 When I was a kid I liked to read cookbooks. My mother had a full shelf and the ones that particularly appealed to me had to do with baking. One day I was looking at a two-page spread of pound cake recipes. I noticed that none of them had the same proportion of dry to wet ingredients. If the cookbook authors couldn’t make up their minds about which proportion was best, what was the point of a recipe?
As an adult I tried baking bread but making it from scratch isn’t easy. Flours have different moisture content. Altitude affects rising. When I tried to use a bread recipe I was stymied by the differing amounts of flour, sometimes 4-6 cups. How could such a spread be possible? The resulting breads were occasionally okay, but often they were mushy or crumbly. Breadmaking was a crap shoot. I never knew how the bread would turn out.
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 In 1971 I had just finished a week-long international conference on drama in England, a week filled with tensions between me and the leader, an upper-class Englishman who didn’t bother to hide his racism and misogyny, as well as spending a day taking care of a psychotic woman. One of the participants suggested we visit Stratford-on-Avon as a way to relax after the intense week. We decided to go and see whatever was being performed at the theatre. Sounded like a good idea and we made arrangements. At the last minute, he had to change plans. I decided to go by myself.
 As part of a 3-day conference on drama, I was in a community center gym, welcoming a group of junior and senior high school English teachers to my workshop, ‘Exploring Imagination and Creativity Through Drama.’ I was more than a little nervous because a group of internationally known drama leaders were watching me conduct the session from the bleachers. Suddenly, a group of kids burst into the gym, bouncing a ball between them, playing some kind of game, laughing and shouting to one another.
 I returned from being hospitalized in London in mid-February 1985. My mother, her sisters, and my sister kept calling me to say I needed to visit my mother. Her cancer, first diagnosed in 1983, had returned and she was now paralyzed from the waist down. By mid-March, although my illness was still undiagnosed, I felt well enough to visit and asked a friend who my mother adored, to drive me. A few days before I was scheduled to leave, my mother’s youngest sister called to reassure me that my mother would be alive when I visited.
 In 1954 I was a college sophomore, the only one in my part of the dorm who never had dates. A girl, I’ll call her Sally, offered to fix me up—in all senses of the word--lend me clothes, make up my face, and provide me with a blind date. My initial reaction was no, but she, for reasons I’ll never know, was too excited about the “project” to take no for an answer. I told her I had a boyfriend back home but she dismissed him as irrelevant since he’d never visited. She insisted it was more than time for me to start going out. I don’t know why I agreed, but it probably had something to do with how long it took my boyfriend to respond to my letters.
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Nancy King is a widely published author and a professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she has taught theater, drama, playwriting, creative writing, and multidisciplinary studies with an emphasis on world literature. She has published seven previous works of nonfiction and five novels. Her new memoir, Breaking the Silence, explores the power of stories in healing from trauma and abuse. Her career has emphasized the use of her own experience in being silenced to encourage students to find their voices and to express their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with authenticity, as a way to add meaning to their lives.
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