I wonder what she would say. My Mom, I mean. I wonder what she would think if she were in the audience or if she were to hear the interaction at a webinar.
I wonder what Mom would think if she knew that I was about to offer my practice to a Women’s International Network. Then again, I wonder what anyone who knew me “then” would say if they saw me now. Would they bash me? Would they roll their eyes and say, “No way!”
I wonder if those who noted my past mistakes would allow me to surpass my previous limitations. Or, wait, no. I wonder this about myself because perhaps if it wasn’t for my past, I might have never decided to hold myself accountable to create my present – or improve. 

There isn’t too much time for indecision. Or, then again, maybe there is. Maybe we don’t know what to do, so . . . we sit still. Or, maybe this is only you and I and we’re in the middle of a moment. And neither of us are willing to let it go because neither of us know how.
It could be.
Maybe this is one of those things or maybe this is a moment, like Deja-vu, and it feels like we’ve been here before. But of course, we haven’t.
“Now” only happens once. I know this. And so do you. However, I suppose this is a moment that comes with a special awareness – and we find ourselves at an impasse; or maybe this is an an instance of attention, intensified by emotion or otherwise in-tuned with the details we find. 

It is Monday now, but only for now. As a matter of fact, give it a moment and the time will quickly turn into something else. And this is true. Time is always moving. The days and nights are always changing. And so are we.

Soon enough, our side of the world will begin to cool and frost will cover the grass. Soon enough, the streets of New York City will decorate itself with holiday spirit—and to us who’ve survived the pandemic; we hope this year will be better than the last.

The mornings were different when I was younger. The night was over and still, the smells of the places and the bars and the late night venues was still on our clothes. I was different then. So was the way I lived and so was the group of my friends.

I can remember beating the night until the sunrise came and then spilling on the street with an idea that sounded like, “Wow, the sun’s coming up.” We were young and we didn’t care. We didn’t know what we were going to do with ourselves. We had no ideas about a pension or a 401K. There was no talking about our future or future plans because let’s be honest, the future was for old people—and the term old is certainly relative. I mean, hell, back when I was turning the age and taking in the scenes, I can remember people at the night spots who were clearly out of their 20’s and deep in their 30’s and thinking, “Who let the old people in?”

By the end of the binge, there was nothing left. There was nothing left of me or my money. My pockets were as empty as my stomach, which had been making sounds for quite some time. I was strung out and pale. My jaw was clenched and my nerves were frayed like the tattered end of a rope. This of course was the chemical reaction to the substances in my bloodstream, yet, there was nothing left of me but the absence of the substance. Everything was gone. I was surrounded by tiny empty vials and little tinfoil packages. I was hidden away from the world and still hearing the paranoid phantoms that whispered to me.
“Try this,” they told me.
“This’ll help you.”

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
This is something my Mother would type when testing a new typewriter. I was too young to know much about a book called The Early History of The Typewriter. I was certainly too young to know anything about Charles E. Weller. He’s the one who wrote this first. There were other things that Mom could have typed. For example, Mom could have typed “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” and this would have incorporated each letter of the alphabet. But no. Mom chose to write, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of our country.”
I always liked this. . .

We sat together in a room on Christmas morning. We talked about our favorite meals and our favorite memories from back when we were young. And we laughed for a while.
We laughed about our childhood memories and the way it was to be a kid on Christmas morning. We talked about the presents and the way things change from action figures to a new bike (or something like that).
We spoke to one another the way regular people speak. There was no hierarchy, no pecking order, just a roomful of men who wished to be elsewhere. But due to the circumstance, for the moment, this was all that we had.