It’s really quite awful.
Forgive me if I seem a little breathless. I’ve had quite a shock just now. I’ve seen it and I can’t un-see it, so I’m here trying to make sense of this, trying to see how I can ever fit into a society that would accept my shero, Eleanor Roosevelt, as a Barbie doll.
According to the CNN article I read:
“One of the most influential women of the 20th century is being introduced as a role model to a new generation of girls.
Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt has been made into a Barbie doll as part of the…
But it created the best of both worlds for me.
My mother was pure Finnish and Lutheran. My father was pure Italian and Catholic. She was sandy-haired and green-eyed, he was dark and swarthy. They both came from old world families that didn’t mix and didn’t approve. Each of their mothers would have preferred they married their own kind.
It was 1936. She was only 17 when they married, and he was 24. She was from the Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan’s remote northernmost point, and he was from Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, but they came separately to Detroit to work — he as an auto worker and she as a housemaid…
I know that now.
My appointment with my oncologist went well yesterday. Four years and still cancer-free. I never realize who anxious I’ve been until it’s over and I hear the good news — at least for the present.
What caught me off guard was my reaction as I left the building, walking on air lighter than when I went in. I thought, Good! Now I can concentrate on what’s really important — the eternal fight to save my country from itself.
I mean, seriously. My first damn thought.
I hate that I’m this old — 83 — and I’m still at it. I’ve…
We don’t need Commandments or Courts to tell us what evil looks like.
You may have watched in real time, as I did, the horrific scenes as thousands of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6. Or maybe you saw clips of the worst of it later, brought to you by brave reporters armed with cell phone cameras instead of fire extinguishers or flag poles.
You may be wondering, as I am, how those people could have been spun into such a froth they would leave their homes to travel to that spot, fully prepared to storm the building in order to stop, by any means possible, the final confirmation that would give…
When even the Democrats thought Truman was a lost cause.
On November 3, 2020, against all odds, Joe Biden, last year’s quaint old anachronistic hopeful who had been slogging along at the far end of a long, long line of dazzling Democratic presidential candidates, won the election that might well become our country’s greatest game-changer. Even now there are some who still can’t believe it happened. And that includes Democrats.
So I’m here to remind my fellow Democrats about that time Harry Truman won an election nobody thought possible. He was the underdog right up until that moment when he wasn’t. (Don’t remind me that Donald Trump did the same…
Did you?
Finally! It’s 2021! We thought it would never get here! It’s going to change everything! Or, god forbid, nothing. But we’ll change. It’s the new year. We always change. Or promise to change. Or threaten to change. It’s a thing with us humans — throwing out last year’s calendar is a signal for us to rethink everything we did in the past 365 calendar days and regurgitate, in every way possible, the times we’ve failed to live up to the promises we might have made on that long ago magic day, January 1, 2020.
For most of us 2020 was…
We’re not the doomed or the damned, we just don’t believe in your gods.
Yesterday someone tweeted, “What do atheists do this time of year?” So far it has six thousand comments, two thousand ‘likes’, and a few hundred retweets. Most of the comments were polite, considering the question, and many of them were funny, but the underlying theme seemed to be ‘Huh??’.
I saw a similar, unanswerable question online recently: “What do atheists believe in?”
When we atheists say we’re non-believers we don’t literally mean we don’t believe in anything. We just don’t believe in deities. (It’s sometimes just a way of saying we’re atheists without the baggage.)
“Atheist” is often written with…
Leave science out of it
I didn’t do well in grade school. I always thought I was dumb–and it’s possible I really was–but even after the teacher wrote on my third grade report card, “Ramona needs to work on her concentration. She daydreams too much in class”, I saw my lack of interest in learning the hard stuff as little more than a case of misinterpretation. Daydreaming is nothing more than thinking, and thinking, I knew even then, was good.
My mom, always one to let me believe I might be the most important person on the face of the earth (A terrible burden to…
You’re asking too much while they’re doing too little
On the day my father died I was involved in a fender-bender. A boy, a brand-new driver, pulled out of a Hot and Now, so unexpectedly I didn’t even have time to apply my brakes. I was rushing to get through a light about to change and I slammed into his left fender. Literally a fender-bender.
I was beside myself. The nurse who called to tell me it was time said I had better hurry. …
I was that young mother calming our children as our world fell apart
On that day I was up in my sewing room, away from the TV. My four-year-old son was napping, and my 7-year-old daughter was in school. My husband was at work. It was early afternoon.
I heard the back door open and before I could start to the stairs, I could hear my neighbor, Gwen, shouting something, sobbing. I thought something must have happened to her mother, who had been ailing. By the time I got to her she could barely speak. “They shot the president! They shot Kennedy!”
I turned on the TV and we sat watching, hoping, both…
