parking lot next to the closed shelter building. But one night a rat runs across my sandaled foot, and I decide to move dinner to a prominent street corner.

Activism has begun to intertwine with direct service. Is it an act of resistance to provide food in places inconvenient to the powers that be: where they’re forced to watch it happen?

Next: 8. Epiphany! I’m an Asshole.

Rest of series:

#1 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/notes-on-resistance-1-of-7

#2 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/notes-on-resistance-2-of-7

#3 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-3-of

#5 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-5-of

#6 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-6-of

#7 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-7-of

Today would have been the great Adrienne Rich’s 97^th birthday. I usually remember because it’s the day before mine, but I hadn’t thought to post about it until I saw my dear, long-time friend Eliot Katz, the poet-activist, do it on Facebook.* He worked with her over the course of several years after I had lost touch.

I’ve written before about studying with her for two years while I was at Douglass College in the late ‘70s. I particularly mention her in the abortion pieces I published here a couple months ago.

I won’t rehash all that. Instead, I’ll share some of what I’m grateful for:

• Our creative writing seminar, my first class with her, happened spring of 1976, when she was preparing to publish Of Woman Born, her first book of prose and a seminal work on “motherhood as experience and institution.”** She read a couple pages to us and told us of something that meant nothing to me at the time but later really saved my sanity: fragmentation. She said after you have a baby, your attention is so interrupted that it’s stressful and hard to concentrate. Six years later, after I had my first daughter (named for Adrienne), my brain felt broken into bits, day in and day out for months. I couldn’t hold a thought together and felt low-key panic. By grace I remembered what Adrienne had said. Some days I held onto that word fragmentation like a life raft: it named a condition that made sense and that didn’t mean I’m losing my mind. Because that’s sure what it felt like.

• I have good line editing skills and a good sense of pacing. Those started when Adrienne tackled my poems and essays with her purple Flair pen and bracketed unnecessary words. I was shocked the first time I saw one of those pages…what the hell was this? But as with everything, I quickly deferred to her and learned the lesson. In addition to making me a good editor now, it also helped me immensely circa 2007 when grant applications began switching to online text boxes. What had been five-page narratives suddenly had to be reduced to a handful of 200-character answers…without losing significant meaning. I’ve written more than a thousand applications, so that lesson came in handy.

• Adrienne taught me, both as part of the class and through her work on my poems and essays, to be brave enough to tell the truth. To push harder than might feel comfortable. In the context of centuries of women’s silences, telling the truth is a responsibility. And it’s a sacred trust to hear other women’s stories. Adrienne laid some of the intuitive groundwork I brought to designing the experiences women would have at Amandla Crossing, the housing program we opened for unhoused mothers and kids in 1991.

• The particular things she said to me and the ways she encouraged me let me think I could be a good writer. She showed confidence I didn’t deserve, because I didn’t have the follow-through to pursue opportunities she offered. If you read this part*** of my abortion series, you saw that I was lost in college, even after women’s studies courses, still believing – no, emotionally needing – to be connected to a man. I threw over everything to pursue romance…including, for a long time, writing. (I’ve always made dreadful decisions.)

• In 1977 she got Ms Magazine to give my friends and me $300 to take our little feminist literary magazine, The Common Woman, to Houston for the National Women’s Conference. We never would have made it there, otherwise.

image source: Instagram. Poster unknown

That’s what comes to mind, though I’m sure there is more I owe her. I have journals from those years I studied with her, but I don’t have time now to dig through them for further insight.

By the way, she didn’t pronounce her name like Rocky was yelling up at her window. She said it with ah at the start and the accent on the final syllable.

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*Eliot shared this link to a piece he wrote upon her death in 2012: (sorry, I don’t know how to shorten a link)

https://logosjournal.com/article/spring-summer_katz/

**The subtitle of the book. I can note here that she later came to recognize she had written it without considering race and class, something she addressed in a subsequent version.

***https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/redux-march-29-1974-part-iii-of-iii?r=9ofp6

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

In a writers’ meeting the other day, someone taking an essay course told of a classmate who got quite upset when others asked for more details about things mentioned in his essay. “If I’d wanted to tell that story, I would have written it!” the classmate said. People in our group seemed to relate.

I understand – likely all of us have stories or aspects of stories we don’t want to share. At the same time, clearly his listeners were engaged, so he was onto something.

His reaction sounds like a lot of emotion was tied up in what he wanted to exclude.

Each of us has the right to tell or not tell what we choose. We have our individual criteria for what’s shared vs not. So it’s not appropriate to pressure people to share what doesn’t feel safe or right.

With that understanding, though, I’d like to suggest another angle.

As an editor and book coach, in the past few years I’ve read a couple hundred novels, short stories, essays, and poems when people asked for feedback. So I’ve seen patterns.

One pattern is the heart of a story sometimes lies outside the story the writer is willing to tell.

Our pain often lies outside the stories we are willing to tell, right? We may want to write about an experience, but telling the whole truth would reveal too much hurt, shame, fear, loss, etc. Too much vulnerability.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly where much of the life of that story is, mired in all that vulnerability.

I raise this as something think about, so your choices about what to in/exclude will be more informed and intentional.

Let me get this out of the way first: we may have stories we choose not to tell because we don’t want to hurt other people. I would love to write about how destructive my first marriage was, how I allowed it to do such harm – but I know that would hurt my kids, so I won’t. It’s frustrating, but I sit on those stories.

That’s not the kind of self-censorship I’m referring to, though. I’m talking about the stories we don’t tell because we’re afraid of hurting ourselves. (I have a few of those, too.)

It’s a legitimate fear, a legitimate choice to make. But to help it be an informed choice vs an automatic emotional response, it’s useful to think about what you want your readers’ experience of and engagement with your story to be.

If you hold your truth back or if you write around it in vague language, your reader is not going to feel the full impact of your story. As you’re writing about it in vague language, you know exactly what you mean and what emotions are involved. But your reader can only guess.

And maybe that’s just fine for where you are in this moment.

However, if you write a clearer (not vague), more vulnerable piece, your reader is more likely to experience your story with you, to make a deeper connection between your life and theirs, to remember your writing better because they have more to hold onto.

Immediacy, specificity, vulnerability – these engage readers in a meaningful way instead of keeping them at a perhaps-bewildered distance.

Again, to be clear, I’m not saying you have to tell stories you don’t want to. But I am suggesting

(1) you think about what impact you want a given piece to have on your audience – how close or distant you want them to feel

(2) you look at how the words on your page help you achieve or impede that impact.

Also, if you’re in the mood sometime, you can experiment with sitting in that “did I just share too much?” space of pushing your boundary a little. Maybe with a friend or in a trusted group: just exercising that vulnerability muscle a little more than usual to see what it feels like. It’s one way to grow as a writer – if it feels safe enough. I don’t think it always has to feel 100% safe.

Also consider fiction – vulnerability often is more easily explored through a character who is as much like or unlike you as feels comfortable.

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Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

I was thinking today about what it would be like to be a wholly authentic writer. Often I feel like I am, but there are a couple of things that feel like secrets I haven’t been able to write yet.

Both are things that happened to me, one by virtue of DNA, so hardly my fault. The other by virtue of someone else’s behavior independent of me, so not my responsibility either.

I know that. And if these things happened to someone else, my feelings toward them would be nothing like my feelings toward myself. They shouldn’t feel shame or like a loser or a failure. They shouldn’t feel humiliated or held back.

So WTF is the matter with me?

Meanwhile, under all my essay writing is the drumbeat of who cares who cares who cares? A chorus occasionally pops up – what personality disorder makes you think anyone would care?

I don’t think I write personal essays because I want people to care about me. It’s more like I’m just the vehicle. I write my experience or observations for two reasons:

(1) My brain really does process complex things by going into what I call composing mode. Certain subjects set off my thoughts to be presented in word choice and sentence structure as though they are being written. It happens automatically. And damn it, they’re always better floating around my head than when I start typing. This essay is a case in point. It launched itself in my mind unbidden. Then as I took care of unrelated business – moments requiring normal thought to decide what food to buy and what corner to stand on, e.g. – the essay brain would stop and go. Yes, I realize this probably makes no sense to nonwriters, and I can only hope it does to other writers of personal essays. Maybe to poets, too – at times these things have popped up as poems, a line here and a line there.

I’ve chosen to have faith that this process is a symptom of being a writer. A gift and a fundamental skill, as opposed to a mental illness.

So one thing that happens during composing brain is it helps me sort out my observations and positions on what’s happening around me and in the world. That comes to the second reason I write these things.

2. Maybe somebody can relate. Maybe I end up articulating things that others feel but haven’t found the precise words for. Maybe more precise words bring better understanding of one’s own experience.

For example, recently I shared a Substack post by Carol Seymour, “The Gray Camper Van Writer,” about the increasing number of older women being forced to live in vans. My introductory note turned into a mini-essay on my own fear of being in that position one day. As I dashed it out on my phone, I wondered, TMI? Am I too much for sharing such personal fears? Ultimately, I said, So what? and hoped something I wrote would mean something to someone.

~

What kind of authenticity do you, as a reader, want? When does something feel like too much for you? When do you get bored? What kind of topic lights you up?

Those are not rhetorical questions. My composing brain needs to know these things.

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The puppy photo posted by the rescue group. I knew instantly he was for me. We were for each other.

This is a dead-dog story. The kind I would never read. The movie I would never see. The conversation I would cross the street to avoid.

So I can’t blame you if you stop reading now.

Three months ago today I had to choose to have Bodhi put to death. My heart is still broken; I can’t imagine it ever being unbroken. I cry every day.

Sometimes it’s deliberate – in particular, I seek out a little video I took a couple days before he died. He looks normal and chipper. You might not notice that his left hind leg is missing. You can’t see cancer spreading across that area, raised red, crusting lumps that fused together over the weeks they developed. You can’t tell he had a cancerous lymph node in his left front armpit. That was only evident by touch. In his final days, it became hard for him to curl into my left shoulder, as he always loved to do, how he spent a lot of time over the past six years in Zoom meetings. All my clients and friends got to know him that way.

12/22/25 - I needed to capture him in all his aliveness.

And of course the video doesn’t show how cancer had begun to surround his urethra, the single tube that flows urine into the bladder. On December 22nd and 23rd, two vets said I needed to think about euthanasia imminently, since the urethra was in danger of being closed off entirely, which would have been catastrophic for him to experience. It was agony to consider because, as this video taken on the 22nd shows, he was so spirited and vocal. I posted it on Instagram on the 24^th as I waited for the death vet to arrive. It made its way to Threads, where a stranger misinterpreted the searing pain of my narrative for cold disregard and willingness to kill a perfectly good dog. I forgave that person for his harsh reaction; he had no idea what was really happening.

He loved to hide under the covers.

Bodhi had food allergies and a tendency toward pancreatitis and irritable bowel flareups. He spent most of his life on a restricted diet, more so as he got older. It was on July 1 last year, after four months of working with a veterinary internist and finally getting him to gain weight, that I took him to urgent care to see what the ugly little growth on the bottom of his left hind foot was. They needle-biopsied it and said it was benign. The first of several cancer misdiagnoses.

But I was talking about the food.

He had a couple of prescription kibble and canned options that I mixed and matched because he often got bored. Apparently they didn’t provide much flavor; he’d refuse to eat unless I added something. Between his being picky about what he could safely eat – like green beans and apples – and the need to have little to no fat in these extras, I ended up being limited to a tiny bit of water from a can of no-salt-added tuna or a tablespoon of baked sweet potato or a crumbled half-cracker, a “healthier” Ritz alternative. I tried to give him just one of those options with each meal, per vet recommendation, but he loved those crackers so much that he often demanded I add them too.

If he wasn’t in the mood for the meal I presented, he’d turn up his nose and bark at me. When I knew the end was coming, I made this video to capture that bark and his accompanying tap dance of insistence. You can hear me say, “Eat your food” over and over because I knew he’d bark back at me. “Not until you put something good on top, damn it!”

Last summer my grandson worked on my Instagram account, which I rarely use, and it boosted a post. So now IG prompts me to boost posts. I never do, but this one of Bodhi must have been a trigger, because for the first six weeks, every time I scrolled through, it would pop up. At first it took my breath away, and of course I would sob. Then I found myself anticipating it, would scroll an extra time or two each day, and felt comforted by seeing it. Still teary but feeling like it was a visit from him. Not literally. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in posthumous spirits, an afterlife, the Rainbow Bridge. How I wish I did.

After a while, the video stopped showing up in my scrolls. I felt low-level panic, an extra stab of heartbreak. So I sought the video in my profile and played it a few times, hoping to trigger a repeat of the surprise showings. Maybe it did, since I started seeing them again. But now it has been a week without them, so I’ll retry that experiment.

When I need to cry out the grief, I look for that video.

Anyone on Zoom with me knows I have a mini-museum of Charlie Chaplin stuff. One year I made this Halloween costume.

A lot of the crying triggers are unintentional, catch me by surprise, and seem way out of context. My chest clenches, and I lose breath for a moment. If I’m home alone, which I usually am, I’ll full-on cry. But if I’m out, I stop it at wet eyes. I’m doing this daily anti-ICE vigil on whatever street corner is convenient, and several times I’ve been ambushed by grief – walking a path Bodhi loved, seeing a little dog he enjoyed, noticing a short white hair on my black sweater. That doesn’t happen much anymore; I no longer pluck them off.

There’s a company called Cuddle Clones that I ordered from shortly before Bodhi died. Peter gave me this opportunity for Christmas. I sent initial photos, and someone (thing?) created a prototype of a stuffed animal. This photo is from the third batch of revisions. They don’t quite nail it, but I thought I should stop pressing them for perfection. It’s supposed to arrive next Monday. I don’t know if it will feel weird, terribly wrong, or comforting. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

~

I don’t know. I intended to write Morning Pages in my journal, and this essay came out as soon as I typed the date.

I’m sorry to be such a bummer. Between writing about ICE and my decades-ago abortion and now my beloved and oh-so-dead dog, I may be chasing readers away. I wish I could provide comedy instead. Maybe I’ll do a post with YouTube clips of my favorite hilarious TV and movie excerpts. While I have a rogue writing voice that pops up trying to be funny sometimes, I have no talent with jokes. I have to steal comic relief from others. I’ll try to find you something good to make up for the recent and upcoming agita and grief.

~

Two things were undercurrents in my mind/gut last year as I went through six months of trying to save Bodhi. On the top level were freaking out and grief and determination to do whatever was possible. Under that were two kind of life-affirming drumbeats. It felt inappropriate then to pay much attention since they hinted at surviving beyond Bodhi. (One of my early reactions to his diagnosis was the thought that they should allow dogs and people to be euthanized together as a way to avoid parting. No, I wasn’t suicidal. It was just an unbidden thought trying to reconcile the reality that I had to let him die with the terrible pain of it.) Those drumbeats were, as I said in my recent vigil essay, to return to my activist roots – the antidote to despair is resistance – and to go deeper into writing.

Early last year before I knew what was coming, I expected to devote the year to serious new writing. I expected to abandon the romance novel that’s not too far from ready to publish and instead have fun writing a historical mystery with a woman anarchist as the protagonist. I ordered a bunch of research books, and just when they began to arrive, Bodhi and I went into this intense nine-month period of vet visits, medications, and nursing care.

In some corner of my wacked-out brain lives what I call my composing voice, triggered, unprompted by conscious-me, to narrate a situation that I recognize as meaningful. To be clear, I’m not saying I hear voices. 😊 I’m talking about voice in the writing sense.

Through much of last year I mentally wrote many essays about what was happening with Bodhi. They were necessarily immediate and visceral. And included some good sentences, or would have if I’d ever been able to get them on the page. I barely even wrote in my journal – it ceased being even a repository for to-do lists and bookkeeping.

The writing I absolutely wanted to accomplish last year was that three-part abortion thing I published here. Or two parts made it last year, then hell started breaking loose as I started the third.

Bodhi died Christmas Eve. The next day, frozen, I made it to my daughter’s for family Christmas to see my almost-two-year-old grandson open his presents. Over the next week, I read six novels, though I couldn’t tell you what they were. A romance or two and suspense. After that, through most of January, I was a zombie, watching even more TV than usual, crying throughout the day and night. My husband, who lives on the opposite side of the country (another story in itself), came out when it was apparent Bodhi’s end was near. I’m not sure how I would have managed, otherwise. He stayed til the end of January and insisted on taking care of me, especially for the week I was sick. So because I wasn’t alone, I contained my grief expression to private moments for the most part. No need to bring anyone else down.

Except for what I’m writing here, I guess.

I had to get back to functioning by the end of January – two HUD grant applications to write, three novels to evaluate for others, the writing group I facilitate for the A Writing Room community. And I wanted to do substantial writing again.

It felt like a big mountain range stood between me and writing a sustained project like another novel. That mountain was the three essays I needed to get out to clear my mind. About Bodhi. About my abortion. About my daily anti-ICE vigil. The last two are done and published.

Writing this one shows me “the Bodhi essay” will need to be a series. Gees, I’m sorry. If you’re not a dog person or don’t realize dogs are a higher form of life than people (they would not give me reason to stand on a damned corner every day), then the rest of my Bodhi essays may not be for you. But you probably figured that out already.

Thank you for reading. Sorry for the bummer. I do know a few people who have lost their beloved dogs or cats in recent months, so maybe these essays will help. At the least, you can have space in my comments to tell me about your wonderful animal-children.

~

Don’t forget the No Kings march this Saturday, the 28^th. If you don’t know where to go, start here: https://indivisible.org/

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A note from Adrienne Rich on the abortion essay-mess I turned in as a final exam

This is partly a meditation on shame. On unconscious limitations imposed by class and patriarchy. On believing I’d be dead by 24 because I couldn’t visualize a life beyond that.

Let’s start with shame. I hate that topic. But it’s the rock this story lived under for years after my abortion. Not shame about having had an abortion; no woman need feel shame about that. My shame was in what a failure I was for getting pregnant on purpose during my sophomore year of college.

To my credit, as I’ve said, it wasn’t a trick, soap-opera-plot pregnancy. He agreed to it. So at least I don’t have to feel bad about that.

~

If you’d like to catch up:

~

If you read Parts I and II of this series, linked above, you might be asking, “What the hell was wrong with you?” I’ve asked myself plenty. The question brings to mind Rebecca Bunch’s answer in one episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: “Off the top of my head, I’d say low self-esteem, a lack of maternal affection, and a genetic predisposition for anxiety and depression.”

Check. Check. Check. Check. And perhaps the greatest issue: a subterranean panic about my lack of a future, the sense that adulthood was stepping off a cliff into a foggy abyss. Emotionally I did my best to drag my heels, grasped for anything to stop my fall as I began to tumble.

~

In Part I, I showed the above card that Adrienne Rich wrote me after I turned in a mess that was trying to be an essay about the abortion I’d had two years earlier when I was 19. I hadn’t written one complete sentence on the first page. Bless her, she was always brilliant and knew how to respond. She gave me permission to do something I couldn’t conceive of then and didn’t even recognize she was suggesting. I put it away and forgot it for 49 years. I’m including a chunk here partly because I know a lot of memoir writers who might find it useful.

Adrienne said: “Your notes…seem to have a form of their own, & it struck me that rather than write it as a chronological documentary, a linear narrative, you might experiment – as you begin to do here – with several different ways of telling…you might try interweaving visual flashbacks, dialogue (remembered or imaginary) – in other words, try clustering your impressions & remembrances, don’t feel bound by a conventional structure.”

So I’ve given up on this essay being a regular narrative in favor of letting it be the fragments it insists on being. It’s a complicated story and may be too long.

One thing I ask, if you’ve read this far and if you’d like to help me: please let me know if you get bored, if this is too tiresome and things should be omitted, etc. I can’t tell, so I have to rely on readers to help me do better. Thanks.

~

How did I turn into a person who thought getting pregnant as an unmarried college student was a good idea?

I couldn’t conceive of living to adulthood. My family had no sense of setting goals, of wanting to be anything. Life was just the strict rule to live by my mother’s moral code. There wasn’t religion, something I’m so grateful for. There was just iron will. And the other strict rule: don’t tell anyone what went on in our house. I lived with the enforced secret of my father’s alcoholism – what my mother said to keep secret – but also with her violence, which she couldn’t have designated a secret because she refused to admit it existed.

I grew up in the 1960s. My father was an Army sergeant; my mother worked in a bank. Born in 1920, they were from tiny Arkansas towns with one-room schoolhouses and little education. I was an accident, ten years after my brother and fourteen after my sister. Most of my growing up happened in New Jersey.

I started kindergarten the fall my sister started art school in Philadelphia. A huge fight happened between my mother and her family – my mother had a rich aunt in Oregon who told my sister she’d pay for college if my sister got away from my mother.

Philly was only 45 minutes away. The first year my sister commuted and would come home each day and teach me something. I watched how red and blue blend to make purple. How to draw a face by making a circle and putting a line down it.

The next year she didn’t live at home and broke contact with my parents for six months. I don’t know why. It was the beatnik era, and my sister was surrounded by artists. My mother’s rage may have been as simple as my sister becoming unrecognizable.

The upshot occurred four years later when my parents and I were living in Germany and I was going to a Canadian school, where suddenly I got celebrity status among kids as a “real, red-blooded American” and ended up with the highest averages in grades 4 and 5. My good grades created expectations: from my mother, that I would always continue them. Anything less than an A was bad, unless it was gym. My teachers were delighted and encouraging, especially about my writing.

Lacking a TV those years, I read a new mystery novel every day. Just before we moved, my mother’s co-worker had given me three bags full of books. Hardcover full-length novels for kids. I was immediately drawn to the Nancy Drews that dated back to the 1930s, though several other series were represented.

Four things happened because of those books*:

• I had safe worlds to which I escaped from the chaos and violence of my home.

• I was exposed to mysteries and immediately started writing my own.

• I was exposed to college through the Dorothy Dale (1908-1924) and Beverly Gray (1934-1955) series that showed intrepid young women educating themselves and going out into the world. Beverly was especially exciting because she was a writer and eventually became a reporter.

• College became real in my imagination. My takeaway from the books and my academic performance was suddenly a world of possibility. It was 1965; I was in 5^th grade. I decided to become a lawyer, like Nancy Drew’s father, along with being a writer. I had no idea what a lawyer was; maybe something to do with solving mysteries. But I knew it would require going to college, so I took one of my father’s heavy cardboard cigar boxes, threw in the few German pfennigs I had, and started a college fund.

“You’ll go to college over my dead body,” my mother said. She’d lost control of my sister; no way would she let that happen again. I was 10, so what else could I do but believe her? I kept reading. I kept writing, though my mother urged me to stop because, she said, holding a pen was making my hand ugly. I kept getting the highest grades (except gym) because I wasn’t allowed to do otherwise. That was my message at home: you must be the best in school, but you’re not allowed to do anything with it.

Maybe that’s why I thought adulthood meant falling off a cliff.

~

In 11^th grade English, back in NJ, Mrs. Lowden, a middle-aged woman with tightly curled gray hair, scared the crap out of me. But she also made me read Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” which eventually changed my life. She seemed to dislike me or maybe just thought I was an idiot. One day she went around the room asking the girls to say what our plan was for our future. I sat with low-level panic, as I did whenever I had to speak in class, exacerbated by the knowledge that I didn’t have a future. Again…expecting to be dead; some part of my brain couldn’t count past 24.

I don’t remember what aspirations the other girls had, but I remember being the weirdo. It was an era of new possibilities for women, and being in an honors, college-prep class apparently came with career expectations that were lost on me.

My answer was, “I’m going to get married and have kids.” Mrs. Lowden pushed back somehow; I had to say it a few times. “No, this is all I want.” I held onto it stubbornly, like a last low-lying tree branch to keep me from tumbling into the abyss. Did she roll her eyes or sigh with exasperation? I do remember the feelings I was left with: shame, failure.

At that age I couldn’t articulate that fear of falling into nothingness. Now I can say it was a reaction, in part, to not having created any acceptable identity. Or more accurately, I did create a positive identity as a child, as we naturally do, but my mother forbade it. Then, as my self-image devolved, the future promised by that positive identity felt off limits to a girl like me.

~

By the time I got to college, I was one fucked-up chick.

Yes, I did make it there. My best friend from senior year got two applications for the schools she wanted and made me fill one out. My mother relented and signed the papers.

But I lived with an undercurrent of terror. I couldn’t have told you that; I didn’t articulate it to myself. Going into the world, leaving the reliable if dysfunctional structure of my parents’ home, brought me back to that damned cliff with no guardrail.

Photo by Sander Lenaerts on Unsplash

I started having panic attacks second semester of freshman year. One day, standing on a campus bus going from Serious College Boyfriend #1’s side of town back to my dorm in the women’s school, I suddenly felt like I might scream against my will. I was lightheaded and on one level knew I wouldn’t scream but on another level felt like I was losing control, like I was losing my mind.

This went on for months as I clung to him and promised myself I wouldn’t be crazy like my mother. I could not allow that to happen. At one point while back at my parents’ apartment on Ft. Dix, I went to the Army hospital where I’d been active as a Red Cross volunteer. In the clinic I happened to get a doctor who was hot stuff among the nurses and other volunteers. He said I had anxiety and prescribed valium. He also said what I really needed was to get a different boyfriend. Then he invited me to go away with him for a weekend to his family’s estate. I was 18. He was 35. I may have been a panicky mess, but I wasn’t stupid enough to hook up with him. It wasn’t the last time he asked me.

Sorry for that digression.

Looking back, my panic partly was from being in a world I didn’t know how to navigate and partly because for the first time ever, I was no longer the one seemingly sane person in the midst of my parents’ alcoholic, violent, histrionic, tragic chaos. I had months of peace in which it was my turn to break down.

Unconsciously, I believed there was safety in falling back on what I’d been raised to do. I could and should get married and have kids. Serious College Boyfriend #1 and I had come to Rutgers together and were engaged that first semester. I still have the tiny ring he gave me. He was sweet and willing to give me what I thought I wanted. But he said I’d have to sign a church paper saying I’d raise our kids Catholic, which I thought was ridiculous. I wasn’t an articulated atheist yet, but I wasn’t going to let a church tell me what to do. We tabled that issue, but what really did us in was his need to see me as cute and insubstantial. An airhead, since he believed girls were “illogical” by nature. I knew that in spite of how he loved me and wanted to protect me, he wouldn’t be able to take me seriously as someone with independent intelligence and agency.

So I left him for the sexy guy in his dorm, the one who agreed four months later to have a baby with me. Serious College Boyfriend #2.

~

Why the hell would I do this to myself and torture a nice, naïve guy? That’s what Serious College Boyfriend #2 was. I just re-read the long letter he wrote five years after the abortion, where he shared what he remembered. Even now it gave me a zing! of shame and embarrassment at how manipulative I was. Maybe that’s the story I didn’t want to tell all these years.

He blamed himself, but I never did. Sure, I was pissed and felt betrayed that he did a 180 on me, but we lived together for another three years until he went to start a new life in FL. After that we remained close for four more years, visiting, talking on the phone as much as we could afford, writing letters. A few times we talked about getting back together. We had a strong bond. But in the last year of our living together, I had treated him terribly, having an affair with one of our roommates. He didn’t deserve it. I don’t know why I did it, unless I really was angry all that time and suppressed it, then acted it out. I never blamed him for moving away. I was awful.

~

As it was, three things happened after the abortion:

• Somehow I finished that semester, the second of my sophomore year.

• On my birthday six weeks later I told SCB#2 I wanted a puppy, so he took me to the pound and bought me Rhett Butler. A dog was probably what I really needed all along.

• I dropped out of college at the end of that semester, moved back with my parents and got a job in the clothing department of Grants, a discount store. I was terribly depressed. Probably full of rage, too, in retrospect. But I couldn’t feel that then.

SCB#2 went to the Catskills for his regular summer job at a resort hotel. He asked me to come with him and got me a job as the bookkeeper’s assistant. Because he was the maître ’d, he, Rhett, and I lived in a little room in the staff wing. My financial management training proved useful down the line when I developed nonprofits.

A year later, 1975, I went back to school to learn to be a writer. My Women Writers professor, Elaine Showalter**, head of one of the earliest Women’s Studies programs in the country, was 34 at the time and astounded me with the impossible richness of her life: teacher, writer, leader in her field, representative on feminist boards, mother, wife.

I still had no solid vision of my life; I just knew I didn’t want to be alone and didn’t want to be bored. One day I expressed amazement to Elaine for all she did and said something about feeling incapable of creating a future. She said not to worry, that we’re capable of so many things we can’t yet imagine, that I would learn skills and create a path. Those weren’t her exact words, but that gist of it opened a door to hope, gave me something to hang onto and believe in. She told me Adrienne Rich would be teaching there next semester and encouraged me to apply for her creative writing seminar.

I’d had a sociology instructor who, when I was lost about how to navigate college, told me she also had come from a low-income family with no college expectations and that it brought adjustment challenges. I’d never thought in those terms – I had no class analysis then other than feeling inferior. Her words blessed me with context for my experience: It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t figure out a future in that environment; it wasn’t because I was a failure and a loser.

Elaine turned out to be right. By the time I reached her age I had spent 10 years as a writing teacher, had become an antinuke and peace activist, had helped start a press for leftist causes, was two years into creating resources for people living outdoors, had had a few poems and essays published, had two wonderful little daughters. In other words, I’d been able to create an identity out of what I had believed was nothing, one step at a time and with help from others.

Nineteen-year-old me had no identity other than disaffected, impoverished college student and desperate girlfriend. But it had always been in my nature to start things: clubs, publications, plays as a kid; later as an adult, organizations, publications, nonprofits, and social service programs. Maybe part of my problem at 19 was that with no discernable identity, I had no vision for something to create. So I fell back on what I was raised to do.

~

In many ways this history doesn’t matter now. Most of my life is over. But this story would not stop pressing me to be told.

If I had gone through with the pregnancy, I don’t know where life would have gone. Probably the future my mother said I was allowed, except I’d likely have moved in with them, dumped and hated by my boyfriend, and utterly depressed. I doubt I’d have gone back to finish school. I probably would have gotten married ASAP to escape my parents’ house, possibly to some Army guy I met from being at Ft. Dix. I might have repeated my mother’s life.

It’s March again as I write this, eight days from the 52^nd anniversary of my abortion. Every year I can’t help but think of it. I usually do the math to see how old that person would be had I stubbornly fought for what I thought I wanted back then. I planned to name her Rachel Elizabeth. I discussed this with my boyfriend then, before he freaked out. I don’t think we came up with a boy’s name; I didn’t want a boy. Funny, though, because when I calculate how old the person would be, it’s always a man I picture.

I have two daughters now – 44 and 41. Believe it or not, I did it again when I was 27 🙄: told Serious College Boyfriend #4 that I wanted to have a baby. At least I’d graduated the year before and had a full-time teaching job. I had been talking about it in our activist circle, and three other guys had offered to accommodate me. But I gave my boyfriend first dibs. He agreed, and thus my family was created.

Eventually we got married, and while it was a terrible marriage and he left me after 22 years, in the interim we were very well matched for activism and creating organizations and programs – great business partners. The work we did helped over a thousand unhoused families and individuals. That’s the fact I weigh decisions against when I question my life choices: I could have, if I were stronger, left that marriage right after my youngest was born and had a better life – but all those people wouldn’t have been helped. I could have, if I had been stronger, gone ahead and had that first baby on my own – but my wonderful daughters wouldn’t exist and all those people wouldn’t have been helped.

Plus who knows what kind of life that poor kid would have had.

So all in all, the choice I felt forced into was for the best.

* https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/what-saved-me-as-a-kid?r=9ofp6

**Once I babysat for Elaine Showalter’s kids, including five-year-old Michael. He grew up to be a Hollywood actor and director, which means if I played Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon, I’d be one degree from some cool people.😀🙄 (Not, however, from Kevin Bacon.)

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This 1973 profile by Bill Moyers popped up in my Facebook newsfeed.

The religious aspect of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker doesn't do anything for me, but I have deep respect for the work they've always done around poverty, peace, labor, etc.

I never got to meet her; the first time I heard of her was right after she died and I was working with the Plowshares 8 Support Committee in NYC and had to do something around a memorial event. But she immediately became a role model, and her work, along with that of Carol Fennelly and Mitch Snyder of the Community for Creative Nonviolence in DC (also largely Catholic), greatly influenced me.

When 23 of us were arrested at a tent city we'd organized in NJ demanding that a shelter remain open, I realized when preparing for the trial that we couldn't leave the issue at that: we had to keep fighting and, importantly, provide food every night for the people who were being put into the street. I would not have come to that epiphany if not for Dorothy Day and Carol and Mitch. This is worth watching.

We can all learn from this.

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The hat I wear during my vigils

Today two people gave me the finger, two gave me vehement thumbs down, one shook his head and called me a dumbass, and another drove by with overaged frat-boy asshole energy and yelled something unintelligible.

A runner stopped to thank me because her parents are immigrants.

I’ve committed myself to standing on a local street corner once a day for 15 - 30 minutes with a sign that currently says, “End ICE Now.”

Does it accomplish anything? Nothing direct – I don’t have the power to make the cruelty stop. So in that sense one might ask, “What’s the point?”

I started on January 24 in response to Minnesotans’ call for people to gather at 7 pm after federal agents murdered Alex Pretti earlier that day. Rather than drive into downtown Portland to the bigger protest, my husband and I went to the busiest corner near me. It was cold and dark. There wasn’t much traffic, and response was what I’ve learned is typical: mostly silence, a fair amount of honking/cheers. Some cursing. At us, not ICE.

I’ve been wanting to do something for a year. I did attend the big demonstrations last year and some small weekly vigils with friends in another town. But once my dog Bodhi got his cancer diagnosis in early July, 90% of my energy went to trying to keep him alive. It was six months of emotional rollercoaster and intensive labor. I have another essay going about that – one ran in my composing brain almost continuously all that time – but since he died on Christmas Eve, I haven’t been able to handle writing it.

As I went through that grief, knowing the inevitable, my gut said that once he was gone, I would need to turn that pain into activism. Now that I think about it, maybe that was internalization of the belief I’ve written about before: The antidote to despair is resistance.

This solo vigil is something I must do to focus myself, to remember, literally to stand for something, until I can think of something better to do. A friend said it’s a spiritual practice, and I – being an atheist and not spiritual at all – had already begun to feel that.

For five days scattered through this six-week period, it rained hard. Knowing it was coming – Portland’s rainy season – and knowing I’d take any excuse to avoid going out there, I bought rain pants. I tried to waterproof my sign with some stinky spray, but it didn’t work. The posterboard is warping and making tiny rips, and the supposedly self-sticking letters have had layers of tape applied to keep them in place. I made duct tape handles on the back: two at the sides and one on top, allowing me to hold it comfortably with two hands or switch to one when I need to wave. Those are disintegrating. Clearly I need to make new signs, but I’ve been too busy with work. (If only George Soros would give me my back pay for 40 years of protests. )

Like probably everyone else, on some level I want attention, generally speaking. But mostly I also feel super uncomfortable being noticed. I stand with a 22” x 28” sign, held lengthwise. I’m only 62” tall, so that sign takes up a lot of me. A friend I’ve attended other protests with likes to wave at all the cars going by. Me, I stand there like a tree or telephone pole (do those still exist?), trying to blend into the scenery, letting the sign do all the work. If someone honks or says something friendly, I smile and wave and say, “Thank you.”

Half the time I’ve been on the busiest corner that’s closest to my apartment, a four-lane road that leads from I-5 into my town. It’s an easy walk, one my little Bodhi used to love, so at times I get teary as I think about how happy he’d be if he could join me.

Fuck. How happy I would be.

Otherwise, if I need to be out for something else, I find the closest busy corner. I’ve parked in the lots of grocery stores, Planet Fitness, corporate complexes, and a strip mall as I waited to pick up lunch.

On a different four-lane road with a lot of traffic, a 40-ish guy in a truck yelled something unclear when he was all the way across the road from me. A couple minutes later he came back on my side, right next to me with his passenger window rolled down. The light was green so he couldn’t stop all the way, but he slowed enough to yell, “You want some ice?” He smirked like he’d said something clever and drove away. With that line, he might have thrown a cup of soda at me. I don’t know if he planned to and lost his nerve or if he thought the nonsensical question itself was some kind of own. 🙄

At that same intersection on another day, a young, scowling guy in a Tesla filmed me. Creep. I just turned away.

About 20% of people who honk also flip me off. So if you’re a honker in support of protesters, make sure to add hand gestures that clearly communicate. Frequently I can’t tell what people are trying to say.

A 3-D printed whistle for alerting people that ICE has been spotted in the area

Some people have said doing this by myself is “brave.” I disagree because “brave” means doing something when you’re scared. This isn’t scary for me, probably because I had a lot of experience in my youth. But I’m not cavalier about it; hateful people clearly feel more entitled to be violent these days. So I maintain what my ex-helicopter-pilot husband calls situational awareness. If a white man walks toward me, I step quite a bit back from the curb. I’m white myself, but I don’t trust them. They by far commit the most political violence (violence in general), and they’re the only men out here who have flipped me off or yelled hostilities.

But so far that caution hasn’t been needed. One guy pulled into the driveway next to me, parked, and got out of his car. I didn’t know what to expect so was surprised when he started thanking me profusely. Fighting tears, he said his sister is in Minneapolis and he can’t bear to watch the news, and it meant so much to see someone standing alone against it. I listened for several minutes as he seemed to need someone to talk to. After he drove off, I realized I should have given him my sign so he could stand on a corner himself. I’ll know that for next time.

Another guy on foot stopped on his way past me and said how good it was to be doing this in that particular spot, because it’s a rich area and “those people” really need the message. Several runners have stopped and a couple guys with dogs. A young couple came up to me and said they’d seen me the day before in the rain and wanted to bring me hot chocolate, but I left too soon. They’re teachers and talked about how different it feels in this political environment.

The landscapers and most construction workers in my apartment complex are Spanish speaking. I gather that’s true of the area in general. My complex did a big renovation last year, so there were lots of workers for several months. I worried ICE could come in and find easy targets, but there was no trouble. Recently a walker who stopped at my intersection said, regarding negative reactions to my vigil, that it was because our town isn’t the kind ICE targets. That may well be true, and I hope it helps protect workers from attack. I can say that several landscaping trucks have driven by me during this time, and the men inside gave enthusiastic waves.

ICE recently stayed in a hotel two blocks from my primary corner. I learned this on Instagram through a Portland group’s “Wide Awake” protest photos. They went to this hotel in the middle of the night and made a lot of noise, in hopes of making it not worthwhile for hotels to host ICE. (I didn’t hear anything.)

That kind of tactic may cause a lot of liberals to scold, but I get it. Think about the horror ICE and related federal agents are causing thousands of innocent people. Think about the detention camps the federal government is trying so hard to build in order to double their capacity to imprison people with brown skin. (Rachel Maddow gave details here, about two weeks ago.)

In relation to that, misbehaving with noise is minor.

I don’t know the results of that hotel protest, though the group is doing trainings and has held actions at other hotels. I imagine they could be arrested for disorderly conduct, maybe trespassing, disturbing the peace. (I was arrested for the first two of those pre- and during early days of motherhood – not 20 years into grandmahood. No doubt I’m less resilient now.) Police are supposed to give a warning to disperse before arresting, so maybe there aren’t any arrests at all.

With Bodhi gone, I’m now free to do nonviolent actions that risk arrest. Look at the history of social justice advancements in this country and elsewhere – civil disobedience almost always eventually was a winning strategy. It’s what let us win our fight to force a men’s shelter to open in New Brunswick, NJ*, and it’s what got us three acres of federal land on which to build housing.**

As I contemplate upping my protest commitment, these are the things I think about, along with how I don’t feel safe driving around in the middle of the night for the Wide Awakes. Portland has a Raging Grannies group of protest singers, but I can’t sing worth a damn. They’d never have me. It might be fun to join the Portland Frog Brigade, though.

Here’s what I think my vigil is doing, besides pissing off haters and causing me to reshape my life in small ways: it reminds people of the evil happening under ICE; it gives a moment of affirmation and happiness to people who get it - I can see it in their faces; it shows people they’re not alone. Every act of resistance, even a tiny one like this, is an act of hope.

In the White House and in Congress we now have people who want to turn our country into Christian nationalism, who want to expand upon and strengthen white supremacy and terrorize the world even more with bombs. Several of these people are sneering punks – think JD Vance, Pete Hegseth – who act like it’s fun to bring terror and violence down on people. The US has always been violent, but this government we’re faced with now is so greedy, so crazed by religion, so corrupt, so racist, so hate-filled and bloodthirsty.

Who’s going to change it if we don’t?

March 28 is the next No Kings day of demonstrations across the country. It’s important to attend.

But we can’t stop there.

Our group at one of last year’s demonstrations

* https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-5-of

** https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-7-of?r=9ofp6

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photo by Robin Jonathan Deutsch

I haven’t written a Substack post since early December, though plenty of essay bits have churned in my brain. I was dealing with my dog’s cancer, desperately trying to save him, then accepting on Christmas Eve that I couldn’t. I’ve been grieving since, as well as sick for a couple weeks and now buried in work deadlines.

And of course I’ve been horrified and enraged and heartbroken over the latest evil being forced on our country. Until I figure out what else to do, I’m going out for half an hour each day to stand on a corner with a sign that says, “End ICE Now.”

And today this sentence popped into my head again - the antidote to despair is resistance - so I thought I’d share this essay I wrote last June. I hope it helps. If it does, feel free to share.

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From June 2025: Last Friday I was in a Corporeal Writing small group session where a young woman exuded despair as she talked about how she was doing. She never used the word, but her voice, her body language, her words describing the wretched things happening now combined to show it. So I pulled up this sentence that has helped dredge me out of despair many times, and I offered it to her. The antidote to despair is resistance. From there we went into an hour of silent writing.

It’s not like this is a brilliant or terribly original thought. Last year I saw Joan Baez say, “The antidote to despair is action.” She’s probably been saying that for decades.

But that wasn’t how the sentence came to me 38 years ago. Resistance is a word with its own kind of energy.

As I’ve written elsewhere on Substack, in the 1980s I worked in the street with unhoused people, pushing government to provide more shelter, advocating at local welfare offices to help people get benefits to which they were entitled, and for 18 months, serving dinner every night on a busy street corner until churches eventually invited us inside.

Some of our diners had been lucky to get a motel room that first winter because of their welfare benefits. Most spent the night in abandoned buildings. The elderly tended to go for doorways or bushes in the park.

One snowy February night when I was serving dinner alone, I was overwhelmed as I watched the men walk away. I vented to Ed, the one remaining man, feeling pressure in my chest: overwhelming sadness, fury, helplessness, hopelessness. And that’s when the sentence popped into my head: The antidote to despair is resistance. To get rid of the terrible emotional pain in my chest, I had to push back, do something.

I stashed my giant soup pot in my nearby car and asked Ed if he wanted to go with me to the Middlesex County Administration building, a few blocks away, where for some reason I knew a Freeholders’ meeting was going on. The story of what happened next is here: https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-6-of

By that point I’d been an activist for eight years in nuclear disarmament and homelessness advocacy. The latter is the only area where we made real change, largely through civil disobedience campaigns. There were many defeats along the way, moments of despair. I’d continued to do the work anyway, but until that February night, I’d never articulated the secret to keeping going. Push back, do something, keep coming back to do more.

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When I shared my mantra with the young woman in the writing group…and the four other people there…I felt silly, cautious, worried it might be irrelevant. That’s leftover baggage from years of living with parents and then a husband who dismissed most of what I said. Sometimes I don’t know whether I should feel embarrassed when I say something.

At the end of Friday’s writing session, when we came back to share, that woman said she had written down my statement three times and it had inspired her. I was surprised but pleased, of course. And that made me think I should share it again here in case it helps someone else.

Resistance in the sense I use it is pushing back against something harmful. It’s the recognition of personal power. Many of us writers are familiar with resistance to writing and how it keeps us silent. That resistance is based in fear, is controlled by fear, and is not at all what I’m talking about. The resistance I encourage you to embrace takes place in spite of fear. It allows our personal power to overstep the fear. It’s reaching metaphorically into your core and with both hands pulling up determination and courage. It probably will be scary. Many of the actions I took had some degree of fear. Resistance is taking a deep breath and pushing that fear out of the way.

The context in which I talk about resistance is usually what some people (generally those opposed to it) would call “political” — and therefore often out of bounds. Instead, I think in terms of human rights and justice. Looking out for the wellbeing of others. That’s decency, not politics.

What would happen if you tested out my mantra? What kind of personal resistance can you imagine, would feel good doing? Even if you think in reality you could never imagine yourself doing it. What is one little step of claiming personal power, of pushing back, that you might be able to start with?

I’ve always been better about resistance on the part of others. I let myself live in despair for nearly 20 years of a bad marriage because I was afraid to push back and get out and be a single parent. Maybe resistance on our own behalf is harder. Or maybe most people have more courage than I do.

In any event, I share my mantra in case it helps. And I encourage you to get out in the streets. We have to do something.* (a couple resources are listed below)

To steal from my 11/21/24 essay: I’m 71 and don’t have much energy. I’m too comfortable hanging out with my little dog and escaping with TV. I haven’t done anything in years, beyond the Women’s March, donating to the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center, some pre-election work, and the recent anti-Trump marches. I don’t feel like doing anything hard. But things are horrendous now in Gaza and LA, on so many fronts in this country. And they keep getting worse.

I have to take a hard look at who I am and what I am willing to stand for.

When Antifa was in the streets of Portland saying No and Fuck Off to Nazis et al, I wanted so badly to hop the Max and join them. I felt that pressure in the chest. But being older and too comfortable and scared I’d get my ass kicked in the first five minutes, I didn’t do anything but cheer them on.

At my stage of life – at your stage of life – what does resistance on behalf of others look like, and when do we make it happen? What is strong enough action to make a difference? (I don’t think it’s only marches.)

Where does courage come from?

*Here are a couple places to start:

https://indivisible.org/

https://www.fiftyfifty.one/act-now

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I wasn’t planning to post today, but Facebook reminded me that on this day in 1886, the short-lived poet Joyce Kilmer was born.* I never cared about him or his poetry, though I, like so many kids from my era, had to memorize his most famous poem, “Trees.” My connection to him was the house where he was born.

My not-yet-first-husband, Bob, and I lived as caretakers of Kilmer’s birthplace in 1981-1982. At the time it was owned by the Arbor Society (because of that poem). It sat empty on the first floor, with the room Kilmer was born in on the second and a tiny apartment beyond a door in that bedroom. Bob and I had the apartment and had access to the first floor through the front door but weren’t allowed into the bedroom. The door between it and us was locked, until one day it opened by itself. That was weird, but I don’t believe in ghosts.

Of course we went into the room, careful not to touch anything because we didn’t want to get caught breaking the only rule we’d been given. The furniture was sparse, the main feature being a double bed - his birth bed - that looked like it would collapse if sat upon. It was covered with a plain white bedspread. There was a photo of Kilmer on the wall above it. An old, braided rug took up part of the painted wooden floor. When a friend of ours needed a place to stay, we let him sleep in that room for a couple months but not on the bed. (I wondered if he ever did, but I haven’t thought to ask him all these years. Eugene, if you’re reading this, what’s true?)

The Arbor folks thought they would fix the downstairs bathroom and tidy up the first floor and eventually open it and that bedroom for public tours, but their heart wasn’t in it. They did say we could bring in a plumber, so we hired an old paramour of mine. He worked for a few days, but he said it was unfixable without way more structural work than the Arborists wanted to do.

So the first floor sat empty except for one night when we hosted the late, great peace activist and former priest Philip Berrigan and some local activists for dinner down there. A couple years ago a few of my friends talked about that night, but I have zero memory. You’d think I’d remember when one of my major heroes – someone I later named a daughter for – came to my house for dinner. They said a nasty argument broke out between Phil/those who supported direct action and the “don’t-rock-the-boat-too-much” faction of the local peace movement (or “gutless wonders,” as Bob and I referred to them). Maybe the bad behavior of my guests embarrassed me so much that I blocked the whole night out.

A few months later a man froze to death in an abandoned house several blocks away. New Brunswick had no shelter, so Bob and I talked about opening that downstairs room as a place for people to sleep. We knew it would be only a matter of time before the Arborists found out and evicted us. But they all lived out of town and never visited, so we thought we could get away with it for a couple months, the worst of the winter. But with that damned unfixable bathroom, it didn’t seem viable. (That was before I met these guys, who did so much more with so much less. https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/for-hope-and-inspiration-watch-this)

Bob and I found this house while looking for a cheap place to live. The rent was $50/month, and sometimes it was a stretch to pay it. We were both done with college and wanted to keep our living expenses as low as possible so we could work as little as possible and make our real work be peace activism. He was a part-time bike mechanic (and we opened Plowshares Press soon after), and I taught writing workshops in Princeton and New Brunswick. We lived there with my two dogs and 1,000 cockroaches and probably some rats we never saw - we used to lie in bed at night cringing over the noises we heard in the ceiling. Once when I cleared out a Roach Motel we’d put under the bed, what I saw were a whole lot of legs sticking up from the gluey base - no bodies. We’d heard crunching noises, too. Horrifying.

Alexis was born while we lived there. But the tiny Kilmer House apartment was too crowded with a baby, my dogs, Bob, and me. I think I’d also adopted two cats.

At some point an apartment I knew of in nearby Piscataway opened up – years earlier I was supposed to move into it with my then-boyfriend, but he changed his mind on moving day, leaving me with nowhere to go since I’d given up my place. The apartment was on the second floor of a house in a neighborhood that in the early 1900s had been an anarchist community. The streets had names like International, Justice, Brotherhood. In my studies of leftist history, I read about Emma Goldman visiting there. Totally un-spiritual me felt a spiritual connection to that neighborhood in a way I never did to the Kilmer house.

I still would like to know how Joyce’s bedroom door opened, though.

*I referenced this house in this Substack post from last April, “Re-Creating Jonesy.” It’s where we first met Jonesy and his two dogs.

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Congratulations, Wendy C, for winning the $20 Powell’s card. And how serendipitous that you’re close enough to actually go to Powell’s City of Books! You know it’s an experience like no other.

I needed a title for the old essay I published here on December 1. Thirteen of you sent in suggestions, all funny or clever or appropriate in some way. I quickly realized I wasn’t going to be able to judge them, so I used this spinning wheel available at

https://wheelofnames.com/ This is a tool I’ve used several times to distribute prizes at Rhode Island Romance Writers’ annual retreat, where everyone gets a prize. It’s fun, so I’m sharing it in case you have use for it. (Also, you might like to check out RIRW if you write fiction. It’s neither all romance nor all Rhode Island - everything is via Zoom, so we have international members. rirw.org)

Anyway, I appreciate your reading my essay and your comments and title suggestions. I’ve held off responding because I wanted to give a few days to collect names for this draw. I will get back to you all now.

Wendy, I sent an e-card, so you should have it by now. Happy shopping and reading!

I couldn’t think of any other way than a new post to ensure everyone who participated got to see the process and results.

Meanwhile, what love stories do you have to tell? The question is not restricted to romantic love. But I can make a recommendation: one of my subscribers is Patience Bloom, former Harlequin editor, where for about 25 years she read and bought love stories. A few years ago she published the sweet, funny, and compelling story of her own path to finding her husband, Romance Is My Day Job. I recommend it. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/315129/romance-is-my-day-job-by-patience-bloom/

Peter and I weren’t together long enough in 11h grade to get a picture taken. Instead, here’s me in 12^th grade with his 11th-grade-yearbook head Photoshopped onto the body of my creepy army-guy boyfriend. It amuses me.

My poor little Bodhi is not responding to chemo, and today the vet said there’s little we can do but keep him happy. So far he seems like his old, bouncing-around, barking-at-me-for-food self. I don’t know how long he has – maybe two months if I’m lucky? – so I’ve been tearful and depressed and not up for writing.

But for some reason, yesterday this piece popped into my head. It’s old – 18 years – my essay about my first trip to visit my long-distance, late-in-life boyfriend, who had dumped me after a week of dating in 1971. When I wrote it, the only place I had to share was Facebook.

It’s long. We’ll see if it’s got enough energy to keep you reading. 😊

Here’s a before-the-fact epilogue: I never went into the Florida swamp woods again, but we got married anyway two years later.

From 2007:

I’m your basic neurotic, fear-bound person, happiest in safe, familiar, lighted territory with feet on the ground, or at least on something that’s on the ground. So how, at 50 years old, did I end up with a guy with a thing for poisonous reptiles and a passion for flying? Not to mention the 357 Magnum under the mattress.

I made him get rid of that the first night.

I’d learned about Peter’s thing for snakes when I was 16. I was the new girl in school. He was president of the class. Out of nowhere he asked me to the Christmas dance, the equivalent of our junior prom. This was three years before Stephen King published Carrie, so I didn’t have visions of pig’s blood when I imagined him and his friends laughing at a loser girl for believing he would really want to take her to the dance. I wouldn’t fall for that one. “No thanks,” I said.

Around Valentine’s Day he asked me to see Love Story. I must have thought he was for real, because I went. Neither of us remembers much about our time together, whether it was one week or two. We cruised around a lot in his blue Camaro. He took me to his house, where showed me his snake-catching stick and pictures of rattlesnakes he’d caught. He had a trophy for snagging the 2^nd largest copperhead in the annual Pennsylvania roundup. My only knowledge of snakes was my mother’s death-grip fear from her Arkansas childhood.

The snake thing was decidedly weird, but Peter was cute and, in my mind, King of the 11^th Grade and in those days still had his British accent. I had a full-fledged crush, so I took the reptiles in stride, especially as they remained theoretical.

~

Thirty-three years later, my daughters were home from college for the summer, and we found a snake in the basement. Not more than 7” long, no threat, except as I imagined its hulking mother waiting to lash out as we unloaded the dryer. As I scooped the intruder up on a fork, I told my girls about this guy I once dated who had a tool for picking up snakes.

It had been the most awkward of romances. I never was comfortable, wondering what the heck he was doing with someone like me. He was friends with cheerleaders and other school elites. He could date any girl he wanted. I was achingly shy, afraid to say much lest I reveal what a dork I was. I remember him pleading with me to talk, even just to say what I had for lunch. He worked at a car dealership and one day presented me with its metal Kardon decal. Perplexed, I took it as a token of his unesteem. But I pasted it into my scrapbook.

I could see the break-up coming. Gordon Lightfoot had a popular song that went, “I don’t know where we went wrong, but the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back.” As it played on the car radio one night, I blurted, “This song reminds me of us.” Immediately I wanted to implode for saying such a dumb thing. Peter’s response was, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” which I heard as, “We never were an us, stupid.” For decades thereafter whenever I heard any song by Lightfoot, I would think of Peter, remember what I had said, and think, “Poor dorky girl.”

Peter ghosted me one day soon after. Humiliating, since we still had history together, chairs in a U arrangement, so we were always within each other’s sight. Luckily, in a few months I moved on to another school.

Three years later, he called to ask me out again, but I declined. We talked long enough for him to say he’d joined the Marines and was having a tumor removed. I thought that meant he had cancer, so throughout the decades when he came to mind, I would hope he was okay, even as I thought he was a jerk.

~

A couple of days after telling my kids about Peter, I saw him listed on Classmates.com. I was stunned to see him, since I’d basically pictured him dead all these years. But ever the dork, I sent an email saying, “You probably don’t remember me, but I was just telling my girls about your snake stick.”

He responded via email. “Are you kidding me? You think I don’t remember you?” He said I had been the first girl he’d kissed, that he’d been “in love” with me but had been scared and clueless what to do about it. Whenever he heard Gordon Lightfoot over the years since, he’d thought of me and what I had said in the car that night, how he’d known exactly what I meant and regretted that he never had a chance to make it right. Also, unbeknownst to me, he had thought of me as his “Brown-Eyed Girl,” so several times a year I came to mind when he heard that song on the radio.

I first went to Peter’s apartment – 1,500 miles from my own – a couple of years later. When you walk in, the first thing you meet is a 2-foot-tall stuffed cobra, standing up ready to strike. Fortunately in one of our phone conversations, he’d mentioned this, so I didn’t have a heart attack when I opened the door. On the floor next to the cobra is his snake stick, a 4’ aluminum rod with a squeeze handle at one end that opens a clasp at the other.

We went to the movies during that visit and saw Mr. Brooks, which had me creeped out when we left the theater. We’d taken my car, so I was driving. Peter picked up my new flashlight from the floor, checked to see if it worked, and said, “Want to go on an adventure?”

“What kind of adventure?” I asked with suspicion. His idea of fun is sometimes my idea of nuts.

“I’ll take you out on the path where I go running.” He flicked the flashlight on again.

We’d spent thousands of hours on the phone in the last 3 years, covering everything from the major events of our lives to the peculiar nature of cockroach poop. Here are some facts stored in my “Who would live in a place like this?” file: a rattlesnake in his father’s yard; more rattlers down the street from home; various pets killed by snakes and alligators; black widows on his son’s tricycle; a 14-foot alligator crossing Highway 90 by McDonald’s. The list goes on.

I’d heard more than once about this path on the University of West Florida campus. It’s in the woods near a swamp, over which is a boardwalk where Peter had taken his four kids to spot wildlife. Peter himself was raised to be a hunter, but he decided in college he’d rather leave things alive. He likes the sport of finding some scary creature, picking it up with his stick to get a good look, and then letting it go. His kids were brave little souls who followed Dad since they could walk, single file, tramping through the marsh. Or riding on the hood of his car, 2 miles an hour, shining flashlights on some dark dirt road where 7-foot Eastern diamondbacks hang out.

Sometimes we talk about what it would have been like if I had said “Yes” when he called during college, if we had saved each other from bad marriages. But then I remember these treks with his kids. I for sure would have killed him if he had tried that with my children.

As we came to an intersection, Peter said, “Go straight through this light.”

I pulled into the left-turn lane. I remembered he had seen snakes on that damned boardwalk and green glowing alligator eyes at night. “Sure. Right after I get my hiking boots.” I had on strappy sandals with 2-inch heels.

My 90-year-old mother, transplanted to NJ in the 1950s, talks often of the South, primarily as a bastion of snakes and right-wingers. She’d warned me that if I was visiting South, I’d better watch where I walked because of snakes. I’d taken that a step further and packed my ass-kicking boots.

“You have to promise if I really need to get out of there, we’ll go.”

“Of course, Janet Jones.” He always calls me both names, weird as it is, because as he explains, “I’ve known a lot of Janets in my life, but you are the only one who is Janet Jones,” i.e., the deliverer of the First Kiss. I don’t know how it packed such a wallop.

It had been less than an hour since we’d left the movie, and I still had the creepy remnants of Mr. Brooks in my mind. Spoiler: this character played by Kevin Costner is an upstanding, award-winning businessman/philanthropist who happens to be a long-time serial killer. The movie manages to make him sympathetic and hair-raising at the same time. This was still hanging out in my consciousness as we set off for the swamp.

If I have to go into a scary situation, I can’t think of any real person who would make me feel safer than Peter does. He spent 20 years as a Marine, had to survive in the wilderness, is a crack shot, learned martial arts, jumped from planes, flew planes and helos, then for fun slogs through swamps looking for cottonmouths. Yet he’s fond of writing love notes that he signs with XOXOX. If I had an “i” in my name, he’d dot it with a heart.

Driving along to this spooky place with the ghost of Mr. Brooks haunting me, I started to wonder, “How well do I really know this person sitting next to me? Is he luring me to the swamp to watch me become an alligator hors d’oeurve?”

A vivid imagination is not always an asset.

We passed through the mostly deserted campus until we got to a parking lot at the edge of the woods. As I got out of the car, I made sure my cell phone was secure in my pocket and looked around for identifying markers. I checked my flashlight one last time. We set off on the path.

Or at least Peter did. I tried but couldn’t move from the safety of the concrete. Peter was already ahead 50 feet in a sandy area of scrub. I stood my ground and flashed my light around. “Come on, Janet Jones,” he said. “Just stay right behind me and you’ll be fine.”

Not wanting to let him down, I stepped forward, looking suspect at every fallen branch and patch of weeds. I was happy for Peter to lead the way but would have been happier with Samuel L. Jackson on one side, Jack Bauer on the other, and Ranger Manoso bringing up the rear.

Then my flashlight went dark. I shook it, banged it against my palm, flicked the on/off switch a bunch of times. It was dead. “Motherfucker,” I said with a hint of hysteria.

“My light’s working,” Peter said. “Come on.” It was dark except for the moving paths of light he provided. I caught up to him, and we went a little ways on. Then I saw a big sign: Caution! You may encounter poisonous snakes and alligators in this area.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered a cartoon where an animal saw a ghost and jumped out of its skin, leaving the skin standing there while the rest of him ran away. In that moment, I could so relate. This was only a sign in front of me, but it was concrete proof that the deadly creatures I imagined were in fact hiding out there. I didn’t need to see one in the flesh. Or the scales. If I were still the 95-pound girl Peter used to know, I would have jumped on him piggy-back-style. Not that I selfishly just wanted to save myself (much), but in my doomsday imagination, I’m always the target, not the person standing next to me.

As it was, I shrieked and hightailed toward the car, until Peter said, “Don’t run!” I froze, afraid running would attract the alligators.

“I’m coming,” he said. “Just stay with me and you’ll be ok.”

I walked really fast back to the car, shaking.

I did get one little reward for that nerve-wracking trip. “Look,” Peter said, as I was about to pull out of the parking space. “There’s your first armadillo.” I watched this thing that looked like a possum walk under the streetlight toward the woods. I hoped he wasn’t on his way to becoming a midnight snack.

Half an hour later, back at the apartment, Peter said, “You did well, Janet Jones.”

“Ha!” I looked at him for sarcasm.

He was serious, though. “You’re just not a woods girl. You’re more of … an asphalt kind of girl.” Sometimes I think he does still see me as 16.

He has something he calls “snake leggings” in the little storage closet outside his apartment. He said I can wear them if I’m willing to go back to the swamp in daylight.

A suit of armor sounds better, but I will consider it.

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      REAL FEEDBACK ON YOUR WRITING · REAL BELIEF IN YOUR VOICE · REAL MOMENTUM TO FINISH

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For months I’ve been trying to write the final essay in my three-part series on my experience of having an unwanted abortion when I was 19. Part I is about the fact that I had it and how hard it has been to write about. Part II is taken from my journal in 1976, two years after. It gives the actual experience. Part III is trying to answer the question of what the hell was wrong with me that I got pregnant on purpose as a sophomore in college. And what happened after.

Answering the why of it is complicated and keeps taking me on tangents. Here’s one of them. Maybe if I get it out of the way I can finish the other.

In November 1963 I was nine and in 4th grade when my mother and I joined my father at a tiny American Army outpost in a German town called Soest. I was the only school-aged kid, so every morning a corporal came by in a Jeep to take me to school at a nearby Canadian military base. I was so confused navigating this new world: a strange country where everyone outside our two-building Army apartments and the Canadian base spoke German. Thankfully, the Canadians spoke English, but they also made me take French every day. Added to that, the kids treated me weirdly from the moment I showed up. One said, “Are you a real, red-blooded American?” My “Uh…yes?” turned me into a celebrity. I maintained this status for nearly three years.

So bizarre. I’d pretty much been a nonentity in the little quasi-rural school in New Jersey where, though I lacked the language for it, I’d begun to notice status levels at play. I was in the blurred-out audience as Diane, Brenda, Beth, and a boy named Charles lived up there on stage. We’d been in class together since kindergarten. Watching them, I could see how some kids’ lives were clearly different. I don’t remember how I characterized that with the girls, but with Charles it was epitomized by his artist-mom making him incredible Halloween costumes every year. I looked on from behind my suffocating, plastic Cinderella mask and flimsy blue shift and realized this picture was out of balance.

Also, I was dealing with the confusion of a home dominated by alcohol and violence – sometimes unpredictable, sometimes not. When I was six, my mother told me I could not tell anyone what went on in our house. So I assumed my life was shameful and not like anyone else’s. I had friends from the neighborhood and some from school; kids came to my birthday parties. But inside I felt like a bad, unwanted kid who didn’t measure up or fit in.

Therefore, school in Germany was a blast. Everyone became my friend and looked up to me. I didn’t understand it, but I wasn’t going to fight about it. At the end of the year I was called to the principal’s office, afraid I was in trouble of course, and instead was given a book for having the highest average in 4th grade. So kids also started thinking I was smart. It was part of the “American” package in their minds: believing I was competent and a leader. I don’t know how non-American kids that young believed in that sad myth of American exceptionalism.

The summer before we went to Germany, my mother had given me the single Nancy Drew book from her childhood, and I loved it. Right before we left the US, her co-worker gave her three bags overflowing with kids’ novels: all fat, yellowed hardbacks from the 1900s to the 1940s. Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, Dorothy Dale, Beverly Gray, etc. I can still picture those brown, crinkly bags and feel the anticipation as I pulled out one book after another. I didn’t know anyone besides Nancy, and I couldn’t wait to meet them.

Those books and those years in that Canadian school saved my childhood mental health. Judy Bolton is a ‘30s mystery series about a teenager who moves to a new town. All the high school girls are bitches, so every day is awful. She can’t wait to get back to her loving home where everyone is pleasant and functional. I quickly recognized her life was opposite to mine: every day I couldn’t wait to escape to school where I enjoyed affection and security. This was the beginning of my becoming aware of the three conscious parts of me: who I had to be on the outside to safely navigate daily reality with my parents; who I was inside, those thoughts and feelings I couldn’t share with anyone; and who I was when I entered this new world of school and friends, an acceptable outer-me who carried the secret of what the rest of my life was like.

My 5^th grade teacher, Miss Klassen, further saved my mental health by recognizing and supporting my spirit and my voice. I’d been a poet in 4th grade, collecting poems in a notebook and sharing them at school and with a kind, childless neighbor named Ann who had time to pay attention to me.

I was enthralled with writing, just discovering how amazing it was to create the same way the books I loved had been created. Miss Klassen had us write a story. Mine was a mystery involving counterfeiting apparatus. That word impressed her enough that she typed my story and mimeographed copies and used it as a lesson. Boy, was I proud. The kids really liked it, so Miss Klassen and Mr. Muirhead – the music teacher I dreaded for making us sing alone in front of the class – suggested I could skip music each week to mimeo a new story. I can’t describe the fire in me from being in that environment.

Toward the end of 5th grade I went from short stories to writing a series of mystery novels – really, they were only 80 – 100 pages, hand-written on notebook paper and put in a cardboard binder. Maybe they’d be called chapter books today. I had no desire to hand-write multiple copies – and no mechanism to do otherwise – so the single books were passed around school in 5th and 6th grades.

Also in 5th grade, I read and re-read the Dorothy Dale (1908-1924) and Beverly Gray (1934-1955) series.

Both told of the young women’s college years. The idea of going to college fascinated me; in these books, I saw a whole world of fun, mysteries, and career possibilities. Beverly Gray also was a writer, so I loved reading about her. I was inspired when she graduated and became a reporter.

Between Miss Klassen’s support for my real-life writing and the future I imagined, I was so excited to get started that I took one of my father’s heavy cardboard cigar boxes and used it to collect my “college fund”: a meager bunch of pfennigs, German currency that ranged from less than one US cent to maybe ten.

My mother didn’t like the fact that I wrote. I don’t know why. That year she told me two things: I’d only get to college over her dead body and holding a pen to write so much was making my hand ugly.

I was 10, so what else was there to do but believe her? I spent my “college fund” on candy. But it would be another 10 years before I stopped writing.

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In 1981 I worked with the Plowshares 8 Support Committee in New York City, commuting an hour each way from New Jersey. Our office was in the basement of a church. Fragments of this poem were scratched on scrap paper, since I had given up writing, even in my journal, in favor of peace activism. I tweaked it years later when my activism switched to homelessness and serving dinner on a street corner every night in New Brunswick, NJ. Still not writing, though in 1988 I picked up my journal and was faithful until a few years ago when it became mostly to-do lists and bookkeeping. Anyway, this took poetic shape somewhere along the way, and I tweaked it more. Being so old, the references are out of date. There’s much greater awareness of hunger now - of starvation used as a weapon of genocide, of vast and increasing income inequality leaving millions without enough. Meanwhile, the people with the power to solve the problems are monsters.

Hunger on 92nd Street

At the church where I work,
once a week someone makes soup
for the neighborhood.

People get canned goods
if they have references
if the hospital or some agency
says they're hungry enough. 

Women with unauthorized hunger 
drag their lives in plastic bags
down damp concrete steps
where we dread the ringing of the bell,
the tired expectant stares
as we empty pantry, collection basket, pockets. 
When all is gone, we hold still
if we hear them coming.

For suited men on the subway
hunger is a billboard ad:
a child's brown face with tears 
says hunger happens somewhere else,
swollen Biafran Haitian Somali Nigerian bellies
you see on tv.

Not the old man in a raincoat
asleep on the subway grate

Not the kid on the church steps
waiting for the Wednesday soup man. 

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This has been a disconcerting year for me. (I wanted to say “fucked-up year,” but millions of others are suffering in such greater ways that I have to use more modest language for myself.) I’ve been dealing with Bodhi’s life-threatening health issues since April: My little tripod dog, recovered from his recent amputation of a cancerous leg. His latest thing is insisting I feed him by spoon or fingers…mushy canned food.

My husband’s work department was wiped out, so our income plummeted, meaning I probably need to move back to Florida, which I despise; and as I struggle through those and more minor stuff, the pall of the horrifying things being done by Trump and Trump puppeteers, like Nazi-wannabe Stephen Miller and Christian Nationalist cult-leader-wannabe/Project-2025-evil-mastermind Russell Vought, hangs over everything. I’m enraged and need to do something, but I’m not sure what.

So it has been a bitch to try to write.

I need to finish the third essay in my series about my abortion. I thought I’d do that 2 weeks ago, but life.

Plus I’m super good at avoiding that thing.

Today I ran a couple hours of what’s called Silent Writing in A Writing Room. We get together on Zoom to write, and then we share work and talk about writing. So I thought I’d do the abortion piece during that time, but I went into my folder of old stuff and found my pages of flash fiction, written 20 years ago. Reading those stories was a good way of avoiding other things. Maybe reading them will give you a few flash-moments of avoiding your things, too. 😀

My original foray into flash fiction was inspired by this book:

It has a lot of info on writing flash fiction, which I never read, but I was drawn instead by the ten pages of this in a chapter called “Five-Minute Fictions”:

I love spontaneity in writing, the energy and unknown of it, and so I love freewriting. When I was a writing teacher, that was the first skill I shared with students. Dropping all worries and writing without stopping to think. I love the mystery of seeing what the hell comes out.

So back then I took a few of those “write a story about…” prompts and freewrote. I remember being anxious because I had no idea what the next sentence would be, even as I was surprised at whatever sentence I’d just written.

A handful of the stories survived. They aren’t really stories in terms of plot or structure. They’re just weird little examples of how my mind works under pressure to write without stopping. They’re not polished. The flow is awkward, but they’re real in the sense of being unforeseen until they popped out on the page.

Whether you’re a writer or not, I encourage you to have fun by freewriting tiny stories. And I’d love to see what you come up with.

Story about a jewel

I am looking at the ring on my finger. The stone is pink, and I am trying to remember where it came from. My hand is wrinkled and the stone is hard and shiny. The ring itself is silver, and I wonder where it came from. The veins are sticking out on my hand, the skin is wrinkled, and my fingers are bent. The stone is square, surrounded by tiny diamonds. I must have had a life if I have a ring like this. Someone must have cared for me once, to give it to me, or I must have had some wealth or power in the world if I bought it for myself. The ring goes on and on; my hand withers. The ring feels loose on my finger, but my knuckle is so bent I can’t take it off. I don’t want to take it off. This is my connection back to the world. They can’t take that away from me.

Photo by Sabrianna on Unsplash

Story about a doctor

She’s a doctor, and she needs a story. Drawing a blank on this one. Doctor walks down the street. She’s tall and slim and has dark hair. She is going past markets in a city. She is running away. She doesn’t want to look like she’s running away, though, so she’s walking leisurely along. No one would notice her. She is running from the blood that she can no longer stand. She has always hated blood. Why didn’t they tell her there would be blood? Why didn’t they tell her the secret magic force that keeps people alive would vanish under her hands? She wants no part of this. She is walking to become a hairdresser or a clerk or a matador – no, there would be blood there, too. Maybe she can’t escape blood. Maybe it’s in her subconscious. Maybe it’s part of her. Is there any interesting occupation that doesn’t involve blood, one way or another? Her hands hurt because they have been stained. Her fingers are stiff and sore. She wants to shake them, but she knows it won’t do any good. She feels like she is wading through blood in the street, walking slower now, slogging through a red quagmire. Maybe she should have run after all.

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The night of my abortion I pressed this rose into a photo album and wrote the date and my boyfriend’s name. He had met me in the waiting room after with a full dozen, as my roommate’s boyfriend had done for her. I guess he didn’t know what else to do.

(Part I here discusses my difficulty writing about my abortion of 51 years ago. I’ve never had trouble talking about it - once I got past the culture of “shut up” - but I never could write the story coherently. Now I’m tired of waiting, coherent or not. What follows is from my journal - October 2, 1978. It’s long, despite two deleted pages. I originally free-wrote it to get past self-censorship. I’ve edited a little for clarity, but I tried to leave it intact: jerky cadence, confusing pronoun references, inconsistent tense and all. The original was in third person, so I left it to preserve my 24-year-old voice. I almost divided it into two posts for length but decided to let it have its full arc. I don’t know if it works. I’ll save discussion of what a dumbass I was for next time. Oh, and be forewarned that there is a graphic description of the procedure’s sound near the end. )

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She wasn't pregnant because she didn't know about birth control or because she forgot to put extra jelly on the diaphragm or because the rubber broke.

She was pregnant because they looked at each other one night and said, “Let's make a baby.”

During those six weeks before it was official, they talked about life with a baby. They went into Korvettes one night while waiting to see some movie and looked at tiny baby shoes. They stopped at a circular rack with pastel raincoats—she held a pale green one double breasted with gold buttons. $11.00. They were poor college students who sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. But he said he’d buy it. She laughed and said to wait. The baby couldn't wear it for another two years.

He had stood there and looked at those baby clothes with her. He’d said he wanted to do this. He’d said they should get married. He thought he should buy that goddamned raincoat.

And when her first positive test came back, he and her roommate took the doctor’s blue slip of clinic referrals from her hand and went straight to the telephone. Her roommate called one in New York and made the appointment for two days later.

She stood there and didn't say anything.

When they were alone in his room across town, she told him she wasn't going. She couldn't say it in front of her roommate because there would be two of them against her; they would dismiss her for being ridiculous. She couldn't argue with both at once. So she just quietly said no. She doesn't remember his response.

That was March 3rd. She finally gave in and had the abortion on March 29th at 10 weeks pregnant.

In between were those 26 days she can't remember clearly. She knows her mind was made up. She threw up every day and didn’t eat much. She skipped classes and sat on her bed reading Dr. Spock and Our Bodies, Ourselves. Maybe it was time to start eating right. Before this she’d been planning to quit school, but everyone had said, “You can't.” So she’d stayed, wondering what the point was. But now she could see a point. This baby gave her purpose to do a lot of things.

It was half his decision to conceive it in the first place. But when the test came back positive, he’d freaked. His sister said, “Break up with her.” His cousin said, “Get away as fast as you can.” His conscience wouldn't let him do that – and to be fair, he did love her in that almost-first-time way – but he insisted on an abortion.

She said she could manage on her own. She was only 19 and had no idea how, but she’d find some way. Her ex-fiancé said he wished it was his so he could marry her. Her friends all said, “How can you support a child and yourself?”

Under the coercion of her boyfriend, she made a second appointment in the middle of March. She had no intention of going to it either – she was buying time. He was happy to think she’d changed her mind. It got her friends off her back.

The night before that appointment she sat on the steps in the hall of her little dorm house eating a bowl of Raisin Bran. It was after midnight, when she wasn't supposed to eat or drink. He was furious. “I’m not going,” she said and kept eating. He couldn’t do anything about it.

Spring break came near the end of March. She was to stay at her parents’ house. The afternoon she got home, she went to her brother's place to tell her sister-in-law, who was only six years older and had two kids. Maybe she would understand.

“How are you feeling?” Her sister-in-law was tentative at first but then enthusiastic. “Your mother will probably kick you out. You could stay with us. I have a really good obstetrician. You'll like him. We'll make an appointment real soon.”

Her brother agreed. They would take care of her. They said that. She could stay with them, and they would help her.

She counted: 16 people she’d told she was pregnant. So far only they were on her side. But that was enough. She went home to tell her mother.

She walked into the kitchen and suddenly wanted to cry. Her mother was a forceful person who fought to rule with an iron will, who had ruled with a leather strap years earlier. Her mother's face loomed before her every time she did anything her mother wouldn't approve of. And her mother didn't approve of much.

She always had to count before she told her mother something she knew she wouldn't like. I'll do it on 10 – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 – “Would you still love me if I did something you didn't like?” No, that was not how it was supposed to come out. She was supposed to be strong, to say “This is what I am doing, and that's all there is to it.”

Instead she was almost asking her mother to forgive her.

“You have to get an abortion. Your daddy will die of a heart attack if he finds out. You can't do this to him. It isn't fair. I raised kids for 33 years, and I'm not taking on another one. If you want a kid, get married and do it right.”

As if that were an option.

Her mother called her brother and sister-in-law and told them they couldn't help her. Then they got on the phone and took back their offer. She hung up.

“Just do it and we won't talk about it again. We'll forget it ever happened.” That's how her mother let the thing pass.

She went back to school and made another appointment. By now she’d reached the last name on the blue slip of paper. She was defeated. No one would help, and she didn't know how to do it on her own. But she hated everyone, herself included.

You couldn’t just tell the truth. Her roommate had had an abortion the year before. Only three people knew about it, and she’d sworn them to secrecy. She would never talk about it. Her roommate said she was sick for wanting to talk about her own experience.

You just had to do it and forget. Forget. That's what they all said. Just go there and forget it. They could forget what wasn’t happening to them.

~

On a snowy weekday they drove into New York. She didn't want to take the bus or train because she’d be hurting afterward. She doesn't remember how she was on the ride in. She doesn't remember if she spoke to him. She remembers slush on the sidewalk.

The clinic waiting room was full. She looked around to see how many women were alone. She had him, but she was on her own.

The first step was paying the fee. Her mother had sent money to help. He paid the rest.

Then they took blood and urine. Another pregnancy test. The woman who went in before her came out smiling: not pregnant after all. She got her money back.

Eventually they called her name. With five other women she went into little rooms to put on paper gowns and slippers.

Then the counselor held up a plastic model of the female reproductive system and explained how pregnancies occur. They had to decide what birth control they’d use after this. They didn't want it to happen again, after all.

She didn't care. Yeah an IUD was as good as anything. She wanted to scream at them, to take her clothes and run out of there. But she sat quiet and nice and did as told. She didn't really have a life left, anyway. Other people were making her choices.

They asked what kind of anesthetic she wanted. A general would knock her out but cost $250.00 more. She didn't have it. But the counselor said it wouldn't hurt much. There was just a slight pinch when the doctor put a needle into the cervix. After that you didn't feel anything.

She wasn't afraid of pain as much as losing control. She didn't know what she might do: scream, just let everything go. So she wished she could be unconscious.

It was her turn. She vaguely remembers a surgical-green room and a lot of instruments and counters. A nurse who helped her onto the table. Did they fasten her down? Her feet were in stirrups, but she doesn't know if she could have taken them out, could have stood up and walked away.

The doctor was a man with short dark hair. That's all she knows. He didn't talk much. He said there’d be a slight pinch when he put the needle into the cervix, then it wouldn't hurt.

She doesn't remember if the nurse held her hand or if she just wanted her to. She remembers the machine churring in the background. It whirred and made a sloppy, suctioning sound. Her belly wrenched and wrenched. She didn't know what she had done to deserve this. They’d said it wouldn't hurt. But a dizzying pain sent her soaring.

Her body was as filled with anger as it was with pain.

Just forget this happened to you, everyone said. Just one sharp pinch is all you'll feel. It's a simple process, nothing to it. In and out in a couple hours. Then it's all over.

Just forget it ever happened.

They were all liars.

Next: Part III - The Aftermath