Hey, Chief,

The last time you and I were in the same room was March 7, 2014, when I stopped by your enormous corner office at Littleton Police Department to hand you a copy of my letter of resignation from our town’s Board of Selectmen.

Remember how I took a seat across from you with that nice big desk between us? And do you remember how it felt to receive my letter of resignation in your hand? How big and powerful you must have felt at that moment. So unabashed in your abuse of power that you demanded that I sign what you, then, slid across that nice big desk to me: a gag order.

Remember that tense moment: Will she/won’t she?

She didn’t.

Nope, I didn’t sign your gag order, Chief. Want to know why?

Because it seemed super un-American to do so. I would’ve felt like I was betraying my American-born right to freely express my experience of how that all went down for me.

That’s what GINNED UP was all about: sharing with our town what happened when a woman/wife/mother-of-four/lawyer/bleeding-heart Pollyanna with one hell of a pair of rose-colored (gin-smeared) glasses stepped into local politics despite the many, many warnings not to.

Chief, if you’ve just read the foregoing sentence as sounding in the key of victimhood, you need to check your tuning fork. GINNED UP is a memoir: my account of the past. Whether I was “victimized” relies on one’s own value judgments that are rooted in ethics, social norms, and codes of both conduct and honor. My “victimization” depends on how one sees the world and, I’ve found, is largely a matter of opinion.

The last decade of my life here in the town has been one of great introspection and observation and curiosity. I happen to take a deep interest in how this idea of “community” works, and how, when unexamined—with the death of local newspapers and rise of disinformation on social media—the structure of community erodes, leaving the system itself to fall far short of the expectations that most of us would hold ourselves to in our own lives.

I spend my time 1. reading, 2. writing, 3. thinking about what I’ve read/written (oftentimes in the sauna), 4. walking the dog (and lately, the turtle), and 5. thinking about Littleton, a town we shared over a decade ago, and a town we still share today, and a town that might learn to do better by learning from its past.

Tomorrow, Episode One of GINNED UP will arrive in subscribers’ inboxes at 8:00 PM EST.

And on Friday, at 8:00 PM EST, I’m going to publish/upload the first episode of MY LITTLE TOWN, which I’ve described like this:

As the podcast is very much a matter of public interest, I’m not charging a penny for it. All FREE subscribers to AMORE FATI will have full access to the podcast.

I hope you’ll tune in, Chief,

Jkb