There are twenty-one days until the 2024 election. Looking at the last seven days of our lives, four of them contained crying. Wait. Make that five.

This morning I received an email from my kid’s school. Inside was information about the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation which awards $20,000 to 150 U.S. high school students. I forwarded the website to my kid and told him to apply. Then I read through the bios of last year’s scholarship winners.

Remaking my idea of ‘home’ feels like building sandcastles at the sea’s edge. Yet, despite all the shedding, reimagining and redefining I do, there are pieces that stay.

Get yourself to a Rock and Roll show. Go sober. Throw your arms up and your head back and let the bass clean out your chest cavity. Dance with the strangers around you. Sing and scream. Last night we took a group energy shower together. Today I feel clean. And I have 38,000 new brothers and sisters.

You left the party. You said you’d be right back, but I could tell you needed to go. It’s ok. I know you wanted to stay and dance all night with us, but you had to get going.

Unlike the finger-caught-in-the-door surprise that’s waiting for us all the time and is never to be outrun, life also offers bits of healing through beauty, nature, friendship, Spirit. But this you’ve gotta work for. No one accidentally trips into a walk in the woods.

Tomorrow (10/30), PBS will air the documentary “Fire Through Dry Grass” on POV. I’ve watched the film five times now and re-living the trauma we all endured does not get easier. While I’m not in the film, I could not be prouder of this body of work or the amazing humans who brought it to the world.

Walking the carved stone and gravel paths through whispering pines and past famous trolls, I remembered what The Universe was showing me. Magic. I’d lost my connection to the magic.

So here’s me, standing in the crisp air of a Maine fall morning, poking about the sweetest farmer’s market known to man, proud to be standing upright, when a man turned to me. “Hey! It’s you!” he said, smile expanding. “Wow! I’m so glad to see you!” I had never seen this man before in my life.

This is my Uncle Frank. I spoke to him for the last time on Saturday. He apologized that he wouldn’t be around to read my book when it was finished. We laughed about the name of his high school mascot (the Authors) and said how much we love each other. A Mozart concerto played in the background. On Sunday, after a morning with family, Uncle Frank took his final pill.

If you’re kicking yourself because we’re 10 days into January and your New Year’s Resolutions are quickly becoming the microphone for your inadequacies, let me throw you a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. I almost died this morning during my new “self care” routine. Maybe we all need to calm the f* down.

These are the words that were shouted at @heyitsbriancook as we crossed the street last night on our way to meet friends. The driver, angry that we crossed without the light, screamed and honked at us, then stopped his car to really get into it. That’s when he labeled Brian with that age-old slur of a ‘Harvard professor’. We laughed the rest of the walk and I offered to buy B a sweatshirt at the Harvard Co-op. But when I woke up this morning thinking about it, I wasn’t laughing.

Previously, whenever we moved to a new state, switching our driver’s license was way down on the list; somewhere between locating a dry cleaner and buying new address labels. However this is an election year. And yes, I know I now live in the bluest state in the nation, but as we all painfully learned in 2016, to assume is to make an ass out of the Office of the President and me, so you can be damned sure I’m voting in this one.