My life is a collection of stories.

I had an idea when I was very young, maybe eleven because eleven is a year I remember happening, my teacher was a man named Robert Z., a strong man with many ideas, ideas I’d never heard before.

I had the idea then that I still have, that if I were willful enough, and lucky, I would be able to find a place where I actually belonged, where people would tell me stories. I could ask church lady Paula in a red house down the road—we are all of us within spitting distance of each other on County Route 17—to tell me about herself, and she’d explain what it was like when she was young and rode motorcycles with boys and had three sons with a man who left and how she met her current husband because he was stacking peas at her super market and when she grabbed a can his pyramid fell and he came running.

These stories are our lives. They are what we know and how we say who we are. Our words are breath for us all. I’ve been gathering these stories all my life. Sometimes people ask why. I make up answers.

I’ve had a long well-peopled career.

I worked for Bob Marley; directed Bread and Roses, a national cultural program for workers; developed UnseenAmerica, which gave cameras and classes to thousands of people around the country; ran a publishing house in Hebrew, English, and Arabic; taught writing at The New School and Manhattanville College; and cofounded The Clara Lemlich Awards for women activists in their 80s, 90’s, and 100’s.

I’ve written about the power of preserving memories for Oldster; about gratitude, liberation, and home for On Being; about a mysterious craigslist poetry contest for The New York Times; and about working people, telling stories, and getting older in the form of five books.

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(And who doesn’t?) I tell them here for you.

I am a person who is always starting over. Every day. Trying to tell the very same story. Last night I confessed to a stranger at the library, a woman I’d never seen before, one of those friendly broad faced strangers who probably has eleven grandchildren, she didn’t even tell me her name, last night I confessed to her that beginnings are all I care about. Not all those inevitable endings. Not the endings I know too well.