I was lucky to have Mark Strand, Pulitzer Winning Poet Laureate, as a neighbor, who summed up the flight to freedom and the pining for what was lost in finding it when he said he had written Keeping Things Whole in Twenty Seconds. ​“When I walk/I part the air/and always/the air moves in/to fill the spaces/where my body’s been. We all have reasons/for moving, I move/to keep things whole.”

I was lucky to have a life filled with people who chose just the right words to write poems and stories and books that crept deep into my head and my heart and led me to stop, breath, think and discover things I did not know about myself or the world before I read what they had written. 

I was lucky that Ben & Julia had a teacher who used to say there is always time for a poem. Yes, his word inspired the title of this story. I thank him for that and for bringing poetry to my children and for both of them being the people they are, willing to dive in and let the poetry take them where it wanted them to go. What a tremendous gift.