Last week, I had an experience that dropped me into an alternate reality. I was walking to my apartment at the retirement center, drifting along a sun lighted corridor lined with windows when, ahead of me, a young woman, a nurse by her uniform, appeared to be blocking the exit where

A report about the success of the New Orleans charter schools caught my eye the other day. After Katrina and the destruction of many neighborhood classrooms, charter schools emerged with open enrollment to students regardless of their home addresses. That liberty freed children who li

Recently, Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, held a press conference to announce his upcoming bout with brain cancer. His grace and courage was inspiring to everyone. What surprises me is the man had to be facing death before others recognized his remarkable qualit

At the retirement center the other day, I inadvertently offended a frail, elderly woman without meaning to. Looking into her eyes, I saw the distress I’d caused and offered her a smile as well as an apology. The smile seemed to have helped. Walking away, I wondered what a robot woul

After 4 years of flogging my allegory, “Agent of God,” it was selected for Under a Dark Sign, an anthology to be published in October 2015 by WolfSinger Press. The novelette had been given an honorable mention in 2012 in Allegory Magazine but otherwise had been passed over. I unde

Tasllima Nasrin is a woman without a country. Born in Bangladesh, she fled her native land in 1993 because religious fundamentalists threatened her, a physician who wrote about feminine oppression. Abused as a child, her work touches not only upon gender inequality, but also on freedo

I’m an organized person and I can accomplish much in a day, but to be honest, I’m lazy. if I could hire someone to breathe for me, I would.  My ideal life would be to lounge on  a Caribbean beach with a good book in one hand and a rum and coke in the other.  I’ve never been t

My father taught me the difference between truth and a lie when I was five.  The story begins with a teddy bear, a tiny, plastic ornament that hung at the end of my toothbrush. I loved to watch it in the bathroom mirror, bouncing up and down as I cleaned my teeth.  One day, the tedd

I recently read about an actor, Aziz Ansari, who has unplugged from the internet and rejoices in the freedom it’s given him, not only in time, but in his choice of activities.  “I’m reading like three books right now.” (“People,” The Week, Sept. 2017, pg. 10.)  Of course

Like sand in an hourglass, Donald Trump continues to turn the world upside down in the hope of returning the country to the past.   In the footsteps of former president, Ronald Regan, he uses his proposed budget to starve from existence the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and