“Ed brought me roses today for no reason,” I say, still feeling the warmth that spread through my chest when my husband handed me the bouquet earlier in the day. Donna rolls her eyes. “Which wine shall we order?” she asks, looking around the table. There are five of us…
On a stormy early October evening in 1962, as thunder and lightning tore across the skies over downtown Asunción, Paraguay, we fought our way onto one of the crowded buses on the Avenida Mariscal López. Our church choir was headed to the soccer stadium, where the Billy Graham…
Before I began practicing tai chi four years ago, I thought it was a Chinese martial art form from thousands of years ago, shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Now it has become part of my daily routine. And I’m excited to share it with you. Numerous research studies have conclusively…
This week I voted. In President Obama’s State of the Union address, he said, “We can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” In President Trump’s State of…
I sit in a large conference hall and look at those around me. Several hundred people are focused on the speaker, a professor from the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She says, “And of course, there’s Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a stellar exemplar of writing with authority.” The…
Clyde had blue eyes that sparkled, and his dimpled smile made me shiver. The only problem was that Clyde was in love with Diana, a pretty petite blonde who always wore perfectly matching skirts and blouses that were store bought from the States, not home-made like my clothes. I knew…
No, this is not about eating well, exercising regularly, getting plenty of sleep… I simply need to feel like I’m younger than my actual age. You’ve seen the aphorisms on Hallmark birthday cards: You’re only as old as you feel or Age is only a state of mind. What if…
The air in the waiting room at the Bilbao International Airport pressed against us, dank and heavy. A greasy stench rose from a counter loaded with plastic containers of Spanish omelets. “Where are they?” I asked, looking around the room. In the far corner, a group of young men, all…
Joan Gelfand, author of You Can Be a Winning Writer Joan Gelfand’s latest book, You Can Be a Winning Writer, charts the four parts of every successful writer’s life: Craft, Commitment, Community and Confidence. The book was published July 15, 2018 at Mango Publishing Group. I…
A while back, I published a story “Is a Good Marriage Good Enough?” about the silence that hung like air in a coffin around my [then] husband and me. I wondered when it was that we ran out of things to talk about. Our good marriage was coming to an…