Sweet & Crazy by Patty Dann
The world is a crazy place these days.  You never know what will happen.  You might lose someone you love.  You might find love next door.  You might discover your hometown is not the safe haven you always thought it to be.  All of these happened unexpectedly to Hanna, and she’s doing the best she can to keep up.

Hanna never ventured far from home. After a few years away at college, she settled
back down in her Ohio hometown.  She married a community college professor, bought a cute little house and had a son.  She taught writing classes at the YMCA and worked at the college library.  Everything was perfect until her husband became ill.  Then at 39, Hanna found herself widowed and the single mom of precocious four year old Pete.

As Hanna and Pete try to adjust to their new lives, they begin to form a familial type bond with their eccentric next-door neighbor, Thomas.  Thomas, who was previously standoffish, finds himself stepping in as a father figure for Pete and a significant other of sorts for Hanna.  Then Pete starts kindergarten on September 9, 2001, and two days later the world was forever changed.

As the horror of September 11^th unfolds, Hanna is drawn into the lives of her son’s Indian friend, Omar, and his family.  Hanna offers to take care of Omar while his father, Mazur, goes to New York to learn the fate of his wife, baby and brother-in-law.  As Mazur waits for his wife to recuperate and return home with their baby, Hanna and Mazur form a friendship based on mutual understanding of loss and pain.  But as panic and accusations from September 11^th swirl, Mazur’s family becomes a target of racism and misunderstanding, and Hanna watches helplessly as her friend’s family becomes the object of threats and vandalism.

Understandably, Hanna wants to escape from it all, run away and maybe live by the ocean.  Many of us have been tempted to do the same thing at one point or another, especially in light of the events of September 11^th.  But Hanna comes to realize that life goes on – as crazy as it is - and she must too.  There’s sweet stuff mixed in with the crazy – you’ve just got to find it, girlfriends.

About the author:  Patty Dann is the author of and Winonna Ryder, and of The Baby Boat: A Memoir of Adoption.  She lives in Manhattan with her son.