Of course, I’m hoping for “good” comments, ones that show that what I’ve written has touched the reader or ones that open the door for constructive dialogue. I’ve always believed that I would be able to weather getting negative comments if they, too, were constructive and not left by some anonymous ranting hate-monger. Then, this morning, someone left a negative comment that made me cringe and filled me with doubt. The poster was not anonymous. He was not ranting. This was the second comment he had left on this particular piece, and, being a writer, I had already parsed his initial comment and understood that he had decided I was not a nice person. That hurt.

I reread my post, and understood why he believed as he did.

I thought of responding to the comment, saying, “Wait, you’re wrong. I am a nice person. Here’s why. Here’s what you didn’t understand about what I wrote.” Wouldn’t that have been self-serving.

In the end, I didn’t respond because I didn’t want to justify what I had written and start a back-and-forth, probably nasty, string of comments. The internet is already too full of those.

This morning, when I read the second comment left by the reader, I rethought my decision not to respond to his first comment. But then he deleted his second comment. I still have it though since an email containing it was generated when he posted it. He was angry and the comment was personal, taking issue with my writing and with me as a person. Maybe that’s why he changed his mind about posting it.

The “nicest” part of the comment called my post “poorly written” and “poorly thought-out.” The nastiest part attacked me personally, not my writing.

I can’t control what readers think of me, though it hurts when I discover they dislike me. But I can control whether my writing is “poorly written and poorly thought out.”

My not-so-tough skin

In the future, before I hit publish I need to do two things: revise, revise, revise and make sure what I am writing is honest, clear and the best it can be.

And secondly, I need to develop a thicker skin.

If I can’t do both, then I shouldn’t be writing publicly.

I don’t have to answer that question often unless I go into Philly or travel to another city. When I’m confronted with someone begging for money, my answer is usually a quick “No.” And I keep on moving.

I don’t like striding past someone who is begging, avoiding eye-contact. Here is a person asking me for help. I could afford to give away a few dollars. But I suspect my money will just go toward drugs or alcohol. And sometimes I’m afraid because the person looks dangerous.

How do you find the balance between compassion and caution, between wanting to help and worrying that you are only making a problem, like addiction, worse or are putting yourself in danger (If I pull out my wallet will I be robbed)?

I could spare the change, but I don’t.

I’m thinking about this because last week my son texted me that he had given money to a beggar and later regretted it. As he said, “Afterwards, I realized she’s probably not going to use it for what she said she would.”

He’s a compassionate soul, and this isn’t the first time this has happened to him. I want him to retain that compassion, but I also want him to be wise about money and to stay safe.

Being a modern parent, I searched the Internet for help, typing “Should you give money to a beggar or homeless person?” into Google’s search box. (Because, as everyone knows, the Internet is the source of all wisdom.) I had hoped to find answers from organizations that work with the homeless or provide services to the poor, but at first all I came up with were links to Yahoo Answers (the armpit of web answer sites).

Finally, I found three articles that approached the subject with intelligence:

From The Atlantic: “The short answer is no. The long answer is yes, but only if you work for an organization that can ensure the money is spent wisely.”

From The University of Oxford: Practical Ethics Blog: “ If you give money to beggars, you almost certainly spend your welfare budget helping the wrong people.”

And, finally, from a woman who used to be homeless, came this admonition:  “If you are struggling with the question of whether to give money to a homeless person because you’re worried they will spend it on drugs … then don’t give. It is as simple as that. No one has forced you to give money, but if you do decide to give you have no right to judge.”

My son has to decide for himself what he’ll do the next time a beggar approaches him.
If he lived in Ottawa, he could put his money in a Kindness Meter, but I have hard time imagining those popping up on the streets of Philadelphia.

What do you think? What do you do when a stranger begs you for money?

“A lot of babies don’t even know what books are these days,” she said. “They don’t know how to turn the pages. They try to swipe and …” She shrugged.

“That’s really sad,” I replied.

Before you begin stoning me with comments along the lines of “Times change. Get with the program, lady,” you need to realize that if my children were still young, I’d let them play with whatever tablet or reader I happened to own. I’d download apps and eBooks and be delighted when they took to the device quicker than I had. If I were spending hours at a gymnastics meet trapped on a hard bleacher holding my ten month old daughter, trying to keep her entertained, I’d whip out my iPad before the baby had a chance to squeal.

I get it.

When my children were young, and we were out and about, I carried a VERY large bag crammed with books, toys, stuffed animals, diapers, juice boxes, Cheerios, wipes, tissues, changes of clothing, and good Lord was it heavy. How much nicer just to throw an electronic device in a bag, leave the books and toys at home, and lighten the load.

The thing is, those books did more than entertain and enlighten. They also provided my children and me with special one-on-one time. When they read or played with books, Laura and Zach had a favorite place to do it: on my lap. They pointed to pictures and asked me questions. I read the text using multiple voices, because everyone knows a Tyrannosaurus has a deep scary roar, and an Apatosaurus growls in gentle tones, and “The Muffin Man” must be sung, not spoken.

My children commanded me to “Read it again, Mommy,” over and over. The most-loved books at times required emergency medical care (scotch tape for tears, packaging or duct tape for spines that had heaved apart), and even if they had lost their brand-new shiny beauty the books were still cherished.

One of the joys of children’s books is that the experience they deliver can be different every time. They’re not pre-programmed. “The Big Book of Dinosaurs” taught my children the names of those amazing creatures, but it also taught them colors — ”Look this dinosaur is blue!” —and how to count — ”How many spines does the Triceratops have?”

I’ve saved many of my children’s favorite books and, someday, if they have children of their own, those books will be ready to be shared. We’ll blow the dust off the top of the pages and open the covers, and all the old familiar characters will come to life again. I hope someone grabs a book and climbs right up on my lap.

eBooks are here to stay, and they offer certain rewards, chief among them portability. So take them on the road, but keep some real, physical, books at home. Those have their own rewards, too.

The most memorable moments in your life aren’t always the ones you think they’ll be.

Sometime in 2000, I took my children to see a movie. We were sitting through umpteen trailers when an image of a mountain pass appeared and crossing it, single file, there they were: characters I knew so well but had never expected to see on film: the Fellowship of the Ring. I practically leapt out of my seat (actually, I may have). I gasped (actually, it may have been more of a squeal) and shouted something along the lines of: “Oh, my God. It’s the Lord of the Rings. Laura! Zach! Look — it’s the Lord of the Rings. There are the hobbits and Aragorn and … Oh my God, they’re making a movie of the Lord of the Rings …”

You wouldn’t believe how excited I was. I couldn’t believe how excited I was. My children couldn’t believe how excited I was.

I still remember this moment as clearly as if it happened this morning (though I have completely forgotten what movie we saw that day).

I had loved Middle Earth since the day my sixth grade teacher had read aloud these words: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” And now it was coming to life on the big screen.

Back home at Messy Hollow, I pulled my original, sixth-grade, Scholastic Book Club editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings off the bookshelf and shared them with my children. I explained how Tolkien had invented an entire world with different races and fantastical creatures and had created languages and a history for his characters so you could go back to the beginning of Middle Earth and understand how the events in his stories came to be. I started reading The Hobbit (for the umpteenth time).

Happily, my enthusiasm was infectious, and my children developed a fondness for Tolkien’s stories, my son more so than my daughter. We watched the movies together, discussed the books, listened to Howard Shore’s soundtrack, played Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit and Lord of the Rings Stratego. We own Lord of the Rings Lego sets. And, of course, the deluxe extended edition of the movie trilogy.

We own several copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as various books about Middle Earth.

We’ve seen The Fellowship of the Ring at Radio City Music Hall with live music: an orchestra and a choir performed while the movie played.

When he was in fifth grade, my son created the most amazing diorama of Smaug sitting atop a mountain of jewels. He used iridescent green paint and gave the dragon a long tail and individual scales and glued jewels of all shapes and colors on the dragon’s breast (I MAY have helped a little with this complicated project).

And later that same year, for a pottery project, he made me a statue of Frodo. The hobbit is dressed in blue and brown with his elven cloak flying away from his body as if a stiff breeze is blowing. It’s one of my treasures.

I love that a world created by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1937 inspired a teacher to share it with her class decades later and decades after that inspired me to share it with my children. I love that it inspired Peter Jackson to create his movies and in turn create new Tolkien fans who pick up his books to discover Middle Earth. It’s a wonderful thing.

Such is the power of art.

Every year, I make the same sort of resolutions: see, and stay-in-touch with, family and friends, be more creative, pay more attention to what is important. Every year, I mostly fail at accomplishing my resolutions due to exhaustion, inertia and the things that life throws at all of us: work, chores, doctor’s appointments, tax returns, illness, the time-suck that is the Internet.

A busy work life and the need to cram chores (laundry, cleaning, appointments, shopping) into off-work time means that I might have clean underwear but I won’t visit with family.

A strong internal critic often halts my creativity, stopping me from writing because it’s a long process full of constant real-time editing and the feeling that others have already said what I am trying to say — and have done it so much better (also: see “a sense of responsibility” below).

A sense of responsibility and the belief that I should always be doing something “worthwhile” as opposed to enjoying myself are other reasons why I often don’t pay attention to what I know is really important in my life (and believe me, it’s not having freshly-vacuumed floors).

Which brings me to the chrusciki.

On Christmas Eve, my sister brought a tray of cookies to our family celebration. The next morning, my daughter held up one of those cookies, a chrusciki, and asked, “What’s this?”

I was incredulous. “What do you mean ‘what’s this?’ It’s a chrusciki.”

“What’s a chrusciki?”

And I thought, how can it be possible that I, a person of Polish heritage, raised on chrusciki, pierogies*, golumpki and cauliflower topped with brown-buttered breadcrumbs, had not introduced my children to chrusciki?

In that moment, I realized that, for me, passing on to my children some of what I had experienced as a child was important, and I had failed at that task.

Really chruscikis are more than cookies to me, they are part of a story I want to tell about my life and the things that matter most to me, like chrusciki and how my mother would cook them, and how being Polish and Irish and raised as a Catholic in northeast Philly defined me when I was growing up and shaped the person I am today.

Last night my mother, step-father, husband and I were discussing resolutions. I had a singular one: to learn to become a better photographer. But now, after meditating on the Chrusciki Incident, I resolve again to:

• spend more time with family and friends;
• strengthen and foster my creativity (write AND take photographs);
• pay attention to what is important to me — taking a long walk in Valley Forge Park with my husband, visiting a museum, spending all day reading the Sunday N.Y. Times, learning to make chrusciki.

Wish me luck.

*It’s only thanks to Mrs. T’s that my children know how wonderful pierogies are.