Diary

One day about eight years ago, my son Ivan and I went into convenience store near my condo in San Diego.  I knew he didn’t have much money, so I was surprised when he bought a sandwich, because he could have eaten for free when we got to my place in a few minutes.  When we left the store he handed the sandwich to a man outside who had clearly been living on the street a long time.  

He told me he always tried to do that whenever he had any money to spare. He knew the distance between him and that man was not that great, and the difference was that he had me to protect him.  I remember how proud I felt to have raised a son with so much empathy and desire to turn that into action.

Ivan is gone now, off discovering what happens after we leave this earth, but the lesson he taught me that day has stuck with me.  When I see people down on their luck outside a grocery store, I buy a sandwich for them.  I leave a 20% tip for servers who did no more than hand me a muffin, because I know they might be worried about making their rent.  Every time, it brings Ivan’s spirit close to me, and that feels so good.

I had an interesting experience today walking home from the gym.  I had stopped to pick up a sandwich for lunch and I passed two men, both obviously down on their luck, one quite old for a street person and the other probably not yet out of his twenties. Both had the look of people for whom life had not gone right for a long time.  I walked past, but within a few steps, Ivan’s essence surrounded me so palpably that I stopped walking. “I can keep it. It’s my lunch,” I argued with myself for just a few seconds, but I knew what I had to do.

I walked back and offered the sandwich to one of the men, He was nearly toothless and his clothes had not been washed in a long time. He took the sandwich, looked at it for a moment and handed it back.  “You see that guy,” he said pointing to the other man. “I’m okay.  He needs it more than I do.”

The younger man took it with grateful enthusiasm, and a bit of shock at the kindness, which he erroneously attributed to me.  I wish I had pointed to the first man and said, “He’s the one who gave it to you,” but I wasn’t quick enough for that. The rest of the way home I thought about who the Laurel was who had argued even for a moment, how the old man’s act of loving kindness far surpassed my own, and how it really had been Ivan who set the whole thing in motion.

I have my doubts about altruism.  Most of my good deeds have the immediate reward of ego gratification.  I’m pretty good at hitting the tip percentage button without giving it a thought, because Hindu teaching says that the minute you congratulate yourself for a good deed, the benefit to your soul is negated.  To act well without feeling proud of oneself is the key to spiritual progress. Maybe I’ll get there some day, but for now, I’ll listen to my son and just try to do my best. 

For those of you who don’t know, I made a decision six years ago to get rid of everything I couldn’t fit in my car, and to move, sight unseen and knowing no one, from San Diego to Victoria.  I didn’t know if it would work out, but I figured if it didn’t, I would try something else. Optimism and resilience seem to be hard-wired in my personality.

 I imagine most of us had those times during Covid when we thought about what we wanted our lives to look like when we could live them more fully again.  I had lived in San Diego almost my entire life, having moved there as a teenager in 1964, and except for time away at university, had never left. My entire career was there, I raised my family there, I had a deep base of friends, and I rarely needed GPS to hurtle down freeways headed anywhere in in town.  I knew where to find the cheapest gas, the best tacos, the secret places to park.   

The problem for me was that I couldn’t picture how I was going to continue to grow. I was retired by then, and though I knew I would get back to cruising eventually, every new activity I considered for the times I would be home bored me to think about. There wasn’t any book I wanted to write, no hobby or sport I wanted to take up, no organization I wanted to volunteer with.  My post-Covid life was going to be the same old same old, and it was eating at me.  I always need to be on the move.  I need stimulation.  I want to take my last breath thinking “wow, this is an interesting development!” 

And so I decided to throw myself into my future and head north. I will always be grateful for the opportunity Covid gave me to be solitary, to explore the beauty of my new home on my own, but also for the way it kept me focused on the few friends in my bubble.  Without Covid, I would probably have made more acquaintances, but the caring community I now enjoy has its roots in that time of interdependence. 

Several times over the years, I pondered the question of what I would do if I became seriously ill or disabled. I have almost no family, so I can’t start there in my thinking. I had a deeply rooted community in San Diego I knew I could rely upon to help, and for a while I thought I would probably move back.   Then, as more time passed and my friendships grew more solid in Victoria, I realized there’s a lot of love here, and I indeed do have a community I could count on.  Now it is clear to me that I would stay right here.

That’s huge.  Nearly sixty years in one place and six in another, and they are increasingly equally dear.  But they will always be different.  Earlier this month, when I was in San Diego to promote Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel, it was so gratifying to see dozens of people I care about, many of whom I haven’t seen for years. I saw people I have known since high school, and others from my first job teaching at San Diego State. I saw people I have known since I was at UCSD in my thirties, and from San Diego City College, where I spend the majority of my career.  There were writer friends, tennis friends, old neighbors, and so many others. 

Here, I have only a fraction of that number, of course.  But the truth is I don’t think most people can really pay adequate attention to more than a few friends anyway. I have a core of people who matter a lot to me, and I to them. When I had a private launch party for Aloha a few weeks back, almost everyone I invited—about 35—showed up. I have friends beating the bushes for me to get the word about my new book out in the community. When I am going or coming from a trip I always have more than one person volunteer to take me to or from the airport, and since it’s forty minutes away, that’s special!

For me, friends are family. I was reminded of that in San Diego, and I came home to Victoria to a welcome that said that I indeed have another family here.  When it comes to what I value, I lost nothing by hopping in my car and coming north.  I had no idea what abundance awaited me for taking that chance. 

With Megan and Eva and Tom, who refuse to let me refer to them as landlords, so I now call them the people who live upstairs in MY house

As often happens, I get so busy with other things that I forget I have a website. I made a date with myself some time ago to get back to blogging, and I kept moving the date forward on my calendar as life intervened, but today is the day that I can finally surface. 

It’s been a whirlwind since the start of the year.  Over the holidays I was on a long cruise assignment on Silver Muse that didn’t end until early February.  When I got home, I had my first true vacation in years, lounging in Mexico. I hear some of you saying that I have a lot of nerve talking about no vacation time, since I spend about half the year on cruise ships, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that yes, cruises are vacations for guests, and I do have a lot of free time to go ashore in wonderful places, and I get to enjoy all the activities and amenities onboard luxury ships, but it’s work for me.

I always spend months before an assignment putting together 45-minute lectures that focus for around 15 minutes on what there is to do and see in port, and the rest of the time delve into the history, culture, important people, and other significant things about each stop. A typical assignment takes months of prep time. I am fully prepared when I step onboard, but I am laser-focused on delivering as close to a perfect talk as I can.  This means that I review each talk multiple times, adding and deleting material, looking for better images if I am not happy with what I have, and spending a little time working with the production crew to make sure everything goes smoothly with the slides and the audio. Honestly, I rarely feel completely at rest since there is always some preparation I want to do.

The other part of being a cruise lecturer is my public visibility onboard.  The minute I step out of my room, I become a performer of a role. Everything, from getting a cup of coffee, to going to the gym, to sitting in another lecture, to playing a game, or having a meal is an opportunity for others to observe me.  I don’t mind this at all, because I like the role, but it does mean that in this sense, I am always at work.

So now, as I go through the year 2026, I have gotten to March.  I was home in Victoria for all of March and into April, but my new novel Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel was coming out in May, and I had what felt like a thousand things to do in preparation for all the promotion that goes with a new book.

If I had known when I published my first novel, The Four Seasons, that having an in-house publicist meant I would have roughly one month of part-time effort from a junior publicist with a huge workload of other clients, I would have realized that it was almost entirely up to me to promote my book.  I would have hired a publicist, and that might have resulted in much more exposure, and perhaps a different trajectory for my career.  I would have done everything I could think of on my own to beat the bushes to bring attention to my book. 

I decided that, though it was too late to change that, there was nothing stopping me from doing for Aloha what I should have done back then. As a result, I hired a publicist who is doing a good job getting me media attention, speaking engagements, and other promotional opportunities.  On my own, I have been reaching out to every library and independent bookstore on Vancouver Island, and contacting every organization I can think of who has events involving speakers. I’ve been going around to bookstores talking with owners and managers. I initiated a fundraiser where I will speak and donate the proceeds. What this means is that on any given day I will have my own plans for my time, but almost always have to fit in something that the publicist wants, or someone will get in touch with me about an event or other opportunity based on my own outreach.  

And that brings me to mid-April, when I had another cruise assignment from Tokyo to Seattle.  By the time I got home it was May, pub month, where my big activity was to plan and carry out a really fun launch party. There’s a photo below of me with Christian Fink-Jensen, Aloha’s wonderful biographer, and another of my friends gathered around to support me.

In early June I went on a promotional trip to San Diego. I just got back a few days ago, and am in the thick of promotion again. 

But back to the cruising part of my life.  I am off on a long assignment, from the end of August to the beginning of November, and there’s all that prep to do before I get on board and now only about two months to do it.  Add that to my general busy-ness and I think you can see why it’s so easy to forget I have a website.  Still, I have so much to tell you, that I don’t think I will forget it for long!

This, according to meteorologists, is the first completely snowless winter in Victoria in recent memory. I was gone on purpose for most of the gray and gloomy months, leaving when the last golden leaves were still falling from the trees and coming back when the same trees were covered in blossoms. But still, when I think of ways to describe my life these days, the word “flurries” comes to mind.

I made a big mistake when my first novel, The Four Seasons, came out. I had the idea that the publicist assigned to my book would put the necessary effort into helping it do well. I know now that these overworked people juggle multiple books at a time and spend only a few weeks on most titles, including mine. If I had known that, I might have hired a publicist to give a debut book the boost it needs. Instead, sales were less than stellar, though foreign rights did very well, and the book languished. I still hadn’t figured this out through three more books, with my own efforts consisting of little more than crossing my fingers and reaching out to my limited range of contacts.

Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel is my fifth novel, and my sixth book (the one other one being non fiction, Until Our Last Breath). While pondering the mid-list fates of my other novels, I decided it wasn’t too late to get it right for this book and do what I should have done the first time. I’m working with a publicist from Books Forward, and with a small press, Sibylline, that is genuinely interested in the success of the book, and it has made such a huge difference. Right now, though, I am at the crazy flurry stage, doing all I can to bring the book to the attention of libraries, social organizations, bookstores, conferences, book festivals, and online influencers, while my publicist and publisher are going full tilt as well.

For me, this makes my days sometime feel less like juggling balls than swatting at a swarm of gnats. Or snow flurries. A much gentler analogy. But just as with snow, the flurries are often just the beginning before the white stuff really begins to fall. In this case, I welcome it. The more of this figurative snow, the more the publisher, publicist and I are likely to succeed in giving this book the audience it deserves. And maybe, years after publication, my other books will get a new round of love as well.

This photo was taken from the front door of my home during another, much snowier winter in Victoria. I may live to regret wishing this upon myself, but I look forward to that kind of blizzard for my book.

I know people who have published dozens of books. I know people who have published just one. I’ve published five to date. The number doesn’t matter when it comes to how one feels when the whole multi-year project falls into place. The biggest excitement comes when a box of copies arrives, and for book number six, ALOHA WANDERWELL TAKES THE WHEEL, I am still more than a month away from that. Last week I saw the typeset pages, but the even bigger thrill came a few days ago when I saw the cover. Yes, it’s really happening! Here it is!

As usual, I can forget I have a blog for months at a time. Like everyone else I know, I get so busy I would forget to breathe if that were possible. My last few months have been taken up with the work of getting lectures in place for a couple of months of cruise assignments. I’ve lost count now of how many I have prepared this time, but my guess is it’s over 40, and I’ve been working on it since April.

There’s a look people get sometimes on the ship and I know what they’re thinking, that they could do this job themselves. Sometimes they say something like that, or more likely they comment on what a cushy retirement gig I have, and indeed that is true. However, on the occasions when I meet someone who might be a good fit, and I sit down with him or her to think through the work that has to be done just to make a solid pitch to cruise lines, not a single one has followed through. That seems odd to me, because doing the research to talk effectively about any subject is really quite enjoyable. I love the research, and I benefit from it directly because when I go ashore, I am better informed. And there’s nothing I like more than having an audience for something I find interesting. And then, of course there’s the fabulous experience of being on a luxury cruise line, living like royalty. Win, win, win!

This time, though, I have been juggling another big piece of business, my new book, Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel, coming out in May . I won’t be back and ready to work on promotion until March, so anything that could be done long in advance had to be done before I leave on this assignment.

I’m really excited about the book, my first in 10 years! People who have known me a long time are aware that I swore I would never write another book, not because I don’t love to write, but because I was so burnt out by everything else involved with publishing. Anyone who has published a book will recognize the feeling of helplessness that can take over the process once the book is sold. Then I found Sibylline Press, and my experience so far has been terrific. They’re hands on and consultative, and very affirming. I am very excited about doing my part to make this book a success. And by the way, if you’d like to learn a little more, I have a new website devoted to the book, which you can find at Alohawanderwelltakesthewheel.com

Today, on my last day here in Victoria before flying out tomorrow, I have the usual flurry of activities and last chances(for a while) to see friends. Tomorrow I will go on one of my favourite hikes in the morning to wear myself out a little before the long flight to Athens to resume this lovely other life I have. I have a lot to look forward to, and I am grateful every moment for both worlds I have the good luck and privilege to thrive in.

People say the honesty in my writing has been helpful to them or someone they have shared it with. I am pleased and a little surprised by this because in many respects my writing has been far more self-protective than revelatory.  But I have reached a stage where I think I am strong enough to risk a little more. 

Part of this new strength comes from being old enough to give far less of a damn what people think of me, but it is combined now with a realization that for the first time—maybe ever, when I think about it—I don’t feel accountable to anyone but myself.

I used to say that everyone I was related to by blood could fit in one minivan.  I have one sister but I never had even a single cousin.  I had an aunt and uncle on both maternal and paternal sides,  but they didn’t have children and have by now all died. My parents died far too young around forty years ago. My sister has three children, all with families, but I have little to no contact with two of the three, and I have played no role in their children’s lives. I love my sister but we have very little contact. Neither of my own children had children. I could realistically say now that every blood relative I have a relationship with now could fit in a compact car.  For some people this might seem unutterably sad, and for some it might seem like a dream come true, but for me, these are simply facts, and having a family to fall back on is just not part of the way I make my way through this life.

I don’t feel at all unloved. I have beautiful friends who would not let me fall through the cracks, and they are a family of another sort. But one quality they all share—a necessity, really, to be a friend at this point—is that they acknowledge that I don’t need to do what works for them at my own expense, that my life is my own to shape, and my decisions are mine alone. And they know I feel the same about them.  

I said above that I am more willing to say risky things, so here is one. At this stage in my grieving process for my son Ivan and the rekindling of other griefs his death brought on , I am able to acknowledge how much freer I feel. I have no one to answer to and no one else’s wishes or needs to factor in.  I am done with the struggle I share with so many other women, to declare boundaries and stick to them.  I can put myself first now without needing to prioritize whomever I might be letting down.

I am done with the worst gut wrenching phone calls one can get about about family members, because I have weathered them all now.. I don’t have to find my way through the impenetrable forest of trying to understand and figure out what  to do about the intractable mental illness of people I love. I can’t be hurt anymore by the damage loved ones, especially the most fragile ones, can do to my self esteem. So it’s not all bad to be in my shoes. I think both my sons, Adriano and Ivan, would be doing whatever constitutes a high-five in their post earthly realm, upon seeing that I have reached the point where I can see the good side of moving on.  

Would I trade this for a life more like that of intact families, where I would be the proud mother of successful children and grandmother to a beautiful, healthy next generation, still married to a mentally stable person who had grown alongside me for fifty-plus years now?  Would I like to have just one photo of a happy, multigenerational family?  Would Adriano and Ivan prefer to be in that picture to where they ended up? I suppose the answer is, who wouldn’t?  But maybe another, darker question is, how many people really have that kind of family. One of the funniest one-liners I ever heard was from someone, whose name I have forgotten, who said that relatives are like a genetic blind date.  Except the date goes on and on. To have the happy photo, one can’t be spared the hidden pain.  No one escapes unscathed.

The one piece that is missing in that family photograph is who I would be as Grandmother Laurel. My life as it evolved required different choices, different compromises, different opportunities, different challenges.  Now my family photo is a selfie. That’s the thing about the road not taken, or in this case the road not there or at least not apparent.  It wouldn’t necessarily lead to that happy group photo, regardless of anything I might have done differently. There’s only what is, and what I can make of it, and that is entirely up to me

People often ask me if, after thirteen years of cruise lecturing, there is any place I haven’t been, and I always answer the same way: Inland.  

It is true by now that except for Japan, Antarctica, and parts of Africa there are very few cruise ports I haven’t been to at least once. Cruising has been a wonderful way to touch down around the world, but when you just spend one port day in a place, and your experiences are curated around what a country wants you to see, I always feel I have brushed up against a place but not really seen it.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I have laid eyes on so many things that would have been out of reach for me otherwise—tiny villages in the Amazon, gigantic Buddhas in Asia, the beaches of Fiji—but most of the time I am gone before nightfall and miss the whole other life of places when the cruisers are gone. This summer I wanted to do something different. In the middle of June, I took a two-week road trip to explore my new home in British Columbia.  After that I  spent a whole week with my friend Megan in Quebec City, which I have stopped in by ship many times but never spent the night. Today, I am back on board ship, but just for two weeks, as a way to spend quality time with my friend Jane, whom I see rarely now that I don’t live in San Diego. And then, it will be the middle of August and the summer will be well on its way to being over.

I am inspired to write this morning because of a weird experience I just had. I did my morning onboard ritual of going around 6AM to the top deck of the bow, where there is a deserted lounge, with a coffee machine and couches overlooking the bow of the ship as it glides through the water.  I was looking at my mail on my iPad, and as Billy Pilgrim does in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, I became momentarily unstuck in time. Some part of my brain wondered “are we almost there?” as if I were on a plane or in a car. When I looked up and saw the beautiful scenery of British Columbia’s Inside Passage, I was a little dizzy with a sense of disorientation.  

From the moment I set out in my car more than a month ago, I have been keeping track of time. I have made all the decisions about it, and have monitored it all the time, from how many miles to my destination, to what time is on my entry ticket  to a museum, to how long until the plane lands, to what time checkout is.  Right now I have only the sensation of gliding over water with no need whatsoever to care what time it is.

Are we there yet?  Yes and no. No, in that there are ports to get to, and we won’t arrive at the first one until tomorrow, but having cruised in Alaska several times now I don’t have the same sense of anticipation other guests are probably feeling. But yes, I am wherever “there” is when you don’t have a destination, only a beautiful present where the burdens of obligation and desire vanish. 

‘“Just be, “ I tell myself.  Maybe that is why my favourite part of the day, wherever I am, is this little patch of early morning before time starts mattering. Soon enough the clothes will be out of the dryer down on deck 5 and I’ll need to retrieve them to make room for others. At 7, the cafe with better coffee will open.  Around 8 the Cruise Director’s office will open and I can get my notes printed for my talk this afternoon—

Poof! just like that the spell is broken. But for now, I want a few more minutes of quieted mind, in which I am floating in this little bit of nowhere, or maybe it’s everywhere. And you, whatever time it is, and however pressing your schedule, unstick yourself even for a few breaths. Shantih.  

People who have been reading my blog for some time know how often I process something that’s happening in the political world by analogy to my personal life. I was in a long-term marriage to a narcissist, with my stubbornness to admit defeat being perhaps the single biggest factor in why I stayed married to him as long as I did.  His behaviour brought me to the ground emotionally and financially, and in many respects, I have moved on without being able to fully recover.

I acknowledge that every dysfunctional relationship is a dynamic in which both parties play roles.  In my case, the betrayals were all on his part and took many forms that I won’t itemize here, because my point is not about him. He doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is how I make sense of my own history. I was a loyal and completely faithful wife, who took care of him and our children without receiving the same kind of care in return. It’s really that simple.

How I was complicit is in my lack of ability to set the boundaries that would have stopped him from taking advantage of my qualities of loyalty, fidelity, and loving care. I didn’t fight back when I should have, and I played a role in creating a monster. I know better now. One of the best things about my relationship with my late husband Jim is that I went into it committed to never feeling again the way I felt in my first marriage, and I knew to do that I would have to change. Jim was a good man and he helped me learn that I could express my needs and my feelings without being punished for them, and that my happiness was equally important to his own.

I suppose you could say I retain unprocessed trauma over my first marriage, but the truth is I’m just not that interested anymore. What does continue unprocessed is the connection that his behaviour had to producing two beautiful children who then went on, one in his early 20s and one in his early 40s to end their own lives.  When I look at this from what might be considered an objective perspective, I  see that my firstborn, Adriano, was somewhere on the autism spectrum, which at the time of his death in 1999, at age 22, was associated only with its most severe forms. He could never figure out what others expected of him, and eventually he gave up.  My younger son, Ivan, developed severe bipolar disorder in adulthood, leading to psychotic episodes that would have required heavy medication for the rest of his life. He complained that the drugs destroyed the Ivan he enjoyed being,  replaced by a zombie who could take no joy in life. He hung on for a while, but a debilitating shoulder injury put him over the edge and he too made the gamble that the next world would be better.

I could place the blame on biochemistry and leave it at that, and I do remind myself that faced with those odds, there might have been little that any parents could have done to change the outcome. I could point to history of mental instability in his family, and warning signs I see now that should have made me think twice about marrying him. At 25 there was so much I didn’t know about what would matter in a life partner. Still, I have tried to tread carefully between blaming their father too much and myself too little. 

One thing I do know, though, is that blaming him doesn’t make me feel better. Nor does blaming myself. Still, I think any mother can’t ever put completely to rest any decisions that led to negative consequences for her children. I see more clearly now the role that my stubbornness played in staying married to an increasingly dysfunctional man, when his lack of concern for anyone but himself was hurting my children far more than a divorce ever would. It’s too late to know better now, but forgiving myself for what I didn’t realize at the time has proved elusive.

As often happens with this blog, I take a long time to get to the point. The reason I’m having these thoughts today is an article I read this morning about signs in adults that may show they grew up with a narcissistic parent. I will post the link at the bottom of this entry if you think it might be helpful. Self doubt, hypervigilance, boundary problems, trust issues—the list goes on and on. My response to this article came as quite a revelation. I don’t think either of my children had any of these issues. They could have had them all based only on their father‘s behaviour, but they also had me. 

I provided their normality, their stability, their security in the world. Anyone who has seen pictures of them as children knows that these children were loved. The photo at the top of this post shows a time right after Star Wars was released when I made medals of cardboard covered with aluminum foil that I presented to them for running around the high school track with us. At the bottom, there’s a photo of Adriano (top) and Ivan. It’s me they are looking at, so confident they are my treasured boys.

I protected them in ways I understand better now.  Ivan used to reassure me that I had been a great mom, and in the letter Adriano left he said the same, but I had never been able to accept this because my own narrative about our shared past was so different from theirs. I could have done better in so many ways, and I will always regret that, but given the totality of what was going on in our family, I see now that I did a damn good job of mothering after all. My gift was my love and that will have to be enough.

https://medium.com/the-narcissist-detox/17-signs-you-dealt-with-narcissistic-abuse-as-a-kid-f20a66f6e85f

it’s been more than a decade since I have published anything, and I an delighted to share with you the news that a historical novel I have been working on for several years will be coming out in May 2026 from Sibylline Press. ALOHA WANDERWELL TAKES THE WHEEL tells the fantastic true story of a remarkable teenager who walks away from her boarding school in 1922 to go off on an adventure that will take her around the world behind the wheel of a Model T. Aloha’s story has everything—drama, comedy, adventure, romance, steamy sex, life-threatening events, glamour, heartbreak, joy. Most of all, it’s an inspirational tale of a young woman determined not to cave in to societal expectations, who goes out to live the exciting life she has dreamed of. Do an online search of Aloha Wanderwell, and I think you will see why I just had to tell her story. And while you are here on my website, be sure to take a look at the link here https://laurelcorona.com/laurels-books/aloha-wanderwell/ that will tell you about the book. . The cover, by the way, is a mockup that will be replaced in a few months when I have the actual cover. In the meantime, hereis one of my favourite photos of the one and only Aloha Wanderwell