When I ask myself, “What would be comforting?  What can I give myself?”  I freeze, like the kid who gets called on in class when she hasn’t done her homework.

When I ask myself, “What would be comforting for my friend?  What can I give her?” I open, like a cascade of anticipation like Christmas morning.

Maybe this is the entire point of the exercise – to discover where the tight spots are, and to become my own Dorothy, adding oil to the rusty hinges of my heart, where they froze in mid-sentence, too many years ago.