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I am not fat.  I am not horribly overweight.  But I could use to lose 10 pounds.  Again.  I lost it the first time when I went off to college.  Ten pounds seemed to just melt off.  I was emptying my student checking account at the local boutiques so I did not have enough money for food…but I looked good.

I lost that 10 pounds again during the divorce years.  I was too stressed out to eat.  Food sat in the refrigerator so long it turned bad. 

So here I was, getting adjusted to a new life, when I entered into this relationship.  That started the tug-of-war known as the proverbial battle-of-the-sexes.  It was time for both of us to develop new skills and laugh at ourselves as we stumbled around the kitchen.

The aha! moment came when we realized that our battles were waged in the name of love and honor.  Now he snorks and I leer, and we appreciate the different people that we are.  It is challenging to learn how to dance with your new partner.  And that is what Second Life is all about...doing the same things better while being better at being ourselves.

It is our holiday tradition…I buy a few new shirts to replace his old, torn and smelly ones.  We go into his closet and choose the ones that are no longer allowed to live there.  Actually, I choose and he moans. 

“You can’t throw out that one,” Phang complains.  “It’s got history.”

“Yes,” I reply, “I can see the history all over it.  And it doesn’t smell fresh anymore, even when it gets washed.”

Women need their girlfriends.  I am sure of that.  But what, I wondered, makes us attracted to the friends we make?  I put the question out for discussion by my book club girlfriends.  “Who would you choose from our contemporary culture to have as a girlfriend?” 

So, because that seemed like a vague and random question, I really did not have any expectations for any meaningful answer.  I was certainly not prepared for the answer that came back.

Out of eight women at the table, some sipping tea and others drinking coffee, came one answer.  Diane Keaton.  Yes, eight out of eight of my friends want to meet Diane Keaton.  

I brought my mother to the emergency room.  The doctors admitted her to the hospital that same day.  After a week in the hospital and a complicated diagnosis, I made the decision to take her back home to her assisted living facility and call for assistance from the hospice.  Too many things are going wrong, I explained to the hospice nurse, and I just want to provide a pain-free, comfortable end-of-life care.

Hospice ordered a hospital bed and oxygen.  Mom came back to her room via an ambulance.  She was to have constant care around the clock.  Even then, it seemed that her days were limited.  I visited daily, as did her grandsons. 

It wasn’t until my kids were in college that I worried about their drinking habits.  Liquor was always available in our house, not as an attraction nor as a prohibition.  We poured a glass of wine each Friday night for our Shabbat meal and all were invited to drink no matter their age.  We rarely drank any kind of liquor any other night of the week.  The liquor cabinet was full and remained so during all the years my kids lived at home.

During their teen years, the kids’ friends would gather in our basement and often they would sleep over.  I never asked if they were bringing liquor with them.  My rule was that everyone had to drop their keys on my kitchen counter when arriving and get them back only after

It was 7:30 in the morning and the house was silent.  It was as if someone had turned off the noise in my head.  The kids had moved away; the dog had died.  I had requested that my ex move all his possessions out of the house in 24 hours.  That was yesterday.

I went to bed exhausted and woke up to face my new reality.  I had no schedule, no plan and no expectations.  One of the closets in the master bedroom was now totally empty.  The cabinets and the sink top on one side of the bathroom were totally bare.  One side of the garage was empty.  There was no one to talk to; nothing to say.

When your world goes silent, because of a death or a divorce, it seems as if your life is over.

My sister died of breast cancer at the age of 52.  She didn’t think the cancer would spread and chose not to get the best medical care.  For a long time she did not mention how she was progressing.  Eventually she revealed that the cancer had metastasized and was in her liver, lungs and back. 

It was at that same age that my mammograms began to change.  There were suspicious calcium deposits and surgical biopsies were necessary each time, every six months.  The doctors gave me tomaxifin, a chemo that made me horribly nauseous.  I tried for months, but just could not tolerate the drug.

The biopsies were painful.  There were scars and infections each time.  Bu

When my father began to tell me about sex, I was a teenager ready to go out and have fun with the boys. 

“They only want one thing from you,” he said.  “Never forget that.”

My first relationships with the opposite sex focused on sports.  I was a tomboy who loved playing baseball, basketball and tetherball.  Later I learned weight training with my dad in our basement and modern dance at a dance studio nearby.  I loved being on teams with girlfriends and with the guys.  Maybe, I thought, the one thing all the boys wanted was to be on the winning team.