relationships

Jul 05, 2018 by Janet Zinn

 

 

What can I say about a dream come true?  Shall I say that I spent most of my life believing my dreams wouldn’t be fulfilled?  I lived much of my early years longing for the things that others had.  The thing about my longings is that it kept me out of the loop. There’s an unspoken presumption that it was beyond my reach. Growing up I heard about the trips to Florida my classmates took.  I longed to audition for a traveling high school production of Godspell, but had to work, and couldn’t afford to take time off, let alone pay for a ticket to California.  I felt left out.  Moving to New York in the early 80’s, there were apartments...

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Jul 31, 2017 by Janet Zinn

 



On a sweltering Tuesday in August, in my first full summer as a New York City resident, I was nervous and excited about the prospect of obtaining free tickets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The day in 1982 was hazy, and the great lawn was full of picnickers all with numbers for a place in line. I was number 26. I had gotten there so early, maybe 7 AM to ensure my audience participation. And, I was far from the first one in line. But with a coffee and an H&H bagel for breakfast, I felt well-prepared. Hour after hour of baking in the sun, I was a lucky recipient of two tickets...

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Mar 14, 2016 by Janet Zinn

  Picture courtesy of MedicineNet For the past few days I’ve spent most of my time in bed with a hot water bottle. I had a lower back spasm that seemingly came out of nowhere. The first two days were difficult to get up and down. On second thought, difficult is an understatement. But with the pain came some important lessons I apparently needed to learn. Image via web search The first was how kind and generous my family and friends were. I am usually a do-it-myself kind of person, sometimes to a fault. I am strongly independent. But there are moments I can become resentful when others don’t pitch in. It’s in these moments that I realize that I could use some help....

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Nov 24, 2015 by Janet Zinn

Last week on Facebook I had changed my profile picture to one with a transparent French Flag on top of my face. When I was in college I had gone to school in Paris one summer studying Art History and French. The art history stayed with me, the French, not so much. It was a seminal summer for me. Memories surged after the bombings and I responded based on my relationship to my past and those in my present. Yet, shortly after that, so many people started writing pieces or making comments about how wrong it was to change our profile pictures when so many more had been tortured and killed in Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Sierra Leone….. And the shaming...

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Jul 06, 2015 by Janet Zinn

(1996)

Last week was our 18th wedding anniversary. We met online on an early AOL singles site. This was well before Match.com or JDate. This was 1996 when articles and news programs were warning us to beware of cyber dating. We did not heed their advice, and it worked out for us.

1(1997)

There’s so much I’ve learned in these years. Lesson one is that dreams do come true. Lesson two, there is no happily ever after. Relationships are messy work. I was not prepared for that. I naively came to marriage thinking that it solved problems. Even though I came late to the game, I felt loved, and isn’t that all I ever really wanted? Don’t get me wrong feeling loved is...

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