Tag: Scottsdale

Transitions and Auditions

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May is a transitional month in the Valley of the Sun.

Snowbirds have flown away to their full-time nests east and north. Tom and I are left to our creative devices.

Despite the higher temperatures coming soon–100-plus next week–I prefer these quieter, hotter days.

There is more room in our favorite coffee shop where we write and socialize. Less maneuvering through traffic merging on and off highway ramps framed by jagged mountains that remind me I am a westerner now … for nearly nine years.

This morning at the Scottsdale Community College gym Tom and I now frequent (free with our Silver Sneakers membership), Rosalind greeted me with a broad smile.

She read and loved Sixty-Something Days, my latest book and told me she is recommending it to all of her sixty-something friends.

Active-retiree Rosalind laughed when she said, “I’m your target audience.” She offered that it reminded her how important it is for all of us to be grateful for the goodness and love in our lives.

In that moment, she shared a photo of her two, beautiful, three-year-old granddaughters who are the children of her twin adult sons.

As we parted to continue our respective exercise regimens, she volunteered that she will be leaving for Flagstaff for the summer–her own transition to the beauty and cooler temps of northern Arizona–but back in the fall to resume her desert life.

Now that May has arrived, I’m shifting creative gears.

I’ve been working with another chorus member–August–to write and finalize the libretto for Broadway Lights, the next Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC) concert June 27 and 28 at Tempe Center for the Arts.

It features eight storytelling vignettes that wrap in and around our PHXGMC set of inspiring, fun/funny, and fabulous Broadway tunes.

This evening, August, Darlene (PHXGMC’s assistant artistic director), and I will watch and listen to a stream of chorus members who are auditioning for the nine speaking roles that tell stories (fictionalized ones rooted in reality) of how Broadway music has served as a beacon for our LGBTQ+ community in happy and sad times.

I am proud of my involvement with the chorus as both a second-tenor performer and librettist. At this stage of life, time moves quickly. It’s difficult for me to believe that I have been singing with the chorus for nine years, since Tom and I moved to Arizona in 2017.

As my sixty-ninth birthday fast approaches in early July, this community of friends–truly a safe haven in our chaotic country–provides an ongoing-and-meaningful oasis during these Sixty-Something Days … ones I am grateful for even on the hottest days that surely loom beyond this stretch of ground Tom and I walk along the Crosscut Canal and Papago Buttes.

Another Orbit

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This is my space, but I feel it has eluded me lately in the blur of life.

Like the game of Chutes and Ladders, in this month of April I’ve moved forward a few paces–writing another meaningful libretto for the next Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus concert, Broadway Lights, in late June–while sliding back to heal from physical and emotional setbacks: two discomforting dermatological surgeries; one momentous funeral for a close cousin.

Grief has a mysterious way of throwing you into another orbit. That is where I live and breathe right now. Part of me stands on the sandy soil of Scottsdale, Arizona. Another piece is spinning somewhere else in the stratosphere.

The loss of Phyllis cut close. Not only because I loved her. But because I know she loved me. And she was a significant part of the fabric of my young life in her proximity to others I loved. Others we loved. All of whom are gone.

Our grandparents, Albert and Louise. Her mother, Violet. My father, Walter. My mother, Helen. Our aunt, Thelma.

Despite my disrupted and sometimes traumatic home life in the 1960s–featuring my father’s bipolar swings and my mother’s evening coping mechanism behind the broadsheet of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch–love existed there in our suburban St. Louis house. Love I felt. Love I excavated. Love I salvaged and carried forward. Love I still feel today.

Phyllis appeared in our home a few times a year. Usually in July to celebrate my birthday in our big backyard and in December in our living room to share Christmas dinner and exchange gifts. She was an integral presence in those moments.

There is one other moment that was purely ours. It happened just once. She must have been twenty. I was ten. She was an undergrad at the University of Missouri in St. Louis (UMSL). We both loved sports. She invited me to join her at an UMSL Rivermen basketball game.

I don’t remember much about it … how we got there, what we said to one another … just that we sat side by side in the stands rooting for the Rivermen. I just remember being proud of her. She was pretty, smart, and fun … and she wanted to spend time with her young cousin. It touched me deeply

As I write this, I realize Phyllis represented a form of stability in my life at that time … an escape to a more even, peaceful place that no one in my family of origin could provide.

Identifying that helps me to realize why this loss has hit so hard.

***

On Wednesday, April 22–Earth Day–my husband and I attended a volunteer recognition event at the Scottsdale Public Library. Alexa, the supervisor of volunteers, recognized Tom for his outstanding-and-popular movie series–and then me for my memoir-writing workshops–at the library in 2025.

We each brought home a certificate, thanking us for our volunteering efforts, along with a tiny succulent plant bearing an important message. We placed both of them on the windowsill of our south-facing sunroom in Scottsdale.

They will serve as a reminder for me that–even in my late sixties–I’m helping others grow in my community.

I know Phyllis, a life-long educator, valued that, too.

Sensitivity

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I pride myself on my sensitivity.

In my book, empathy is an essential quality for writers and human beings in general. It opens the door to developing deep and trusting relationships, but it also exposes us to emotional and physical pain. In this month of April, I have experienced both.

***

On Friday, April 10, Tom and I said goodbye to my cousin Phyllis.

The day before, we flew to St. Louis and enjoyed a nostalgic salad-and-pizza dinner with family in St. Charles, Missouri.

We gathered around a round, wooden table–balancing paper plates piled with food, while sifting through dog-eared photographs of Phyllis with living and deceased members of our Johnson family from the past seventy-five years.

In that space, I felt a meaningful connection with Tom (Phyllis’ husband), Austin and Bryant (her adult sons) and their respective spouses (Amanda and Kelsey).

Meanwhile, Phyllis’ four grandchildren–ranging in age from three to eight years old–danced around the island in Bryant and Kelsey’s kitchen, occasionally patting the head of Bennelli, their large-and-lovable labrador.

Despite the grief associated with the loss of Phyllis, it was a family moment I will cherish. One Phyllis would have loved.

The next morning, Tom and I drove to the funeral at Immanuel Lutheran Church in St. Charles with my sister Diane and brother-in-law Steve.

In a large open space connected to the church, Kelsey and Bryant had carefully assembled still photos–from throughout Phyllis’ life–on boards anchored by easels. They placed them beside her closed casket adorned with sprays of colorful blooms.

Overhead, at the other end of the room on a large screen, other images of Phyllis and her family and friends faded in and out on a large screen TV.

As people began moving into the church for the 11:30 funeral service, I felt anxious. Jumpy.

A mix of nostalgia and peace washed over me, as Tom and I found a place to sit at the far-left end of the fourth pew. Diane and Steve joined us there.

I scanned the program and saw that after readings from the old and new testaments–slotted between two church hymns–I would walk to the lectern to share “Words from the Family”. To give a eulogy. To pay tribute to my closest cousin’s life.

I’ve done a lot of public speaking, presenting, and singing on a multitude of stages in my life–but few things as personal as this. I breathed in deeply to quiet my nerves. I unfolded my prepared words and looked out over a congregation of probably two hundred: Phyllis’ family, friends, teaching colleagues, students, caregivers.

In that moment, my anxiety lifted and flew away. “I am honored today to remember Phyllis. She was my cousin. We were born a decade apart in St. Louis,” I began.

The words and phrases flowed effortlessly from there, as I looked into the tearful eyes of immediate family members–three generations side-by-side spread across the first pew.

“I admired Phyllis’ poise, her style, her intellect, her ambition, her sensibility,” I continued. Before I knew it, I was reciting verses from I poem I wrote for Phyllis: The Love We Shared.

I closed my notes. I left the lectern. I paused to pat Austin, Phyllis’ eldest son, on the shoulder for reassurance, kissed him on the forehead, then returned to the fourth pew and sat beside my husband.

I pulled a wrinkled tissue from my suit pocket, dabbed my eyes, and felt sadness and love reverberate throughout the church.

***

Tom and I returned to Arizona last Saturday.

Today I found myself dealing with another form of sensitivity … sensitivity to the sun.

This morning my dermatologist–in an out-patient procedure called MOHS surgery–removed a small patch of cancerous cells from the bicep of my right arm. As I write this, I am taped up with a sizeable patch over that area.

The good news is he removed all of the problematic tissue. There is no pain, just the anxiety (and the pinch of a few needles for numbing) that immediately preceded this morning’s appointment.

In a few weeks, the remnants of that procedure will fade. My dermatologist will extract the stitches.

I will be left with my fourth such scar–one on each limb ironically–from excisions and dermo procedures.

In a sense, these scars are “badges of honor” for having lived nearly sixty-nine years and survived a series of setbacks.

They are proof that as long as I live–as long as I write, sing, slather on sunscreen, and pause to remember the ones I love–I will also remain super sensitive to the blazing Arizona sun.

Looking Over My Shoulder

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Back and forth from one end of the pool to the other on this hotter-than-average, magnificent March morning. March 24, 2026, from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. to be precise. Thirty lengths in the deep end of Eldorado Pool in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Somehow, I wrangled my own lane today. I don’t mind sharing but always feel freer on unobstructed Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are fewer swim-class participants to contend with on those days and–now that the Cactus League baseball games have ended–some of the snowbirds have begun to flock home.

Breathing every eight or ten strokes, looking over my right shoulder, swimming south to north, I spy the blazing sun that threatens my sensitive skin and the wispy-white contrail of a commercial plane flying high above.

Serendipitously, the repetitive swimming motion reminds me what I want to write about today. It is the tenth anniversary of publishing my first book: From Fertile Ground.

On March 24, 2016, Barack Obama was president. I didn’t imagine the waves of what was to come: the growing political insanity, the dismantling of once-reliable American institutions, the general implosion of our democracy in one decade. Who could?

Back then, Tom and I were snowbirds–splitting time between our homes in Mount Prospect, Illinois, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

I wrote most of my inaugural book–a three-generation writer’s mosaic about love and loss in my family–from the suburban flatness of northern Illinois.

But working online–back and forth like a swimmer logging laps between my editor and book designer in Nashville, Tennessee, and me in Scottsdale–I made my final edits in the rugged western landscape of the Grand Canyon State.

I remember the pride of holding the first physical copy of my first book later that week. I know I cried. It was a release of joy and amazement. Most definitely, a seminal moment I shared with my husband.

Sadness crept in, too, because I had written the book to process my grief after my mother’s passing. In a physical sense, I wasn’t able to celebrate that literary moment with her.

But I also know that writing about her and her wisdom-filled letters, my father and his unrealized poetry, my grandfather and fifty-three years of diary entries, and the general sense of freedom I felt visiting my grandparents in the 1960s at their rambling North Carolina farm allowed me to create a healing path out of my grief.

It was–and still is–a story I was meant to write and publish. One I wanted to share with others navigating the devastation of grief.

In the past ten years since From Fertile Ground was born, writing has become that free, unbridled swimming lane that is purely mine. Welcome waves of water and creativity running from my mid-fifties to my late sixties.

Whenever I jump into my writing in the deep end of my emotions, I find a way back to the surface with a new story. Many of them have landed on the pages of my other five books: Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator in 2017; An Unobstructed View in 2018; I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree in 2021; A Path I Might Have Missed in 2023; and Sixty-Something Days in 2025.

Of course, I take pride in that body of work and–more recently–find it tremendously gratifying to share what I have learned with other writers, who need an experienced coach … and a few practical ideas … to tell their own stories.

Today, I also pause and wonder–with a touch of sadness as I write this–how many more stories lie ahead for me. Though I still feel strong, capable, creative, and alive in these golden years swimming back and forth under the Arizona sun, I also feel more vulnerable.

Part of it is the process of aging. The other is the narrowing swim lanes of American society that constrain freedom and the expression of ideas.

Having said that, I choose to end this story on a positive note. Today, I choose to relish the goodness of my life with Tom in this rugged landscape. To give thanks for all the stories that have come from fertile ground over the past ten years … as well as those I have salvaged from the depths of the pool looking over my shoulder to beloved people and places that now live on the page.

All About Angels

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Photo by K ZHAO on Pexels.com

In the soundtrack of our lives–I believe one exists–sometimes a word or phrase from a conversation with a friend or acquaintance stops us in our tracks.

That happened for me recently while wearing my Writer in Residence hat at the Scottsdale Public Library in a one-on-one meeting with another writer. She looked at me with kindness and said with a warm smile:

“I’ll bet you’ve had lots of angels in your life.”

My response? “Yes, I have!”

I am not a religious person, but most definitely spiritual. So, I took her observation to mean there are unexplained positive forces at play … weaving in and out of my life with love.

I have definitely had my share of “guardian angels” in my sixty-eight years.

Some have appeared at my side for long stretches. Tom (my husband), Helen (my mother), and Valerie (my therapist years ago) have been visible angels in my life with lasting influence.

Others, like Rachel–a nurse at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis who floated in and out of my room in the middle of the night–helped keep me alive after I suffered a mild heart attack in 2017. She was mostly assuredly an angel.

Then there are the non-visible angels with wings that take flight in unusual ways. For instance, the serendipitous feelings of warmth and safety I feel when I am gardening, or singing, or swimming, or writing, or walking in nature.

Whenever this happens, I feel like angels are watching over me.

I’m a believer that whatever energy we spread in the universe in our everyday lives–good or bad–it eventually finds its way back to us in waves that envelope us.

As I get older, I find myself pondering these metaphysical or philosophical questions more closely. I’m more open to the idea of forces at play that don’t always add up mathematically or logically.

Certainly, at the end of the day–at the end of my life whenever that may be–I’d rather be held up by the wings of an angel for the love and goodness I’ve brought to the world than destroyed by the deleterious effects of a devil for the havoc I’ve caused.

They Still Remain

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Without words, they supply sounds, scents, and texture to our everyday lives.

Their furry souls exist unconditionally, by our sides, under the table, on the coolest tile, or the warmest trail to nowhere special or somewhere sacred.

While they are present, our ever-lovable companions spread beauty, comedy, continuity, responsibility, laughter, goodness, grace, and wisdom across crowded kitchens, cozy front porches, and boundless backyards.

And, when nature calls and they pad along to another plane, they still remain family, they still inhabit our hearts forever.

***

For Mason, Katie, Poly, Maggie and all our furry friends who have gone before us.

Red Roses and Pink Orchids

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Red roses and pink orchids

Adorn our living room today.

It is a day to celebrate love.

Romantic love is the headliner.

I am thankful for my husband,

Our love, our mutual understanding.

We have been together nearly thirty years.

We were able to marry in 2014

On a bright September afternoon.

We continue to grow and love together.

We nurture each other’s passions.

We provide a warm haven

For each other as we age.

But love exists in many shapes and sizes.

Devoted friendship.

Brotherly and sisterly love.

Parental love. Neighborly love.

Love of nature and animals.

Love for the good of all humanity.

These forms of love are just as important.

We all need to feel loved to flourish,

To live with dignity. To survive.

Not just on Valentine’s Day. Every day.

Certainly, there is love in our country.

But the malignancy of hate abounds.

Endless, unbridled love is the antidote.

When love coalesces with truth and justice,

We will reemerge from the darkness,

Holding an abundance of red roses and pink orchids.

Later Than Ever

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As dusk descends, confused trees whisper,

“How did it become later than ever?”

They pause and ache for lingering leaves,

Heroic January lives that fell too soon,

Brilliant ones yet to fade and fall,

On unforgiving February concrete,

Certain militant Marches,

Angry Aprils, unimaginable Mays,

To come and go without reason.

They stand and wonder when and if,

More sensible seasons, brighter days,

Truer hearts, freer minds,

Will return and reign supreme.

Downstream and Upstream

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While we box up our flickering, ever-tangled holiday lights, compartmentalize them with our fading democracy, shove them into insanity’s dusty attic beside our president’s latest lawless actions streaming 24/7, we also attempt to climb above and beyond accumulating ominous clouds, by feeding old-year bread to new-year geese, by examining each piece of life’s puzzle with bleary-but-thoughtful eyes, by loving ourselves, each other, and all animals, by emulating kind lives under fleeting desert candlelight, by resuming our daily quest for survivorship and unflappable wisdom, even as every institution, every once-reliable media conglomerate or teetering motherboard (like the dying one on Tom’s old phone) signals the end is near and must be replaced. So, we replace it. We move on. We give thanks. We cherish every labor of love and every hidden oasis. We welcome every petite, heartful bouquet. We marvel at one rare, exquisite, night-blooming cereus, paint-plus-provenance. It is the perfect gift on canvas from a dear friend.

The downstream darkness of January is real, but in our upstream hearts, in the serenity of nature (and now framed in splendor on our living room wall thanks to Dougal) there is a profound, constant, but private reminder: there is always beauty and hope, even when there is darkness.

Rolling Out the Dough

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Back in the early 1960s, Mom plucked two mounds of dough out of our Philco refrigerator.

She plopped them on the kitchen counter to let them soften and warm to room temperature, then pulled her rolling pin out of the cupboard.

Diane and I took our places on either side of her, holding our primitive cookie cutters. Grey. Flimsy. Metal.

One was a simple star. The second, a classic Christmas tree. The third, a basic bell. The fourth, a reindeer in flight. The last one, a profile of Santa Claus carrying a pack of toys.

Further down the counter, two slightly bent cookie sheets waited, along with green and red sugar sprinkles we would soon shake above our freshly formed Christmas cookies.

But, in this gauzy 60s slice of life featuring baking, rolling out the dough had to come first.

Mom reached into her container of flour and tossed a handful on the counter. Then, dusted the wooden roller with the remains.

She leaned in with the rolling pin and pressed the dough. Back and forth with equal measures of love. The surface expanded with our hearts and imagination.

We took turns dipping the cutters into the flour, creating our shapes in the dough.

Then, we lifted them carefully with a spatula onto the cookie sheets, added the sprinkles, and slid them into the oven for eight to ten minutes.

While the first batch of cookies baked, Mom gathered the bits of dough that remained. She created a smaller ball and flattened it out with the roller. Together, we repeated the process.

It was 1961. I was four years old. Diane was seven. We felt loved, safe in the presence of our mother.

***

Earlier this week, I found one green Christmas cookie cutter in our kitchen drawer here in Arizona. It was a gift from our friend Jillian a few years ago, but I hadn’t made sugar cookies from scratch since those early days in suburban St. Louis with my long-gone mother.

Tom and I bought a wooden rolling pin, and I found an easy sugar cookie recipe online. I assembled the ingredients to make the dough: butter, sugar, flour, one egg, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a dash of salt.

I mixed it all together and let the dough settle in two large discs in the fridge overnight.

On Monday, I rolled out the dough, cut the cookies, and topped my Christmas trees with green and rainbow-colored sprinkles. Then, I slid several trays of cookies into the oven to bake.

Why this year? I don’t really know, except to say it’s been an awful period in our country even though I’m a survivor and somehow have reached new creative heights in my personal life in 2025: several memoir-writing workshops, two joyful holiday concerts, and another book.

And, of course, I still miss my mother. She’s been gone since January 2013, but the grief reappears with the holidays. I suppose I needed to feel her presence again.

I needed to rescue my past Christmas-cookie-cutting memory with Mom. To keep that sweet, simple goodness alive in the stillness of my kitchen. To shepherd it into my present Arizona life with Tom and breathe new life into that tradition.

Merry Christmas, everyone.