Books by W.S. Simons

June 25, 2025 Court Abandons Trans Youth

Apr 30, 2025 God in schools

Feb 5, 2025 Arctic Blast Daydreams

Oct 11, 2023 Tenacity of Spirit 

Dec 27, 2023 Insurance Against Regret

Mar 13, 2024 Letting go of Expectation 

Jun 5, 2024 Pursuit of Happiness 

Jul 24, 2024 Life without Mirrors

Aug 28, 2024 Women without Children

Nov 20, 2024 Have Courage. Be kind.

Dec 27, 2023 Insurance Against Regret

Well, another year is closing out and a new one approaches fast. Like many people, I get reflective during transitions. Taking stock, I find myself pondering far beyond the last twelve months to all that came before. While it is easy to get caught up in the things I’ve done wrong along the way, I try to focus on what I got right. One thing in particular stands out to me as something I’ve decided to call insurance against regret, that thing we do now that will serve to make us happier, better humans later.

When I was in my early thirties, I packed my minivan with camping gear and my dog, collected my father from the airport in Long Beach, California, and we hit the road. It was originally meant to be a break from freelancing in Los Angeles; a solitary exploration of the southwest; a time to draw, photograph, paint, and hopefully reconnect to the artist I had once been before making a living took priority. When I told my parents about my plan, my father asked to come along. I said no. 

To that point in time, I saw my father as emotionally distant and highly judgmental. A sarcastic man, his keen observations were often more caustic than humorous. Like paper cuts, they took time to heal. He was a man of rigidity, a pragmatist. He needed plans, taking into account all possible scenarios, insisting on arriving early for everything. Our camping trips when I was a kid were fun, perhaps because of his organizational tenacity. This trip – my trip – was to be on my terms, which is to say, the plan was to have no plan. 

“You set the ground rules,” he said when he called asking me to reconsider. Presuming he’d beg off, I gave him a set of directives that sound cold now, but at the time were simply an expression of intent: No sarcasm. No judgments. No schedule. If at any time I find you in my way, in my head, running the show, you’re on the first bus, train or plane back home. There was no doubt on either of our parts I would follow through with the threat. He agreed. Without hesitation. 

Before we left, my mother asked how long we’d be gone. His answer: We’ll be back when we’re back. 

I no longer knew this man. 

“I didn’t have enough fun with you kids,” he said over morning coffee in Joshua Tree National Park. He said the responsibility of raising a family wore him

thin and his behavior was driven by fear. In Bisbee Arizona he told me about the importance of AA meetings, as if I knew he was an alcoholic. I didn’t. He didn’t drink. That’s all I knew. He said he stopped when my mother was pregnant with me, and soon found it difficult being with friends who let off steam by throwing back a few beers and cocktails when he couldn’t. 

“Do you still miss it?” I asked. 

“Every day.” 

A storm blew us out of Guadalupe National Park at five in the morning. Over breakfast at a roadside diner, he told me about being a boy during prohibition, riding through St. Joe in his uncle’s big expensive car when they were pulled over by police with guns drawn. One of Al Capone’s men had recently shot a local cop over a busted taillight. A search of the uncle’s car came up empty. That boy, however, never forgot the thrill. 

In Port Aransas, Texas, I heard about his parents moving the family to Florida to open an appliance store. He was four that year and six when a hurricane displaced their house. A year later, the Great Depression shuttered the store and shattered his father’s dreams. They moved back to St. Joe and spent the next several years living in his grandparents’ State Street house with extended family. My grandfather never recovered and I suspect some remnant of that defeat lived within my father as well. Given the opportunity to move to California after World War II, he and my mother opted to stay put. 

How then could he understand my untethered life, never in one place longer than five years, bouncing from one coast to another, walking away from job after job? I could never tell if he was disappointed in me or jealous of my freedom. 

We spent three and a half weeks meandering our way to North Carolina where I once lived. Every day on the road, stories spilled from the man I was only beginning to know. I wonder now, given a different upbringing, if my father might have become a writer, like his older sister who died with a stack of unpublished manuscripts on the floor of her closet. 

I can’t help but think about the future created in the wake of our travels. Most of the understandings we came to in the years afterward were forged in the high desert, low bayous, and on countless miles of back roads across this country. Without that experience, I don’t know that we would have ever come to terms with our differences. 

When I was thirty-four, I went looking for things to sketch and thanks to my father, came home with an experience I would draw upon for the rest of my life.

Mar 13, 2024 Letting go of Expectation 

Years ago, I listened to an interview with a woman whose mother had dementia. It broke her heart that her mom no longer recognized her. Once she decided not to try to break through anymore, their visits got much better. She approached her mother as a stranger, introducing herself with whatever name she chose on the day. Her mother had always been chatty, and though her thoughts were scattered and her words confused, she shared random snippets of her life with this would-be-stranger sitting next to her. The daughter, hearing some of the stories for the first time, a few of them about herself, simply listened, unencumbered by expectation or mother-daughter baggage. It wasn’t about being recognized anymore. It was simply about spending time together. 

My friend Ron was 75 when he began losing touch with anything outside his own reality. A stout man, his head and face were shaved gray stubble, and he had the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. When I met him back in 1985 at a summer arts program in Cortona, Italy, he was an art teacher and prolific painter. I was surprised to meet a fellow Berrien County native so far from home. We became fast friends. 

The way Ron used color always amazed me, so bright and bold. Yet in 2019, as his mind faded, so did the colors. His attempts to paint or even draw turned everything to mud. He began to carry his colored pencils around with him but couldn’t remember what to do with them.

His decline had been so gradual, and his normal personality so flighty, I hadn’t realized he was in serious trouble until mid-summer when I drove him an hour away to visit an old friend. She insisted we go to lunch and was upset when he couldn’t figure out how to order. It was frustrating for her when he didn’t commiserate with her complaints of ill-health, not realizing he had no idea what she was saying. She hollered at him when he put a meatball in his salad. She wanted the old Ron, her friend of fifty years, and could not accept he was out of reach. It was the last time they would see each other. 

Driving home afterward, Ron hummed random incongruent notes in the seat next to me, his eyes glazed. I thought about the woman who had the mother with dementia, how she changed her perception of the situation to improve it. I can’t know what made Ron’s old friend try so hard to make him behave to her expectations. All I know was that it made all of us miserable and he shut down. After that, I made our visits all about being in whatever moment he allowed. 

Just before the Polar Vortex hit that winter, I took a hot lunch to him as I did often over the course of several weeks while his family waited for an opening in a nursing home. He still lived alone, a situation becoming more precarious as weeks went on. You’re a good cook, he said as I put a plate of food in front of him. He looked up with eager eyes. I have something for you, he said, and rose, walked around the kitchen peninsula and returned to his chair, confused. I took a bite of meatloaf. He ate some potato. 

I pointed to a painting on the wall, asking if it was from Cortona, knowing it was. My words registered enough that a name flew up and out. Richiardi, he said. Alice, I answered, surprised the name came to me. We dined at her Italian villa twice in ’85 and the two of them corresponded for years. 

He waved his hands like batting all the wrong words out of the way, finally looking outside to the snow piled high against the sliding glass door. Lots of meatloaf, he said of the snow. I agreed with him as if he made sense, thinking I’d like that if my mind was a sieve. The vacancy of his eyes led me to think he was somewhere else, either drawing a landscape in Tuscany or just drifting with the snow outside.  

I talked about our studios in Cortona and Tonino’s where we ate lunch and dinner. He grinned, then frowned, saying he wanted to go back. But we made the most of that summer, don’t you think, I said, and he was happy again. 

He stood up. I have something for you, he said with a grin. By the time he stepped into the hallway, the thought was gone again. I reminded him we were eating lunch. He sat back down and began humming I Feel Pretty from West Side Story. I started to sing and he joined in, words coming to him from some deep vault. We were loud, joyous, flamboyant. 

A cascade of disjointed words spilled out of him, his hands, as always, speaking their own awkward language. Everybody, he said, squeezing through that thing. That I knew what he meant still amazes me. The arch, I said. YES! John Kehoe, he shouted, pulling another name from thirty-odd years earlier. Kehoe was director of the program and our weekends were spent touring Tuscan towns in a bus that barely squeezed through the narrow arch in Cortona’s stone wall.

Yet again, he said with eager eyes, I have something for you. This time, he got up and returned with his journal from that summer, and like we had each visit for weeks, we leafed through his drawings and I read aloud from it. Something about that summer became a touchstone in both our lives, yet, for him, all the intervening years had evaporated.

Like crumbs, I swept up the memories as they fell from his lap. I etched images on my heart of his home, the walls filled with paintings, all of Italy, his books and photos, and his basement studio, so organized. 

I don’t think I can stay here much longer, he whispered to me. It was like the cognizant Ron was still in there trying to make contact. It nearly broke my heart, but made what would happen the next day easier to accept. They’d found a place for him in a memory care unit.  

I had to laugh when I heard he led the dining room in song his first night there, still eager, still smiling. There would be sad days ahead, what would become an ever more difficult exercise in letting go of expectation and attempting to live in the moment. 

My time with my friend Ron, on our best days as well as his worst, taught me to grab the smiles when I could. As it turns out, that’s not a bad way to live every day.

Jun 5 2024 Pursuit of Happiness

Faced with an empty page this morning, I’m thinking about the beginning of my adulting years, in my twenties, when I had life all mapped out. I saw with such clarity how it would unfold. It took a couple years of reality to see the fallacy of that approach. Little of what I expected came to be and I think it took a decade or two to come to terms with the disappointments. Expectations for my generation, the boomers, were perhaps unrealistically high.

Humans, however, are adaptive creatures. If we’re lucky, we come through life’s trials and punishments stronger. We learn how to plow through any pain with the blind faith that somewhere in the next week, month or year, we will be able to breathe easier. We will be able to love better. Help more. Focus on something outside of ourselves. Maybe even be happy.

Happiness. Now there’s a word that carries a heavy load. Our Constitution endows us with the right to pursue it, but doesn’t guarantee we’ll achieve it. Whether we make our own happiness or find it is a matter for philosophers and psychologists. I find it in my dog’s howl when a train goes by, or in rain on a hot day or snow on Thanksgiving, or when an old friend texts out of nowhere, a connection rekindled. But happiness, that feeling that lifts us above the fray, is transient. It isn’t the robin that hangs out in the yard all summer. It’s the warbler that shows up for a minute or two in the spring and if we’re observant enough, we notice it. Aristotle took the opposite approach. He believed happiness is not short-lived, but achieved at the end of life. It’s a goal, not a temporary state of being.  

My grandmother grew up on a farm without indoor plumbing. Her father died when she was young. She married and raised three kids during the Great Depression. She almost lost her son in World War II to pneumonia, traveling to the Great Lakes Naval Station to sit bedside. She outlived a daughter, a grandson, a husband and all of her friends. Yet, I never heard her complain. She told me there will always be war somewhere; there will always be disappointments great and small and each generation will undoubtably know overwhelming fear. Pushing 90, she told me she’d wanted to be a photographer. Of all she’d been through, that was one of her life’s bigger disappointments. While unattained ambition still haunted her, she said she hadn’t been raised with an expectation of happiness. Not so for the ensuing generations.

A typesetter I knew when I was just starting my career, a man I’m guessing was in his forties, told me he wouldn’t be my age again for anything. He said twenty-four was too full of angst, expectation, energy and craving. He said he’d take contentment any day. He liked knowing what was what. I felt sorry for him, as I’m sure he did for me. Yet I think he probably found something to be happy about every day, whereas I was too crazed much of the time, and far too ambitious to accept anything as mediocre as contentment. 

Finding what it is that brings happiness can be both a lifelong pursuit and a daily aspiration. One is much easier to attain than the other. Long term, I suppose it lies in a life well-lived. Short term, it’s looking to the small stuff, like smiling at a stranger on the street or appreciating the simple pleasure of a good night’s sleep. For me, it could be as mundane as making a list of things to do and checking off even half of them. Writing a thank you note might make me think of my mom and her mom, a nice feeling. Still, I am left wondering if there should be more to this happiness thing we’re so privileged as a country to pursue. Maybe the pursuit itself is what the founders saw as the ultimate freedom.

Since the Covid lockdown, we’ve all heard or read about revelations and life lessons drawn from the experience. All of us carry something from it, profound or otherwise. Personally, it made me change gears. I was a planner.  I made one plan after another. So long as I was planning, it felt like I was doing. But all I was really doing was procrastinating. When the world stopped, and health & safety were no longer as easily taken for granted, I wondered why I’d been such a coward to not have pursued my ambitions with greater intent. I come from people who left Ireland in the 1600s, boarded a wooden ship and crossed an ocean to come to a strange new world in pursuit of a better life. If I had even a drop of their blood in my marrow, I should be able to stop planning and start doing. What was I waiting for?

Somewhere in 2021, I began to take the pursuit of happiness more seriously. I chose to ignore doubt and believe in possibility. I took risks. I’d heard a phrase about procrastination for years before it began to register as a clarion call: If not now, when? So far, it’s working out. I’m not done yet!

Jul 24 Life without Mirrors

When one gets to be a certain age, there is a degree of distress when they pass a mirror and unexpectedly catch a glimpse of a long past grandparent rather than themself.  I have experienced this and have heard I am not alone in its discomfort. Don’t get me wrong here. This is not a case of dysmorphia, distress over a perceived flaw in my appearance. It’s that seeing my sagging face often comes as a surprise to me, as if for the entire day I have forgotten to take into account my advancing age. If you’re young, this forgetting is easier than you may think. All the old people you pass on the street aren’t going around thinking they’re old any more than you’re preoccupied with how young you are, something I have no doubt you’re taking for granted . . . as I once did.

More often than not, it takes a twinge in my back or a catch in my step to remind me I have more than a few decades under my belt. But the rest of the time, when I’m daydreaming, cooking, walking the beach, just going about my day, I am ageless. Pondering a garden project that could involve paving stones, lifting and transplanting three-quarters of the flower bed and building a wisteria arbor, I think as I did in my fifties: I’ll be able to pull it off without too much effort. I’ll Buy the 4X6 lumber, concrete, pea gravel, 2X4 braces, lattice, a dozen bags of new soil and mulch, and a couple dozen pots of new perennials. I figure it will take three or four days tops to accomplish the task. Then, I walk by a mirror and reality slaps me upside the head. I am reminded my stamina, let alone my core strength, isn’t exactly what it once was. That particular project won’t get done unless I pay someone to do it. That’s when I decide the garden is just fine in its untended wildness. In fact, I prefer having mother nature and the squirrels rearrange things. The pink Menarda seems to have moved to the raised bed this year and looks quite spectacular. 

It seems logical to me that if I’m thinking about what I did in my twenties or thirties, I’d be reminded of the passing years and feel old, yet the opposite is true. I catch myself wondering where I’ll go next, what new adventure awaits, and I feel young. I still have the sense that anything is possible. Yet there is a voice in my head quietly reminding me I am not thirty. There are not the unlimited opportunities ahead there once were.

“Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.” Lyricist Carolyn Leigh wrote those words the year I was born. There’s no telling how often I’ve heard it sung, yet it’s only recently that I’ve really taken it in. I think age is a state of mind as much or more than a state of being. I suppose it’s about accepting each new physical limitation and adapting to it. I try to be kind to my body by stretching and walking, but I still overdo it way too often. There’s generally a price to pay, with a visit to the chiropractor or physical therapist. If I don’t get too crazed, it just means taking a few days for R&R.  

I’ve been spending time this summer in a little cottage that has no mirror. Not a one. It has been an interesting experience to go throughout an entire day without seeing what I look like. Vanity plays no part in life in the woods. It is refreshing. An unexpected side benefit has been a total lack of any sense of age. I could be ten years old when I see an eagle fly overhead or twenty when I set out on calm waters in the kayak at dawn. I’m a kid when a storm blows through, remembering how my dad used to take us out on the porch to watch a thunderhead push in. He didn’t want us to be afraid of storms so he had us face them head on.

I suppose not having a mirror around is a way of avoiding a basic truth that I am indeed aging, and, yes, I’m willingly fooling myself. But, I have to tell you, it feels fabulous. Of course, when I get in the car to go to town, I’m shocked to see my grandmother’s face in the rearview mirror instead of my own. It takes a moment to catch my breath and slip back into the present. I put on some lipstick, turn the key and go about my day. I suppose at some point I’ll hang a bathroom mirror in the little cottage in the woods, but I’m in no hurry to do so. I’d rather remain young at heart and see if fairy tales do come true. 

Aug 28 Women without Children

I’ll try my best to keep this civil. And, yes, I realize the focus of this rant has already been litigated by those more eloquent than I. Yet, with so many assaults targeting anyone who doesn’t fit some contrived notion of “normal”, it’s difficult to remain kind toward the bullies out there. And that’s what they are: Bullies.

When a kid’s hair style doesn’t conform to some rigid idea of correctness, they’re told to cut those dreadlocks. We must fear dreadlocks and anyone who wears them. 

When a child suffers from gender dysphoria and seeks medical help, their parents may be charged with child abuse for allowing professional care. We must fear these children even when they face challenges we can’t even begin to comprehend. 

Anyone who finds love within their own gender and marries is dangerous to the institution of marriage. Gays will be the downfall of this country.

Anyone not Christian is wrong-thinking and a threat to the American way of life. We must post the Ten Commandments and teach the bible to our children for it is the only way they will learn the Christian god is the only god. All other religious beliefs must be discouraged, even feared. And atheists or agnostics? There’s just no place for these misguided souls.

And we mustn’t forget there is something inherently wrong with a woman who chooses the company of dogs, horses or – yes, cats – to the company of a spouse.

Honestly, I’m exhausted just keeping track of all the people in this country I’m supposed to fear, hate or avoid.

And now, there’s a new group threatening democracy: People without children. Apparently, they don’t have a stake in the future of this country. As a woman in this category, I disagree. But taking myself out of the equation, let’s look at childlessness.  

Infertility’s causes are innumerable and often go undiagnosed. Treating it can cost thousands of dollars more than most women/couples can afford. And there’s no accounting for the cost in heartache with each failed attempt and in each miscarriage. It doesn’t make these people any less compassionate or sensitive to the world around them.

Adoption can take years and be cost prohibitive, especially after spending a fortune on infertility treatments.

USDA stats adjusted for inflation state that raising a child born in 2023 will cost an average of $331,933 from the time a child is born to age 18. 

Not everyone dreams of parenthood. Is it not wiser to forgo childbearing if it’s not in one’s nature? If a person chooses to build a career and not split their attention between being a parent and being a contributor to the economic engine of this country, they should not be chastised or made out to be a failure as a human being.  

Here is a list from a Pew Research Center survey of the top reasons people ages 18-49 don’t have children:

Just don’t want kids

Want to focus on other things, career

Concerns about the state of the world

Can’t afford to raise a child

Concerns about the environmental impact

Haven’t found the right partner

Negative family experiences growing up

Infertility or other medical reasons

A spouse who doesn’t want children

None of these reasons make childless people any less capable of compassionate decision making, be it for their community or their country. Being a parent is not a prerequisite to becoming a mayor, state representative, member of congress or president. 

Just a thought here, and I realize it may come as a shock to those who still think people without children don’t have the best interest of anyone but themselves in mind. The childless among us are siblings, aunties, uncles, step-parents and friends. We live in community with loved ones who have and share their children. We celebrate births and milestones and graduations and life successes. We worry about the world we’re leaving to the next generations. We worry about affordable child care for parents who can’t afford it yet can’t manage life’s most basic expenses on one income. 

There are those among us whose inability to have children is the single most devastating disappointment of their lives. For ANYONE, especially a candidate for the VICE PRESIDENT of the United States, to surmise we are somehow less worthy, is nothing short of heartless. Shame on him. 

At least we don’t live in the 1600s when single women without children could be suspected of witchcraft and hanged. Cold comfort.

Nov 20, 2024 Have Courage. Be kind.

Life is chock full of disappointments. When we’re little, before we have a handle on impulse control, the smallest afront to the fulfillment of our desires – denial of dessert before we clean our plate – is huge. As we grow, the denials become more significant, yet we somehow manage to wrangle our emotions. Maybe it’s a process of maturation. It could be about perspective. The more disappointments life delivers, the less we expect to live without them. Cope and thrive or gripe and be miserable. Of course, it isn’t that simple. Given the power, disappointment can render a person hopeless. There’s a line in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella that comes to mind: “Have courage. Be kind.”

Between gigs as a freelance graphic designer in the late 90s, I started writing stories. Writers, like most artists, tend to seek validation from strangers. Getting it shouldn’t be important, but it is. And then there’s the whole concept of a story, by its very nature, being something to share, not hide. A writer friend and I have emailed back and forth over the years wondering why we repeatedly handed our writing, and our sanity, over so willingly to grad students reading submissions to any number of university quarterly anthologies. Yet, submit we did, over and over again. Unless a writer is that rare instant success, they tend to suffer a multitude of rejections. It was a crushing blow every time we failed to find a reader who got us. It became easy to believe we were horrible writers. But stringing words together is what we do. It’s not a task or a chore or a job. It is a passion. We kept writing. When that friend placed a story, or in my case I found a home for a piece of flash fiction, we celebrated. Hope was renewed. 

In the intervening years, some of those stories grew into novels. Over the last few weeks of my mother’s life, I read aloud to her the first novel I ever finished. It wasn’t polished, but she found it engaging. She wanted me to publish it. I told her it wasn’t how things were done. One doesn’t self-publish. It just shouldn’t be done. Six years later, the pandemic hit. I took a good look at my life. I had written four novels by then, none of them published. I wondered what I was waiting for. I spent the lockdown revising them until every character found their path. I published my first book this year. I held it in my hands. I even sold some. It felt great. My elation was short-lived.

Self-publishing is a leap into an abyss. I just didn’t know how deep it went until I tried to find people to review that first novel. I came to realize how the system looks down – really down – on those of us who dare to attempt to play in the big sandbox. It has been disappointing to meet with bookstore owners who won’t take on self-published authors. Even more disappointing are the owners who won’t even accept the phone call or respond to an email after a book has been given to them. Their reasons are simple: The book didn’t go through a professional editor; the first release had typos; it isn’t supported by the marketing budget of a big publishing house. As rejections mounted, doubt took hold and self-respect took a hit. I gave disappointment power to ruin my day.

Then a bookshop responded with an offer of consignment. Another offered a slot for a reading. There’s a bookstore on Mackinac Island willing to launch my novel next summer about ghosts in Hubbard’s Annex. I know now there’s always someone willing to look beyond the machine to the author who just wants their work to step into the world and meet some avid readers. These are small advances achieved because I kept trying. I took back my power. 

With age comes wisdom? I’m not so sure. Patience? Nope. If we don’t go after what we want, pursue our passions while we can, what comes next? Regret? I’ve heard it said all my life that nothing worth having is easy. Translated, it means every challenge has an element of failure attached, small set-backs and big ones. Even when we think we’ve got every angle covered, there are a million or more ways it can all go wrong. Yet, we persist. I persist.

There are always going to be disappointments. Half of this country is suffering right now under the weight of a political loss. The other half is celebrating a win. We don’t yet know what it means for our country; for its future; for women; for children who don’t fit into some antagonistic construct of “normal”. We don’t yet know if freedoms will be lost. We don’t know if our Great Lakes will remain protected or what it means for the rest of our planet and our place on it. 

All I can do is live my best life, no matter what comes. I’ll write my stories and keep trying to find readers because stories are a good distraction and occasionally reveal forgotten truths. I’ll be the best friend I can be because some people I love will need a lot of support. I’ll walk my dog along the shore and thrill to amber skies at sunset because I am fortunate enough to live in a beautiful and safe place. Should anyone attempt to take any of that from me, I will resist. 

One way or another, it is my hope we will all manage to navigate through – and past – our disappointments, even the biggest ones. Resist. Persist. Have courage. Be kind.