I may have told this story before, but it bears repeating.  When I headed a teacher’s union, years ago, I defended a black member whom the school district longed to dismiss.  Her hair, greying enough to appear dusted with ash, surrounded a leathery face that seemed incapab

There’s a reason why women don’t earn as much as men, and discrimination isn’t the cause.  It stems from a female’s cultural role as a caregiver. In fact, 81 percent of people who tend to a family member in the home are women. Unsurprisingly, most of them are mothers and

When a person reaches “a certain age,” doctors begin to examine him or her with an eye to senility.   One of their tests requires a patient to draw the face of a clock and insert the required numbers.  I tend to fail because I prefer hexagonal clocks to round ones a

One of my fellow authors is scratching her head because she’s discovered her books are being sold on foreign websites.  Her discovery raises a couple of questions. How did her novels wander so far from the home? Does one get bragging rights for making the bestseller list in Tra

At 81, I now have a pair of hearing aids, and believe me, I’d prefer not to.  If I didn’t already know life moves at a frenetic pace, I would now, judging from the noise around me.  I’ve worn these expensive devices for three weeks and I’m struggling to make the adju

  I hadn’t intended to share “Secrets,” the story I published earlier this month.  When I read the printed version, I discovered errors: “compliment” for “complement”; “shinning” for “shining.”  The punctuation was flawed with double periods in several pla

Our president, Donald Trump, is doing a great job of alienating most of the world.  Certainly, he earned us no goodwill when he refused to shake hands with  Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, and, arguably, the real leader of the free world. Beyond insulting an ally, he p

All I wanted to do in my retirement years was write.  I presumed the easiest way to do that was to find a publisher and let the company go through the mechanics of getting my books into print.  So far that decision has proved unsatisfactory. I won’t go into details, but gi

When I was a child of five, one of the first books I read in school was about Dick, Jane and a dog named Spot.  They lived in a house with a picket fence on a sunny street with a mother and father named Mr. And Mrs. Little.  Dick, Jane, and Spot had many adventures and I lov

In the last two years of my political life, I served with 4 other women as a county commissioner.  I was the fiscal conservative in the bunch but shared their liberal persuasion for social concerns.  About money, I saw it as a fickle friend, not to be relied upon as the answ