Jamie Janosz

I remember going to the grocery store after my dad died. I was pushing the metal shopping cart from one aisle to the next, but I wasn't really seeing anything. The world was foggy. As I pushed my cart from aisle 6 to aisle 7 to aisle 8, I eventually ran into someone, rammed my cart smack into their back. The person cried out, and I jumped back, startled. I was so in my own head, in my state of sadness and grief, that the other shopper's reaction came as a surprise. For a moment, the fog cleared. I looked up and realized where I was. A grocery store. I needed milk, and eggs, and butter. Even when my dad had just died of a massive heart attack. How do we process grief in the midst of the mundane? How does the shocking exist among the ordinary? The past three weeks we have been inundated with emotion and horror. Innocent people have been slaughtered. I feel numb, really. I heard the news of 70-something more people killed in Nice, France, and I turned the channel, swit...

    Lately, I've been living vicariously through one of my college students as she made a springtime trip to Paris. Ahhhhh....to be in Paris, again.   I love that city - I've been obsessed with it since high school French class. My friend, Cathy, and I were so Paris-crazed, that we talked her parents into inviting a foreign-exchange student to live with them. He was French, indeed, but did not live up to our teenage fantasies of the cute Parisian boy. He was averse to showers and a bit of a grouchy loner.   Just after I was married, I finally took a trip to Paris with my husband. We rode the Metro, visited the Notre Dame, and ate croissants in a cafe. Paris was everything I'd imagined and more. It was a bit gritty - a tad decadent - and so, so, so gloriously cool.   We loved the Rodin museum with its enormous front lawn and statue garden. We listened to jazz on a boat docked at the Seine. We ate anchovies on pizza in a dark alley-side cafe. W...