I sat down to brunch with a married couple I’ve known for years.  The friendship is so comfortable, we dare to talk about religion and politics.  Mostly we discuss books. The husband told me he was working through the novels of a Japanese woman who wrote fantasy.  He couldn’t r

Getting Lost to Find Home, my upcoming memoir, will reveal my childhood relationship with my father was a rocky one.  We didn’t make our separate peace until I’d graduated from college.  Even then, communication wasn’t easy.  He was an Indiana farm boy with an 8th-grade educa

According to historians, the Age of Enlightenment dominated western thinking in the 17 and 18th centuries. Coming on the heels of the Scientific Revolution, it valued evidence of the senses, individual liberty, religious tolerance, and a separation between church and state. The major

Sometimes, in the course of human affairs, actions are so preposterous, laws don’t exist to prevent them from occurring.  For example, no one has suggested we need a rule that bars killer whales from competing in Olympic swimming competitions.  Dogs aren’t required to have drive

The budget pamphlet in my mailbox was titled “Financial Realities.”  I laughed.  As a person once responsible for a  $200 million budget, I know financial realities are imaginary.  Budgets are guestimates of the future based on the unlikely assumption that history will repeat

  The ferry bobbed in the six-foot waves like a match stick caught in a wash cycle. While the storm outside raged, inside, passengers huddled in the middle rows of the vessel’s viewing area, away from wind gusts that could break the glass. Together, the people, white-lipped

The man had fallen near an electrified rail of a Chicago subway.  Unconscious, he lay convulsing on the bare track. People on the platform above looked down, stunned.  A few whipped out their cell phones to record the incident. One African American, Anthony Perry, age twenty, made a

To read the news is to wonder if the world has gone mad. Autocracy is on the rise, while democracies seem to be stumbling. To be honest, some democracies no longer look like democracies. India and Turkey come to mind.  Russia holds elections, but no one would describe Vladimir Putin

My hairdresser had moved away, a small tragedy compared to what’s going on in the world. Even so, most women know what it’s like to lose a beautician who understands their hair. Recently, I found a new salon and a new hairdresser. She gave me a great cut and shaved $5.00 off my us

A columnist wrote recently that anti-vaxxers who fall victim to the Covid virus shouldn’t be admitted to hospitals. Facing death, he said, was too late to embrace medical science.  His statement contains an “either/or” proposition. Either a person takes the vaccine or forgoes t