Published Works
PIRATES IN THE WOODS
International Journal Of Play, February 2018
When I was a couple months shy of seven my family moved from West Virginia to Springfield, Massachusetts where I was teased mercilessly because of the way I talked. 'Come on Ricky…count for us.' So I would begin… wahn, tew, thray, fawr, fahve…and these kids, who would soon become my best friends, would roll on the ground laughing and holding their bellies and then we'd all run around in the woods and pretend we were fighting bad guys; pirates one day, Nazis the next. That winter, when my accent became more like theirs, we walked up the road to the frozen pond where I inched around on the ice as if I were an old man with a broken hip while my Yankee friends skimmed across the surface, gliding and giggling. I so wanted to be like them, I so wanted to fly. Even now pushing sixty years later, I remember lying in my bed that night with a dreamy glorious feeling of imagining the glide, feeling the breeze, seeing myself flying along with my friends. And the very next day I could skate just as they were and how amazed I was that what I had seen myself doing the night before had come true. No lessons. No coaching. Just my seven-year old imagination.
Click the title to read more...
The Sixteenth Chair: A Ten-Day Retreat That Changed Pretty Much Everything
Published in Voices - American Academy of Psychotherpists, Spring 2017
It's late winter 2003. My buddy Mike-the-writer and I are sitting at the bar in Theodore's in downtown Springfield. We meet every few weeks to drink beer, eat things that will eventually kill us, talk about women, our teenage kids, our jobs teaching in college, and argue about baseball (he loves the Yankees, I love the Red Sox). For the better part of a year now Mike has been holding something back. I can feel it. Then again I've been holding something back, too. Finally the ice cracks. Mike asks me how he should go about getting divorced. (I do divorce mediations along with a small private psychotherapy practice.) I tell him what I know. He seems scared but kind of relieved. "My turn," I say....erisque enim ligula venenatis dolor. Maecenas nisl est, ultrices nec congue eget, auctor vitae massa. Fusce luctus vestibulum augue ut aliquet. Nunc sagittis dictum nisi, sed ullamcorper ipsum dignissim ac. In at libero sed nunc venenatis imperdiet sed ornare turpis. Donec vitae dui eget tellus gravida venenatis. Integer fringilla congue eros non fermentum. Sed dapibus pulvinar nibh tempor porta.
Click the title to read more...