My sister Suzanne and I have a pact with our cousin Nancy to go snorkeling in Grand Cayman.

Our extended family used to spend Christmas there, and the three of us had a particular love of snorkeling. Our favorite spot was called The Cemetery. From the beach, you could paddle out around fifty yards or so, stick your head in the water, and right below you was a treasure trove of corals, sea anemones, and tropical fish. The water in Cayman is so warm you can stay in it for hours, which is what we did. Nancy, Suzy, and I would strap on our dorky flippers and face masks and snorkels and lose ourselves.

Our pact to return to Cayman was earnest but challenging. Nancy lives in Georgia, so we don’t see each other more than once a year or so. But every time our lives intersect, we renew our vow to get down to Cayman. It doesn’t have to be peak season, we would tell each other. We’ll eat peanut butter sandwiches and camp out on the beach, as long as we can snorkel. That’s our pact.

Suzanne and I are getting on a plane on Tuesday to see Nancy, but instead of snorkeling in Cayman, we are flying to Atlanta, where Nancy has checked herself into hospice care.

As a social worker, Nancy’s life has been about others. Her personal expectations have been modest, and her needs simple. Now even the most basic things, like time and health, are beyond her reach. And then, there’s the pact we made to go snorkeling in Cayman.

This may not be the trip we had planned, but plans have a way of changing. Pacts endure. Even though details may have fallen by the wayside, pacts, though binding, are flexible. Come to find out, pacts extend as far as the human spirit. On Tuesday, Nancy, Suzanne and I will be keeping ours.

On a run through the old neighborhood this morning, I passed our old house. One entire side has been torn down, including the garage and the laundry room we built. A massive backhoe straddled the side yard, surrounded by piles of bricks and slate. Our deck had been reduced to a heap of splintered wood.

In the center of this reconstruction carnage I saw our old basketball hoop. The massive metal pole had been folded over, the backboard and rim flattened.

I wanted to cry.

It seemed odd that with so much of our former dwelling reduced to rubble, what got to me was the basketball hoop, but suddenly, I could hear my kids’ voices in the driveway, asking us to move the Suburban out of the way. It’s not like they were particularly good at basketball, or more than whimsically interested in it beyond pick-up games or a few rounds of horse. It’s just that the hoop was there, a constant, a possible way to pass a half-hour or so on a summer evening, or kill time before dinner.

Seeing it scrunched up like that got to me, in the same way the photograph of an explosion is disturbing but what really gets you is the child’s shoe atop the rubble.

I’ve made peace with moving. Home is here; I didn’t leave it in the mountains of muck and heaped brick. Today, though, I had to face the fact that we’ve left the basketball hoop behind.

If you teach classic literature, you’re bound to run into words so outdated that kids have absolutely no idea what they mean. For example, in Of Mice and Men, “two bits” is a quarter. In Inherit the Wind, the play we’re currently reading, “galluses” are suspenders. I spend what feels like a fair amount of time translating these arcane words so the  kids can make passing sense of what they’re reading. Occasionally, over time some of these words have developed double meanings, like gay and boob, both words we have encountered in our books. These double entendres inevitably spark waves of laughter that can take the better part of a class period to quell.

In today’s reading, we came across a reference to an organ grinder.

“What’s an organ grinder?” asked one of the saucier seventh graders, and everyone started to giggle. It wasn’t until that moment that I heard the possible double meaning. I put on my English teacher game face and launched into an earnest explanation, but I was not able to stem the tide of middle school smutty hilarity. I gave up. Why would I trip over words like organ and grinder on my way to describing something with absolutely no modern application? Organ grinders had gone the way of the sideshow and the nickelodeon, and no, not that Nickelodeon. I think it’s safe to say that unlike the fedora, the organ grinder has passed beyond any possible resurgence into coolness.

This is what you do when someone born in 1999 asks you what an organ grinder is in front of a class of his giggling peers. You look at him and say “Google it when you get home.” Then, if you’re anything like me, it won’t hit you until later that in terms of inappropriate double meanings, internet searches are infinitely worse than seventh graders.

I get cabin fever in the winter. It’s kind of a problem, actually, so I decided to go to yoga this morning in a last-ditch effort to shift my mood in a more positive direction.

Getting out of the house was helpful, and stretching was also helpful, but one of the meditations proved to be the most helpful thing of all. An interesting thing about yoga is to deepen poses without injury requires you to stop trying. It is about finding inner silence, softness and stillness. It’s a distinct break from real life, which drives you to be noisy, tough, and full of momentum.

The snow I spent the better part of the weekend bitching about prevented me from engaging in my usual activities. I was still feeling frustrated when my yoga teacher told us to mediate on the nature of positive change, which sounded like something I could use. She went on to say that struggling and fighting doesn’t create change, surrender does. This started me thinking, what if I abandon all the sound and fury, and surrender to winter? It seemed worth trying, or more to the point, not trying.

In a matter of hours, I may be climbing the walls, because when it comes to cabin fever, relapse is virtually inevitable. But in this moment, I’m okay with everything, the snow, the cold, the knowing that I will forget this lesson, and most of all, knowing I will get to learn it all over again on some other snowy day.

            We belong to the New Haven Lawn Club, which sounds hoity toity but for us, more than anything, it’s just a convenient place to go to the gym. Most of the members are perfectly nice people, but there are some exceptions. One woman I have grown to loathe wears a floor-length mink coat to the gym, and has a frightening penchant for bright orange lipstick. She also has a habit of braying, instead of speaking in a normal voice, and always seems to be expounding on pretentious things like privacy hedges and how to cook a leg of lamb. The net effect is obnoxiousness, which is forgivable, but my last straw issue with her was something she said about her teenage daughter. The daughter was next to me, sweating away on an elliptical machine, when fur coat woman leaned toward me and brayed, “She will never lose those tree trunk hips and thighs. She’s built like a sturdy Russian peasant.” My horror was compounded when I found out that she had, in fact, adopted her daughter from Russia.

            Yesterday, I was at the gym, talking to my friend Bernie, who happens to be the head of maintenance. Our sons grew up together. Tragically, several of the boys in their grammar school posse got into drugs in their early twenties and died of overdoses.

            “Crazy,” Bernie said, “to think that three or four of those kids are just gone.”

            “I know,” I replied. “Who would have ever imagined it, watching them growing up?” That’s when I noticed fur coat lady hovering nearby.

            “Laura, do you mind if I interject?”

            “Not at all.” I assumed she was about to tell us how drugs had infiltrated the nearby elite prep school, but she turned to Bernie. “Those old fashioned florescent bulbs in the upstairs ladies’ room are so unflattering,” she said. “I would like them replaced with something less harsh. I see myself in the mirror under those lights and I just want to shoot myself.”

            Just hand me the gun, and I’ll do it for you, I thought. Here we were, talking about something so personal and tragic, and this is what couldn’t wait? What massive self-absorption! I wasted no time in adding it to the list of transgressions- the ostentatious fur coat, the bray, what she said about her daughter, who by the way is now at boarding school, thank god. It took me a few hours to calm down enough to realize that maybe I was overreacting.

            An uncomfortable memory surfaced of a time when I was working at a convalescent home as a housekeeper. I was emptying wastebaskets. I went into a patient’s room to get hers, but the door seemed to be jammed. I pushed against it, and a woman poked her head out. I told her I needed the wastebasket. She said it wasn’t a good time. I told her it would just take a second. She repeated it wasn’t a good time, and if I had taken a moment to examine social cues, such as the woman’s tears, I would have proceeded to the next room. But I had a schedule to keep, so instead, I insisted I needed to get the wastebasket, which was when a nurse whispered in my ear that the patient had died during the night. The woman was waiting for the coroner to take her mother’s body.

            I’m sure this woman thought I was the most horribly insensitive person alive, but really what it came down to were obliviousness and bad timing. And while I can find her lipstick appalling, her voice grating, and what she said about her daughter unforgivably cruel, fur coat lady’s interruption could well be attributed to the same two things.

            It hit me that fur coat lady and I have something else in common; today, we were both making an effort to cast her in a better light.

Over the years, I have tried to find some reason to not detest winter. Sports involving gravity and zero traction, like skiing, are a bad fit for a person who recently managed to break her ankle walking across the street. For indoor sports, there’s squash, an irrational pairing of a coffin-sized space and a long-handled racquet. Snow is aesthetically attractive for around four minutes, but sooner or later shoveling is required, and those cozy woolly hats, scarves and mittens one customarily dons while performing this task, when damp, smell like a dog’s butt. Add to this my chronic nose drip, an enduring tribute to my modeling career in the late 70s, I find myself envious of any animal that hibernates. Then, I remembered hot chocolate.

To most, hot chocolate is just a drink, but I believe there‘s a certain nobility to a beverage that single-handedly makes bearable the burden of winter. Add mini marshmallows, and hope, meet your metaphor.

My posts can be snarky when it comes to my job. Teaching is often exhausting and frustrating, and for me, snark is the go-to hedge against despair. But as snide and nasty as I get about the stuff that happens in school, the snark stops when it comes to the kids themselves.

The truth is, I love my middle schoolers.

I realize it’s not even remotely normal to dote on these awkward specimens, with their raging hormones and lack of impulse control. They clutch you with one hand while flipping you the bird with the other. They forget their homework and make up ridiculous excuses, leave messes, incubate pimples and revere media whores. They use too much deodorant or worse, not enough. But they are who they are, unremittingly so; raw and open and malleable. They act tough, but really, they are just posturing bundles of tender, exposed nerve endings wrapped in Northface fleece. Being with them is a déjà vu nightmare of my own middle school days, amplified down the corridors of time.

I know I can’t advise them on how best to survive the purgatory that is adolescence. It’s a uniquely painful journey that I watch them struggle through every day. They aren’t interested in navigational advice, anyway, much less the rules of grammar. They would, however, like the occasional soft cushion for the ride, which is where I come in.

The seventh graders are working on their term papers. The topic is altruism, and whether it is innate or acquired. I made them look up the word, then brainstorm examples of altruists from real life, past or present. I gave them a couple of people I thought served as good examples of altruism: Mother Theresa and Gandhi.

“No fair. You took the only two I could think of,” one student whined.

“There are lots of altruists. How about people you know? An altruist doesn’t have to be famous. It just has to be a person who consistently puts others before him or herself.”

“I don’t know anyone like that,” he said.

“I’m sure you do. Just think. A family member. A coach.” I smiled at him. “A teacher.”

He stared at me and shook his head. “Nope.”

“Come on,” I coaxed. “You mean to tell me there is not one giving, kind, unselfish person in your life?”

Again, he looked at me and shook his head, and I was forced to acknowledge that my sudden urge to smack the ungrateful little shit probably took me out of the running.

Here, little Eliza, Rachael, and Sarah recreate their gestational positions. Happy 23^rd birthday to the amazing trio who took our family from modest to extraordinary in under three minutes.

I was complaining to my son Jake about how many mediocre books are not merely published, but land at the top of The New York Times Bestseller list or get to wear a Pulitzer Prize sticker on their front covers. As a fellow writer and a person to whom I gave birth, I thought he’d sympathize with my whining, but instead he pointed out that artists of every persuasion cannot control fate’s fickle hand. The most extraordinarily innovative musician might, at this very moment, be jamming with some crack heads under a highway overpass in Austin, never to find a record label; the most brilliant artist might be in a remote African village, rendering a mud painting on the wall of his hut, which will soon be burned to the ground in a military coup.

I suspect Jake is right. Just because you’re genuinely good at whatever you do doesn’t mean you rise to the top, much less catch a break. The luck of the draw almost always trumps talent, and while it might not seem fair, I have to acknowledge that sometimes, in some things, luck has definitely worked in my favor. And maybe, just maybe, the only thing more tragic than the artist who ceaselessly labors on her/his craft, only to die in obscurity, is the artist who throws in the towel because obscurity feels like an indictment, as opposed to the crap shoot it actually is.

It makes me think that instead of wondering if I have what it takes to be a successful writer, I should be hoping I possess what it takes to be an unsuccessful one.