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< Back Stefanie's Story Stefanie discusses how COVID-19 affected her college experience as a student athlete. As well as the impact that quarantine had on her social life as an incoming college student. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 03:14 I think like as a person, I’ve grown a lot socially since I’ve been at college. I know COVID, when COVID happened and everybody was in quarantine it was like, I didn’t really see that many people. I only saw my family like my mom, my dad, and my sister and like occasionally my friends but like my parents were really stuck on no seeing anybody like during COVID. So I kind of like lost all my socialness, I guess, like all my abilities to be like social so I kind of had to relearn that when I came back here, or when I came to college. So I mean it was a struggle just getting into like this new world of like everything is so social. Especially, like in college, like everybody goes out and stuff like that, everybody goes to parties, and like everything is just super social with your friends. So, I just kind of had to learn how to change from COVID and not seeing anybody to seeing like hundreds of people a day like in my classes and stuff like that. So like last year, I was a freshman and well I graduated high school early, I came to college early. But it was still COVID and so we had all of our classes online, everybody was on Zoom so you weren’t really able to make friends and really my only friends were on my team. So then last year, it was the like first time that like everybody had been back into full classrooms and stuff like that and everybody is just trying to get into the flow of it again everybody’s like relearning everything that they lost like during COVID. And last year was especially difficult for me because I was trying to like extend and make like friends off the team and stuff like that and create like connections off of like my team or outside of my comfort zone but it was just super hard because it was everybody is so used to who they already talk to. But I think this year especially, I moved in with some people on the soccer team, so I’ve been able to like branch out and make connections with like them obviously. Just my social circle is just way bigger than it was last year and that’s something that I really struggled with last year. But this year it’s definitely a lot better and like I said before, it’s something that I work for, instead of, I was trying to let it come to me but it really wasn’t and it was hard because it was like when everybody gets in classes with like 200, like 400 people especially at UMass like when we have classes that big like nobody's really gonna talk, everybody is going to keep to themself. So like it was kind of like I had to teach myself how to go outside my comfort zone especially like I definitely had to go outside my comfort zone deciding to live with three girls I had never met before. I mean I was friends with one of their teammates and I have never meet the three girls that I live with before. It was definitely outside of my comfort zone. I was definitely scared just like what would happen. But, I’m definitely glad that I took the decision because now I’m just so happy with where I’m at socially so I’m definitely glad that I went outside my comfort zone, and I took that risk. I think like college and like being this age has also taught me how to reach out and make friends it’s not like everything is going to come to you and everything is going to find you, it’s like you need to go find like what you want. Previous Next

< Back Jacqueline's Story Jacqueline talks about the most important person in her life; her mom. She describes her perseverance, strength, and love for both her and her brother. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 03:40 Can you tell me about the most important people in your life? Yeah, I would say definitely my mom, for obvious reasons. She's amazing. And she's definitely my biggest role model. My mom started, she went to college to be an accountant. And then she hated that, because she didn't like how accountants were very, to the point didn't have like much of a sense of humor. And she, she's such a big person. She's such a talker, so that was important to her. So then she went into health care, she went to nursing school. When I was about four, my parents got divorced me, my brother, and my mom went to go live with my uncle. And my aunt, my cousin in born, which is where we then bought our house. between in between when they got divorced, she was in the middle of nursing school, so I can't imagine how hard that was for her. So being with my living with my aunt uncle definitely made it easier for her. And we spent a lot of time with them one on one, then she started working down in P town, which is about maybe two hours from my house, maybe a little less. And she would go every day work double shifts, drive all the way home sleep and do it all over again. I don't know how she did it. And then she started teaching nursing assistants. And she loved it. She was working just as a teacher under the owner. And then the owner decided that she was going to sell the company. And my mom was devastated because she loved her job. So she ended up buying the school from her. She had the school for a while, probably like 10 years, it was definitely hard because the financial situation wasn't always constant. Because that's obviously what happens when you own your own business. And it will add everything fell on her if like one of her teachers couldn't go. So there were times where it was just her running the business. So she's definitely worked very hard. And then about three or four years ago, this nursing home agency reached out to her asking them asking her to teach all of their and all of their facilities. And she took it almost right away. She's still with the company. And that's the company that I've also worked through. I think as I'm aging, I'm becoming closer with my mom in a different way. Like we're becoming more like friends than mother and daughter even though she's always been like a friend to me and all my friends go to my mom for any problems, any advice, which I think is super important. Every year on my birthday since my birthday on Christmas Eve My mom always made sure no one could say the words Christmas Eve on my birthday. It was always Jacqueline's birthday. And she would always set up she'd had balloons and she loves cards. So she'd have like a million cards. And like just a whole setup and it was always so grand and special. And so that's every year. That's definitely something that I'm looking forward to. I would like to be as good of a mother as she has been to me. I think she's done. Such a good job raising my brother and I She's worked very hard. She hasn't had a lot of extra money or extra time or anything. So I think just making sure that when I'm older that I have the ability to take care of her like she took care of me Previous Next

< Back Sharon's Story Sharon shares about the influence that her hardworking, loving grandmother had on her and how this influence guided her to be the person she is today. 00:00 / 03:08 Previous Next

Annabel's Story Annabel, who recently uprooted her life in North Carolina and moved to Northampton, MA, discusses how she ended up living in the city and her close familial relationships that led her there. Scroll to Listen Annabel's Story 00:00 / 03:21 Stephanie: Speaking of Northampton, how did you even end up here? Like, how did you know this town? Because it is so small. Annabel: It is so small. I had been visiting here for a number of years because my daughter, who is a writer, and her husband is a publisher, they were living in Northampton and were - and Amherst and Northampton both have a huge community of writers. I ended up visiting frequently, and then 12 years ago, almost 13 years ago, they had a child who was born four months early. And she only weighed a pound and a half, and ended up having a lot of medical crises. She had a feeding tube and a trach. Stephanie: Oh, my God… Annabel: And, ended up spending four hundred and [sic] days in three different hospitals. Thank God she was in Massachusetts because she had some fabulous care here. Stephanie: Yeah. Annabel: She is doing really really well now. Um, and if you didn’t know, if you didn’t see the scar in her neck you wouldn’t know she had a trach. And, ironically, as a two year old, I had a trach… Stephanie: Oh… Annabel: Because of a really bad case of bronchial pneumonia, and ended up with a trach. So, we may be the only grandmother team… Stephanie: Yeah, that has… Annabel: that have the trach scars. Anyway, so I came up here a great deal while she was in the hospital - or, those 3 hospitals. And finally, I just thought, “I want to move there. I want to be near her,” so that was the reason I ended up here. And I’m so glad. I’m almost 75, and if you had told me I would make friends as good as any friends I’ve ever had I would not have believed it. So, I count my blessings that I ended up here. Stephanie: Yeah, that sounds really, that everything worked out, basically. Annabel: It did. It really did. Stephanie: Yeah. And was it hard making friends here? Annabel: I think at first, because I didn’t think that I could ever make friends like the ones I left behind, particularly back in North Carolina, I wasn’t reaching out. But finally, my daughter is best friends with another writer, whose mother moved here from California, and both of them kept saying “You’ll love each other if you get together!” and we instantly did. And then, I joined a church at the same time as another friend and we’ve become best friends. So I'm just amazed. I did not expect - I knew I would be happy here because of my daughter’s family. And there’s another family, they’re very close to me and I love them. I didn’t think I’d have peers as friends, but I do, and I’m so glad. Yeah.

< Back Joan O's Story Joan shares the story of adopting her daughter from Russia. She talks about what adoption is like and some of the struggles that come with adoption. 00:00 / 03:31 I’m Joan Oleck, and my daughter whom I adopted in 1996 in Russia is now 26 years old. I ended up adopting Anya through an agency in Russia that had a connection with Spence-Chapin back in New York where I was living, and that connection was open to single women adopting which was still kind of unusual back then. So, I jumped on it. My grandparents had emigrated from Russia, what was then Russia in the nineteenth century and I had always loved Russian culture so it was a good fit for me. I passed all of the screenings I had to do. In October of 96, I traveled to Russia with another couple who were also adopting from the same orphanage. I got a tiny little baby, just five pounds, very undernourished and I named her Anya. And on the car ride back, 200 miles back to Moscow, she was on my lap, somehow I picked up on the fact that she wanted to look out the window. So I picked her up and held her against the window, and she, you know, quieted down and that was a very sweet moment. We were passing a lot of birch trees and a lot of American towels that people hung in their yards to sell for some reason. Anyway, that week will stay in my memory forever. Ali: What is something that you wish more people knew about adoption? Joan: That aside from the genetic issues, because sometimes, you know you need to see if you can match on a kidney or stem cells or whatever. That aside from that, that child is as much yours as if you had given birth to her or him. And I just really want people to understand that. You know when Anya was a little kid, kids would come up to her and say, “Well who’s your real mom?” and she’d go “Joan is my real Mom, that’s the only Mom I’ve ever had”, even though she and I were in touch with her birth family and exchanged letters for several years. I want people to know that these children have feelings. I, on the other hand, told Anya as soon as she could understand “you are from a country called Russia, here it is on the map”, and everytime Anya heard Russia on the news, she’d go “Mommy! They just said "Russia, where I’m from!”, and she was always very comfortable with it as a result. I was very fortunate to be adopting at a time when single women were slowly being accepted as adopted parents, and the same thing was happening with gay couples. At the time being 97’ 98’, I wrote a widely disseminated piece for a platform called Solan, and it won a national award, just interviewing singles and gay couples who were adopting, and just about the discrimination against them. To this day, it still remains that some church groups in Southern states block gay couples from adopting which is terrible because a loving family of any kind is what any child needs. It doesn't really matter what kind of family. If there’s love, there’s love. Previous Next

< Back Robert's Story, 2022 Robert talks to Honor about his experiences living in a commune and how it saved him from serving in the Vietnam war. He explains how his faith and trust in a higher power guided him to conquer this fear, and continues to support him to this day. 00:00 / 04:00 Previous Next

< Back Jesse's Story, 2022 Jesse talks with Lauren about being wrongfully accused and sent to prison. He shares the lessons he learned during that difficult time. 00:00 / 04:41 “The toughest thing I went through was, when I was in college, I had a little run in with the law over a marijuana issue. When the whole thing started I was 18 years old. I was in college out in Western Pennsylvania. That particular town was under very, very right winged conservative area. They were down on drugs. I was accused of selling $15 worth of marijuana. And went to trial. It really should never even gone to trial. I mean they had no real evidence. There were four people in the room at the time it was supposed to have happened and three of them said it didn't happen, and one of them said it did. And they decided to believe that one person. I was the only one. I was pretty sure it was because I was Jewish and there a very strong anti-Semitic taint to the whole thing. So I was convicted. The judge said, as far as he’s concerned, selling drugs is as bad as murder. So he gave me the maximum sentence, even though it was my first offense. He gave me 3 years in prison. I didn’t take it seriously, I really didn’t think I was gonna go to prison. It just seemed so outrageous. My lawyer was taking an appeal then I got a call one day from my father and he said, the appeal fell through and you have to go to prison. So, I freaked out, I was 21 years old at the time. Really didn’t know what to expect. My first week there was very very scary. It was overcrowded, so they didn’t have room for me in the part of the prison where they first introduce people. So I was put in solitary confinement for a week, which was really not a lot of fun. I thought my life was over at that point. Prison is like hell. It’s like everybody’s there, it's full of anger and aggression, but I found some friends there, actually. There were several people there, that were there for drug related offenses, you know, marijuana. And we weren’t criminals, you know, we were just kids who got caught up in a system. Because I had friends, I was able to make it through. Could’ve gotten out in one year, but it didn't seem like that was gonna happen. They wanted me to repent and say that what I had done was wrong. I was adamant that I thought the drug laws were wrong. I didn't really repent and they took that as a mark against me. So I didn’t know how long I’d be in there. It was a hard thing. One of the things that got me through was, I had a girlfriend before I ended up there. She wrote me almost everyday. She would write me a letter like almost everyday, at least 5 or 6 times a week. And that really helped me make it through, getting those letters everyday, really lifted my spirits. It turned out that my father was really not very good. I went to prison because of him. He told me he had taken the appeals, but didn’t. He told the lawyer not to take the appeals. And that’s why I ended up going to prison, my own father. And I didn't find that out until later. My mother hired a lawyer from the national organization for the reform of marijuan laws and he told me, he says, “they never took the appeals, you had grounds for appeals but they never took it.” He applied for what's called, commutation, which is reeducation of sentence. My mother went to court and testified for me. One day I was about 8 months into my sentence and they called me up and said, “do you have a job for when you get out of prison?” I said, “what are you talking about? I’m not getting out for another 2 and half years.”And they said, “No, right here it says you’re getting out next month.” I said, “what?!” And sure enough the commutation had gone through and nobody had told me. I was released from prison after about 7 or 8 months. So I was really, really, happy about that. I was so excited. That day I got out I was so happy. I felt so good. It was like, okay, I made it through that. If I can make it through that, I can make it through anything. So I felt really confident, really good, and really proud of myself that I had made it through and I hadn’t turned bitter, and I hadn’t gotten worse. You know, like, I got out and went right back to school, got my degree and went on to graduate school. In some ways, prison helped me, I mean I would not recommend it to anybody, it wasn’t worth it, but it did help me. It did help me focus my life. I guess the main lesson I learned was that no matter how bad it gets, there is a way forward and there's a way out. Nothing bad lasts forever. I still feel that freedom I felt on the day I got let out, the strength I felt. I can still tap into that today. As bad as things get, they eventually end. Bad things don’t last forever and there’s a way through. That’s what I learned.” Previous Next

< Back Juli's Story Juli speaks with Jacqueline about her time at summer camp as a kid. At this camp, Juli met someone who didn’t fit in. But Juli learned how a little kindness could go a long way. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 02:06 Yeah I think I dont know how old I was maybe 10 years old and it was ya know mostly I went to summer camp ya know girl scout camps but it was a camp at the end of camp um they always had this big camp fire at the end of the week at camp and everyone would come and they gave an award it was like a good citizen award to the person who best exemplified the values of ya know camping and girl scouting and I got the award It shocked me cause I didnt feel like I distinguished myself in anyway at that point i didnt really excel as a student when was young it wasnt until i got older but um and I relaized and I had to think about it for a few minutes why did they give me this and i think it was because there was a girl who was assigned to my tent that year and I always went by myself I didnt know other campers and it wa a tent with 4 cots one of th egirsl was um she was clearly from a poor family probably there on a grant and um she was very awkward very awkward physically and socially and ya know just had a hard time fitting in ya know and that was clear to me and the other 2 girls in our tent wanted absolutely nothing to do with her and so I always made sure ya know when we go out for walks in the woods wed have to have a buddy and i would ask her to be my buddy and I made sure she wasnt sitting alone um at meal times um ya know I just tried to be kind with her even though i didnt really connect with her cause she wasn't easy to engage with but I just tried to be kind and I think thats why I got the award and it was an important lesson to me ya know the value of kindness Previous Next

< Back Liam's Story Liam talks about a scene in the movie Tampopo and discusses the differences in how people consume media and how media can be interpreted differently depending on the viewer. 00:00 / 03:22 0:00 I am going to talk about a specific scene in a specific movie that is now over 30 years old. But that means a lot to me. The movie is called Tampopo. The director is juzo Itami. The scene I want to talk about is about a family. We are introduced to the first member of the story, as we see a man running past the end of one of the stories that we've just seen. And we see him run down the street, we see him run along the train track, he runs up his stairs, and he gets to what we assume to be the door of his house bulldozes in and we see in his house, there are three children, a man, we suppose is a doctor and a woman who we suppose is a nurse. Lastly, there is also a woman lying on a makeshift bed or roll on the ground, he runs in and by his tone, we can tell that the woman is sick, and that she perhaps has been for a long time he runs over to her and he says, stay with me, you can't die. And he says do something, sing do anything. And he hits the floor and he says don't make dinner. And the woman slowly rises and gets up and walks over to the kitchen. Kind of absent mindedly grabbing a knife and some spring onions. And she cuts them up, puts them in a pan puts other things and we see the family viewing this and we see the children because they know what to do have already gotten their bowls and have moved to the table we see the older sister setting things out for her youngest sibling, the mother or then comes back with this steaming bowl of food places on a table. And we see all of the hands come in and start serving themselves. However we see the mother first serve the youngest child. After that, they all start eating and the husband looks up and says it's really good. It's delicious. And we see her smile. She slowly falls over. And the doctor pronounces her dead. The oldest daughter screams and comforts her youngest sibling, the father yells essentially Eat it while it's hot. This is the last meal that your mother made for you. 2:22 And we see the middle child, the boy kind of watching his father and doing the same thing. And then the scene cuts out. And it's over. And it's three minutes. I think a lot of the scenes kind of just pass by and spectacle. And so because of that the more intimate and caring scenes really stick out because you're kind of forced to sit with it and sit with what you've just watched. It's It's interesting how we consume media, and how we all come at it from our own different little lens. But for me, I think the scene that I described sticks out a lot because, you know, I think we're all able to see different parts of us in film. And it's interesting, because I think I relate pretty heavily to the characters in this scene specifically, my mom is still alive. You know, she's had different illnesses and different things that have kind of made this film stick out. This is one of the only scenes in a film that's ever I think really made me emotional. Previous Next

< Back Emily W's Story Emily W talks to Emily L about how the feminist movement has shaped her growing up and how the culture of women's liberation influenced her ideologies and life. 00:00 / 04:39 The feminist movement which was then mostly called Women's liberation movement was a major civil rights movement when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies. In high school I started paying attention to national leaders like Gloria Steinem in particular, who had started Miss Magazine which was kind of the first thing that was called a women's magazine that wasn't about housekeeping and cooking and among many other things she said that women needed to recognize and fight for the right for recognition and equality, the idea that women were equal. It seems like such common sense, but it wasn't people didn't always act as if that was common sense. In a lot of ways I felt that my whole life, but especially when I went to college I went to a women's college, Wilson college in Pennsylvania and I learned academically some of the things that I was picking up from the culture from women's liberation, things about, you know women have always been pioneers, but our history has been often hidden either accidentally or on purpose. Certain women have always defied the norms and excelled but they have not always been celebrated. Just that there were a lot of hidden stories of women, both individual and national. So feminism made me question a lot of the norms that I've grown up with. I certainly was never told as a kid that I wasn't equal to a man. I was always told well you can do whatever you want to do. But the culture saw until I grew up with these sort of Unthinking things around the T. V. Ads magazines. And that in my hometown was the college that my mom went to which was this women's college. It turned out to be one of the best things I've ever done in my life. When I got there I realized-- I mean it's sort of like my intellectual life took off. There were certainly efforts made by most of the professors to bring women's history or whatever into the curriculum. So in some way I definitely got more academic knowledge than I might have been at another school. But mainly it was just being around all women and when women have all the opportunities women take all the roles. So it was nobody saying you can do this. It was just if you wanted to do it you did it. And so it wasn't political at all. It was just like learning by doing oh you can do anything, you really can do anything. The baseline assumptions have changed considerably and it's much more than the norm for women to have a choice of how they lived their lives. That's kind of the bedrock change. So I think the biggest change probably is that the assumption of inferiority since it and it wasn't all that women couldn't do as good a job at things but there was always the assumption that you probably didn't even want to give women a chance in the workplace or anything serious because they would get married and or have kids and then leave, and so therefore you really needed to give men the opportunities that we're serious. And I don't think that happens as much. There's still some of it, but I don't think nearly as much overall about feminism, it's certainly not a big hot topic today and the way that it was when I was growing up, but I think although there's so much more to be done, it's okay that it's not a hot topic because it doesn't need to be in quite the same way that second wave feminism, which is the era that I grew up, made some progress and therefore feminism for a lot of people could be put on the back burner because men and women and people of other genders just sort of take it far more likely to take it for granted that, of course everybody has self determination. So I don't personally take any credit for that, but I think my generation as a whole, and the generation just before me, um, can take some some credit for kicking up a lot of fuss and making things happen. Previous Next

Owen talks about his decision to go to college as a way to avoid the Vietnam War. He talks about how this experience exposed him to a whole new demographic of people and allowed him to see people for who they were as opposed to the stereotypes they had been socialized to believe. Education served as a bridge across cultures, creating the ability to connect with people of all backgrounds. Owen's Story Owen talks about his decision to go to college as a way to avoid the Vietnam War. He talks about how this experience exposed him to a whole new demographic of people and allowed him to see people for who they were as opposed to the stereotypes they had been socialized to believe. Education served as a bridge across cultures, creating the ability to connect with people of all backgrounds. Owen's Story 00:00 / 03:11 When I was 19, approximately, there was something going on called the Vietnam war, and you probably studied it in ancient history or something like that. But for those of us who didn’t really want get out there and get shot at, we had to find eats to not do that. And we also didn’t really believe that war was necessary. So I was part of a group of people, there are many, many of us, who said, no, this is not a good idea. And the only way I could stay out was to go to college. And so I went to college. And another thing that’s big in my life is when I went into college I was meeting different people from different parts of the world and more so different parts of the country. But I did meet a few people from outside the US. And some people have big influences on you. Some people have small influences on you, and some people you just don’t understand. And part of the non-understanding is you have to learn to accept people as they are. I would say the majority of kids that I was in classes with were white, from middle-class suburban cities around middle-class suburbs, from large cities around the country. I went to school in St. Louis, and I came from a suburb of Washington DC. but there were so many people from so many other places that were similar to me. And then I got to meet people who were different than me. I remember one young woman came from Hawaii, and she was native Hawaiian, and that was cool. I mean, I’d never met anybody from Hawaii before. And one day it snowed and she ran outside, and she just went absolutely beserk running between the snowflakes because she had read about it, she’d seen it in movies, but she had never experienced snow before. And i’m going, okay, this is cool. You know, I’m just trying to understand somebody’s frame of mind, especially when you grow up with snow. You know it’s like, what’s just snow? It’s like, no, this was like a life-altering event for her. And I said, okay, that’s cool. You know, you don’t, it’s to be able to do that and not to judge somebody based on things like that. And I grew up in a society where a lot of people were not accepted as they were. A lot of minorities were looked down upon and legally discriminated against. And, you know, that sort of has gone away, but not entirely. There was no such thing as people who were openly gay. That just didn’t happen during that period of time. People did not date interracially. You never saw, you know, a white woman with a black guy. I mean it just didn’t happen. So when you start meeting people that are different and meeting people a little outside of your realm of experience, you learn about them and you learn to accept them. And that was a huge thing for me, to transition from living with stereotypes, which were reinforced by things like tv shows, to getting to know people and understanding who the people were. And you know, understanding a person as a person, not just put into a category, a stereotype. Part of going to school was that piece of education. Previous Next

< Back Joan A's Story Listen to Joan as she talks about her Auntie Delly and the role her Aunt played in shaping Joan's life in the past and the present. 00:00 / 03:55 Hi, I'm Joan Axelrod-Contrada, and this is my story about how Auntie Delly became my feminist role model! I grew up with a mother who was a traditional suburban housewife. Mom always seemed a little bored and depressed. Once I was in the car with Mom when she stopped at a gas station and signed the receipt, Mrs. Maynard Axelrod. Why didn't she use her own first name? She told me that only divorced women sign their names that way. The only times mom really lit up were when her older sisters came to town. Mom's sisters bore an uncanny resemblance to the girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Adele Herwitz, my Auntie Delly, was Jo, the adventurous one. She had an exciting career as a nursing executive and was a feminist long before anyone had ever heard the word. She represented the American Nurses Association at the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Auntie Delly traveled the world, first as the Executive Director of the International Council of Nurses, and then as the founder of a new organization in Philadelphia that credentialed international nurses to practice in the US. As a teenager and young woman, I got into journalism, a field that called for just the kind of curiosity and adventurous spirit that Auntie Delly represented to me from an early age. Interviewer: And in what ways would you say your Auntie Delly was adventurous and inspiring to you? Joan: Well, Auntie Delly once told me she wasn't a beige type of woman. She loved the color turquoise, which is why I'm wearing turquoise today. And she decorated her apartments in a striking combination of turquoise, red, and black. She was such a strong career woman that everyone in the family worried that she'd be miserable when she retired. Instead, though, Auntie Delly thrived in retirement, moving to Brookline Massachusetts to be near her sisters. he enrolled in Harvard's Program for Learning and Retirement, took up watercolor painting, went to movies at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, and joined the League of Women Voters. She also took a real interest in my career, my husband, and my kids. Interviewer: Do you have any other fond memories of Auntie Delly that were your favorite? Joan: Yeah, Auntie Delly founded a holiday that we called Aunt's Day, in which she took the entire family out to eat. And she made every outing an adventure. Once she gave Fred the kids and me each $20 to get whatever we wanted at Trader Joe's, she turned a shopping trip into a true scavenger hunt. She used to say, it's one thing to put yourself first, it's something else to put yourself first, second, third, and fourth. I use that line often on my kids to get them to distinguish between legitimate self-care and being inconsiderate to all the rest of us. I'm trying to live this last third of my life with a spirit of adventure that Auntie Delly represented to me. And like her, I consider myself a lifelong learner. And I'm currently working on a collection of essays called ‘Rock On! A Baby Boomer's Playlist for Life After Loss’. And I plan to dedicate the book to my Auntie Delly. Previous Next