Forever a Heartbreaker

October 21, 2026 by Leave a Comment

He had that rare ability to make you feel as though he had somehow read the chapters of your life that you never allowed anyone else to see; his music didn’t simply entertain us, it became part of who we are.

On October 20th, 2026, Tom Petty would have turned 76, but some souls are simply much too extraordinary to be measured in just years. Tom’s music was never something I just listened to, it was something I lived, through moments of love, heartbreak, loyalty, disappointment, and the quiet courage it takes to keep on going.

Somehow, Tom understood that life could be both beautiful and brutal, sometimes in the very same breath, when his words found their way into the corners of my heart where memories lingered, and where sadness sometime lived. He gave a voice to feelings I couldn’t always explain and strength to moments when I had very little of my own.

There was something beautifully defiant about Tom Petty, a man who understood that being wounded didn’t mean being defeated. Time may have silenced him, but it will never silence what he awakened in those of us who found pieces of ourselves in his music.

Tom Petty didn’t just leave behind songs; he left behind a soundtrack to my life, and as long as my heart remembers, his music will never die. Some legends leave us memories and Tom left us music that makes those memories come alive again.

From the Writer’s Workshop: Write a post in exactly eight (8) sentences.

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Through a glass, darkly

October 7, 2026 by Leave a Comment

The mere word “Eyeglasses” sounds almost painfully ordinary, but I felt that it might make a terrific piece. Humans invented two little pieces of glass in order to correct vision, then spent centuries pretending eyeglasses also reveal intelligence, character, a bit of eccentricity and, occasionally, whether someone is a serial killer in some movie. The more I wrote down thoughts I kept thinking that I’d take this topic somewhere darker, kind of a boundary between what we honestly see and what is actually there. A mix of October eerie, a bit reflective and slightly supernatural.

I ventured off to write about how glasses remember, like when an old pair is found in a drawer, perhaps belonging to someone long gone. When they’re put on, you don’t see more clearly, you see what they once saw. In addition, glasses normally correct blurred vision but, when reversed, things are visible only when the world is out of focus. Think about how we spend our lives believing that seeing clearly means understanding clearly but, it does not. Eyeglasses can certainly sharpen words on a page, or an image in a photograph, but they cannot help us recognize deception, love, regret, opportunity, or the moment something, or someone, important is disappearing from our lives.

I’ve always thought there was something slightly supernatural about eyeglasses. Tucked into a frame, glasses sit between us and the world, and suddenly everything changes. Edges sharpen. Faces emerge. Words become readable. We call that corrected vision, as though seeing clearly were merely a matter of prescription.

If only.

There are things I have seen perfectly and failed to understand. Things I misunderstood because I saw only what I expected to see. And things I recognize now that were invisible to me when they were standing directly in front of my face.

I’ve thought that maybe October is the right month to wonder about such things. Shadows lengthen. Mirrors become slightly less trustworthy. The dead seem a little closer. And an old pair of eyeglasses sitting alone on a table can begin to look less like an object and more like a witness.

I keep thinking about circling back to the glasses themselves and realizing that, perhaps the most frightening things in life were never the things hiding in the dark. They were the things we looked directly at, in perfect focus, and still failed to see. It seems that, in October, we humans apparently require an entire month to admit that shadows, and what might lurk beyond, are interesting. It’s all about vision versus perception where two people can look through perfectly corrected lenses at exactly the same thing and see entirely different realities. People often fail to think outside the box, instead, they forget there was a box in the first place as they look through the glass, darkly.

What if our eyes aren’t the things that need correcting?

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From the Writer’s Workshop: Write a post inspired by the word eyeglasses.

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When the sky remembers

September 9, 2026 by Leave a Comment

Tragic events that leave deep emotional scars on those left behind are supposed to soften with the passage of time.

But not always.

Not even after twenty-five years. On that beautiful September morning, beneath a clear blue sky, the world we knew changed in a matter of hours. Innocent lives disappeared. Families were shattered. First responders ran toward something everyone else was desperately trying to escape. And two majestic icons of the New York City skyline collapsed into wailing clouds of smoke, dust and twisted metal. Twenty-five years later, the images have not lost their power. The sky remembers.

Each year I watch the September 11th remembrance ceremony in New York City. I listen as the names are read aloud, one after another, by husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandchildren who never had the opportunity to know the person whose name they now carry into another generation. And still, the tears fall.

Perhaps September 11th became even more personal for me after visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum with my family. Standing at the footprint of the North Tower, I could not think of it simply as a memorial. I felt that I was standing on sacred ground. There was an overwhelming sense of the lives that had existed there, of the ordinary people who had gone to work that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday. I found myself imagining that perhaps those who perished were somehow still watching over the visitors who came to remember them, searching the crowds for a familiar face, a child now grown, a spouse now older, or someone who simply came to say:
I remember you.

That may be what matters most now.

Twenty-five years have passed, and inevitably many more will follow. Those of us who remember exactly where we were when the first plane struck will grow older and, in time, that painful vision may fade. A generation has already reached adulthood with no personal memory of September 11, 2001. Someday, no living person will be able to say, “I was there,” or “I remember.” September 11th will become history. Words in a book. Photographs in an archive. Artifacts behind glass. Names belonging to people born long before them.

Unless we tell their stories.

Unless we bring our children and grandchildren to that hallowed ground and teach them that nearly three thousand individual lives existed behind that terrible number. They laughed. They loved. They had families, plans, unfinished conversations, and people waiting for them to come home.

They were here.

They mattered. And twenty-five years later, they still matter.
Time will continue its relentless march forward. Buildings have risen again. Children have been born. Generations will come and go.
But remembrance is something we choose.

Twenty-five years later, we speak their names.

We tell their stories.

We stand on sacred ground.

And we never forget.

From the Writer’s Workshop: Talk about a moment that changed your perspective on life
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