(On the eve of the first anniversary of my mother’s death at 104, I reprise a blog I wrote days before she died. I hope it will comfort those with similar losses in the past or yet to come.) “I remind you, your parent isn’t actively dying.” The woman in charge of the assisted

Women’s contributions to history and in particular to religious history are almost invisible compared to the recording of masculine exploits. What made Dan Brown’s, The Da Vinci Code so scandalous was that he relied upon a theory which posited that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lo

“Sorry I didn’t respond to your email sooner. I’m recovering from a mild stroke.”  The voice at the other end of the telephone belonged to a writer whose play-reading I’m producing. Naturally, I gasped to hear his news. Already, he’d faced so many obstacles in his life it

While thumbing through a magazine, I came across writer Anne Tyler’s confession that she feared to concentrate upon a bad idea because it might come about. She holds herself responsible for the coronavirus pandemic, in part, because for some time she’d been praying for an excuse t

Because of the coronavirus, she was wearing a mask which made it difficult for me to identify her, at first.  She was walking her dog, which I did recognize, but the cane her right hand came as a surprise. At 97, she’d eschewed using one until now.     Keeping an appropriate dis

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

Thanks to hackers who spirited my personal information into the dark web, I’m getting weird emails. Some of the senders write revealing details about me as if we’ve known each other for years. “Delete that stuff,” my hardware guru advised. “They’re crooks pretending to kno

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

When I was a kid In the 1940s a movie ticket cost 25 cents. For that price, I watched two features, a cartoon, and a newsreel.  World  War 11 was in full swing at the time, so I saw far too many images of death and destruction than was good for me, particularly the images of the Red