February 22 – 26 February 22 Ed and I arrived in the Buenos Aires Ezeiza airport at 12:00 noon and took a bus across the city to the Aeroparque airport, where we boarded our flight to Asuncion. Acquiring our visas upon arrival at the Pettirossi Asuncion airport took a long…
I cry easily. And increasingly, I cry about apparently nothing. I wish I more often had some external trigger to explain the reason for my tears. Sometimes they feel inexplicable, even uncalled for. At times, I begin to cry when sadness within me feels so vast and so deep that…
Six years ago last Thursday at 10:05 a.m. MST, the brilliant cardio-thoracic surgeon Dr. Luis Rosado-Lopez cut open my beloved’s chest and constructed three alternative pathways for blood to flow to his heart. Dr. Rosado saved Ed’s life, and today my blog is about gratitude for that gift. I’m one…
As I write this, Ed and I are fortunate to be in Wollongong, Australia, just south of Sydney, playing tai chi with our teacher, Dr. Paul Lam, and his master trainers. Dr. Lam is celebrating his 20th year of annual workshops here in Australia. For the past 21 years, his…
Last week we saw Steven Fales’ award-winning one-man play, Confessions of a Mormon Boy. Parts of his story resonated with my own life that I’ve described in my forthcoming memoir. The play takes us on Fales’ heartbreaking journey from being a devout Mormon and devoted father of two to coming…
Thanksgiving Day. While many of you sat around a table with family members on November 23rd, Ed and I tried something different. It was 92 degrees in Tucson that day. We sat at one of about a dozen tables temporarily set up in the interior courtyard of a large apartment…
Yesterday my 10-year-old grandson interviewed me for a school project. He had a list of questions about my ancestors, my childhood. His heritage. Where did your ancestors come from? Were there any naming traditions? Where did you grow up? I responded and he took notes on his iPad. So serious…
Our tai chi master, Dr. Paul Lam, said something to us a few weeks ago at the end of a workshop we attended that has stuck with me: “Endings are simply the moment of new beginnings.” I’ve always hated goodbyes. All the way back when I was a little kid…
I sat thinking about what I should write in this week’s blog when Ed approached me with an idea. “Why don’t you write about some common myths that have turned out to not be true in our lives,” he said. “What myths are you referring to?” I asked. “If you…
I recently wrote an essay titled An Unreasonable Couple that describes my brave parents, Clara and John Schmidt. They left their small Mennonite community in rural Kansas in the early 1940s and traveled to Paraguay to provide medical services in an area largely considered inhabitable. Why? They were devout Christians,…