Joan Bauer's Blog

Put down your load.  If it's anything like mine,

It's all the gifts you need to buy,

all the cards you should have written,  

all the cookies you've consumed 

all the things you meant to do.  

Put them down.  It's okay.  

Come closer to Christmas

Put down your guilt about not being perfect

and getting sucked into the hype 

that siphons out the joy.  

The more you buy the more you save.

Not exactly -- the more you buy the more you buy.

Just for a minute let that go.  

Come closer to...

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Philadelphia. Spring, 2007. I stood in the bath center of a large department store -- I don't remember which one. I'd been given an important shopping task, one I was not suited for. My mission was to buy a shower curtain and towels for my father-in-law's new bathroom. This might not sound like a big deal, but you have to understand, my father-in-law, E. Steven Bauer, was a very big deal. He was a retired pharmaceutical executive, a pharmacist, a man who led the team that brought the first...

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My dog Max is terrified of garbage trucks. No matter what I do -- talk soothingly, give him his favorite treats, put him in another room of the house -- he acts as though the Evil Death Star has come to suck him into it's atmosphere.  

I got a book about calming dogs' fears, and one of the things it mentioned was yawning. Seriously. Dogs yawn sometimes when they are trying to calm themselves, so the books suggests that we humans yawn when our dogs are nervous.  This is supposed to show the...

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When I was in school, I wrote all the time -- short stories, essays, poetry, songs, greeting cards. I had a few poems published in my high school literary journal. I was on fire with the love of writing. Over the years, sometimes that fire has gone out. It's usually when I'm too busy or too stressed to remember that I love what I do. Deadline pressure can kill the flame, wanting more to happen than is realistic always drops me in a sinkhole. But here's what I've learned.

    To be a writer of...

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I imagine in my mind a play that asks two questions: The first, Where were you on September 11, 2001? And from every part of the theater, people young and old answer. I was in school. I was just getting out of the shower. I was landing at O'Hare. I was going to work. I was so little I don't remember. I was buying coffee and a croissant. I was getting my teeth cleaned. I was there at the World Trade Center. And then comes the second question: Where are you now as the 8th anniversary draws...

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I remember a walk I took when my family and I lived in Connecticut. I had a great deal on my mind that day and I was trying to think through what seemed like a hundred things on that walk, and being a multi-tasker, I was also determined to do this while achieving a full aerobic workout. I was pumping my arms back and forth and picking up speed as I walked. I was not looking around, or down, or thinking about the weather when I heard: "Look up."  I don't like stopping when I've hit the A zone...

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My daughter Jean called the other day and said, "Mom, I have a metaphor for you." Instantly, my writer's heart was stirred because Jean doesn't mess around when it comes to a metaphor. She and her husband had just been to an exhibition of Japanese ceramics in D.C. where she learned of the "golden seams," a special method created by Japanese craftsmen to mend cracked ceramics. Instead of trying to match the color of the pot to make the crack less visible, they decided to flaunt the flaw by repair

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I was walking through the playground near my house when it beckoned to me. The swing, that is. I was never a climbing across monkey bars kind of kid, but a swing was one of life's great inventions. I looked around -- I was alone. I walked to the swing, plopped down and pushed off, slowly at first. But it didn't take long before I was stretching my legs to get maximum height and throwing back my head to feel the freedom of it all. I felt ageless, weightless, fully energized, and so happy. A woman

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A few birds are singing in my yard and I'm thinking, easy for you to chirp away -- have you seen the headlines? My yard is covered with snow from our big storm. I've got work to do to get ready for spring and I don't much feel like it. I had big dreams for my garden this year -- I was going to bring in a landscaper and get an arbor built. With the economy, that's not going to happen. For a minute I think nasty thoughts about greedy bankers and how we're all paying for the monumental money mess t

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Max my dog is licking my hand like it's a popsicle, particularly interested in my engagement ring -- it belonged to my husband's grandmother. I had to take the ring off when I had neurosurgery over twenty years ago after a man in a Volvo station wagon rammed into my car, injuring my neck and back. I remember the fear rumbling through me when I handed my husband the ring. I remember being wheeled down the hospital hall with Evan walking next to me. It was our seventh wedding anniversary and we we

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