I know things ordinary people don’t know because I
- was born with a very unusual heart,
- grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household,
- had an incredibly funny, creative, and kind father, who loved to make people laugh,
- had an incredibly caring, kind, clean and neat mother, who loved to laugh,
- realized I had a connection with cats when I was very young,
- had my first major heart surgery when I was 10 on the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated,
- have relied on cardiac pacemakers to keep me alive since that day,
- spent a lot of time in hospitals where I met many different types of people,
- danced in our basement to musicals when nobody was watching,
- read voraciously when I was young,
- learned to play the piano, guitar, and ukulele,
- attended three schools where everyone there knew I had a heart condition,
- travelled across the USA by bus when I was 21,
- visited many different countries,
- danced, danced, danced in the 1970s even though my heart rate was fixed at 72 beats per minute,
- majored in English literature at college,
- worked as a technical writer, marketing writer, teacher, manager, and psychotherapist,
- volunteered for several years at a suicide hotline,
- attended graduate schools for film studies and social work,
- love hearing other people’s stories,
- married two extraordinary men,
- gave birth to an extraordinary son when I was 45 years old,
- saw people behave at their best and their worst and everything in between (including me),
- survived the coronavirus,
- have kept learning from all the people I have encountered in my long life, and
- have the Daily Bitch calendar, which knows a lot.
Can you tell that I know things ordinary people don’t know from the rest of today’s photos?
Harley knows things that ordinary cats don’t know, but he’s not telling.
It’s a good thing I know things that ordinary people don’t know, because I’ll be teaching several interns about my Coping and Healing groups this morning at 9.
Here is “I Know Things Now” from Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim, whom I’ve known I’ve loved for a long, long time.
I also know gratitude that ordinary people don’t know, every day, so thanks to to all the extraordinary people I’ve known, including YOU!
