St. Ignatius Loyola, a Jesuit priest, is credited with saying, “Give us a child till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life.” Growing up as a Catholic, I believed  Loyola until I  turned eleven. That was the year I left the Church to listen to the sound of my own drummer. St

Perhaps, my mother’s passing colors my reaction to the current demonstrations for racial and economic equality.  I continue to see the need for change, but when Death takes the center stage, it presents a standard that when measured against the demonstrations makes the latter seem

Where it has been imposed, the Covid-19 lockdown begins to seem endless, particularly because the number of victims continues to rise despite the precaution. In some states, sheer economic exhaustion has emboldened a few businesses to open. But, if the spike continues to rise, these s

In the midst of the George Floyd tragedy and the protests that have followed, this might not be the time for a calm debate on how to reform the justice system in this country. Nonetheless, cries to dismantle our police forces are troubling and need to be addressed.   I agree change i

While my mother’s death feels like blisters under my skin; while there are riots in the streets– a reaction to police brutality; and while the pandemic continues to rage, killing over 100,000 people in the United States, I’ve spent my evenings without the news and chosen to

Like pandemics of the past, Covid-19 will probably leave lasting social change in its wake.  A person doesn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that contagions usually alter the course of human life. The Black Plague broke the back of the feudal system, for example. (“How Pandemi

The current Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to numerous conspiracy theories concerning why it happened. Though we know little about the virus as yet, these theories have flourished like toadstools after a sodden rain. Thanks to the internet, they have spread to remote places like Gym

The bookstore owner who hosted my summer writers’ workshops closed her doors last December. The rent had ballooned too high, but she hoped to find another location.  Then the pandemic hit in February 2020. Looking back, the woman might have felt she’d had a close call.  Unlike o

Life is interconnected, making sorrow and absurdity cousins. Sometimes that interconnection invites laughter.  The reaction might seem perverse but it can also be enlightened. In times of great adversity, if we look, we might see clowns cavorting in the margins of the shadows. The an

If the coronavirus is a hoax, as some preachers claim, I must admire the people who engineered it.  Over 30,000 casualties in this country, not to mention the 160,000 deaths worldwide. To accomplish this task takes more staging than one of Andrew Webber’s musicals.  So far, no one