October 4, 2008
It wasn’t the latest toy or a trip to Disneyworld that topped my wish list as a kid. No, I yearned for what friends and classmates had, what came so easily to them. I wanted to be normal. The gimpy leg aside, there were other oddities. While most kids wonder about their parent’s sanity levels, I knew Mom and Dad were wacky. My mother was a nun – really. My father liked to take things apart – walls and ceilings, mostly. The foil-backed insulation in my room shimmered in a number of spots void of sheetrock; the closet door never did make it back onto the hinges, and I lost endless change, two necklaces and a contact lens in the gap between the wall and floor where a baseboard used to be. Needless to say, when friends came over, we played in the living room, which had all four walls […]
August 27, 2008
The garden is a mass of weeds. I suspended voice lessons until fall. Cookouts came and went while I sat at the computer. What was I doing all summer? Writing a book. Really. And, it’s about to be published. A plethora of yoga books line my shelves and topple from stacks on my desk. I enjoy them all, some more than others. But each is peppered with bookmarks noting sections that speak to me. Some highlight interesting poses. Others are there for easy access to a phrase that touches on bringing daily practice from the mat into my day. None, however, fully address yoga and Parkinson’s. There’s mention here and there in some of the texts, and there are books that connect exercise to the disease. But when I couldn’t find one that dedicated itself to living your yoga while living with Parkinson’s, I decided to dedicate myself to writing […]
July 31, 2008
I’ve heard it called emotional incontinence, crying at commercials, greeting cards, the mention of crying. This inhibition of the tear ducts often accompanies a head injury, as if there isn’t enough to weep about after trauma causes brain waves to misfire. Long before my AVM burst into my gray matter, I reached for the tissue box. When I was young, Charlotte’s Web set me off. Actually, it still does. Then there was the fire station siren. How I hoped, each time it rang out, that there was a neighborhood cat stuck in a tree not a neighbor’s house in flames. I prefer to think of my responses as, not weepy, but sensitive.