Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

My daily three-mile walk in the morning keeps me in passable shape, clears my head, and gets me going. I start each day, after coffee but before breakfast and writing by heading out to the park where I walk in circles. As a writer, I'm seeking inspiration for my novel, working out plotholes. As a human being, I sometimes need to blow off steam. The Jacarandas shading the pea gravel pathway are a beautiful distraction, stunning in springtime when they bloom in deep blue purples, and mandatory in the summer when Los Angeles heats up early. Today as I near the patio sitting on the perimeter of the park, I see the gardeners have hosed down the cement. The entire surface is still wet and puddled. Slick. Without my permission, my heart starts pounding, bringing me crashing to a halt. Wimp, I think. That's in the past. Shake it off. I can't. I’m afraid. I'm fifteen years old again, walking along a sandy road near the beach in San Juan with my best friend. We're both

Can you find George Clooney standing to the right of Stacy Kiebler in their last trip to the Oscars together? What are you doing Sunday night? Please don't say live-tweeting the Oscars! I know we live tweet everything, share our every thought with the world but I won't be doing that.  I'm not putting it down— I’ve tried in the past and it was an epic fail—I just don't have the capacity to watch and tweet. Even though I reserve the right to insist that as a woman, YES! I can do two things at once, I can multi-task— and bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, I am woman, W-O-M-A-N  but  maybe it's time to leave the live-tweeting to you crazy kids under 30. Not to be a whiner but arthritic hands don't tend to fly across the tiny telephone screen with any kind of accuracy . I'm always missing the best things—the JLaw  stairway fall, Alec Baldwin bungling Idina Menzel's  name—as I'm stuck staring at my phone, furiously trying to correct auto-co