are you there, dog? It's me, kerensa

    There is a moment in Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams when Doc Graham abandons his dream of playing baseball to walk across the border of heaven and earth to save someone's life. It may be THE moment in the movie, although my son argues that the true moment is when Ray's dad agrees to play a catch. Either way, I leak like a sieve throughout the movie, a timeless film about nostalgia and dreams, and a little about reconciling the losses we have endured.     I was five when I decided to become a doctor. There wasn't a moment of wavering from the time my sister was meant to be born in our two bedroom apartment to a midwife (with me watching). Not throughout elementary school, when my friends wanted to be MTV VJs or famous actresses. Not in high school, when I spent every spare moment writing poems and essays and novellas, when my mother urged me to be a writer, to be the next SE Hinton, as if there could be such a thing. And not in college, when I took eighteen cred...

Last year, I became disenchanted, or perhaps I should say more disenchanted with our political system. Looking around me, I found thousands of people willing to bitch and none willing to do anything about it, and I made a pact with myself that I would no longer give myself free rein to complain unless I also followed through on a plan to change things. I ran for office, and in the year it took to fill out petitions, to design signs and placards and write speeches and attend meetings, in the year of raising money and taking abuse, and worrying about my family, and feeling defeated, I felt like I put a check mark next to the box that said "do something".       And now, I have to once again put my figurative money where my mouth is, because my complaints and grievances are drowning out my reason and my motivation.       I joined Facebook about twelve or so years ago. Once a Myspace fan, it took me a bit to get used to the new platform, and I missed being abl...

It was the summer of 1986 when Micah Allen told me he needed to show me a movie that would change my whole life. I was nine years old, and it was before the days of being able to afford a VCR, when going to the theaters to see a movie was an extravagance done once in a blue moon (except the Hollywood DriveIn, which would allow a clown car in for a mere $5). We sat in his sunroom, me on a bean bag, he on the floor and watched The Breakfast Club without pausing. When the credits rolled, I was lost in a way I would only be a handful of other times in my youth. It was the first time I had ever seen someone write childhood as if we were all being seen. Even as a fourth grader, those common themes were beginning to run rampant, and we had all begun to wear either an invisibility cloak or one of potent popularity.   I walked home that early evening in a heightened sense of reality. Thirty four years ago and I can still remember what the neighbor's lilac bushes smelled like as I took t...