Disasters happen and reporting them is essential, but there’s always that dead air — when nothing more is happening and we’re awaiting more news. That’s when the dread ‘human interest’ stories fill the time, the reporters turning from the real story to look for victims who will try to answer the unanswerable questions: “How did you feel?” “What went through your head?” “Did you think you would ever see your family again?”

The injured — many of them still traumatized, still hurting, still trying to figure out where they are and what happened — are forced to face a camera…

Before I start on what you’ll surely see as a gushing, naïve paean to America, let me say up front that I know how awful we’ve been. I know the terrible things we’ve done — or rather what they’ve done — from the years before that lofty group of privileged white men stewed over the wording in our constitution, wondering how they could keep power and still make a stab at suggesting equality, to right now, a few months after Trump’s insurrectionists raced up the Capitol steps to attack the same government we’ve depended on for more than two centuries…

When Joe Biden was finally and forevermore declared the winner of the presidential election (long before Donald Trump accepted it), in most corners a collective sigh went out and when those of us on pins and needles could take a deep breath and relax, everything seemed to change.

Here at Indelible Ink, it was no different. The submissions moved from political (and personal) angst to waking up, looking around, and seeing life again. For the first time in a long time. even with the threat of COVID still looming, we felt the heaviness lift.

But first, in ‘One Nation Worlds…

I woke up this morning trying to hang on to a fragment of my dream, remembering only that I was with my family at an unfamiliar cottage on a large body of water feeling lucky that the strangers outside let us use it, while noting that, as kitchens go, there wasn’t one. My daughter wanted to make pumpkin pies and I found two disposable pie pans in the cupboard, but no oven to bake them in. That was it. That was all I could remember.

But as I was thinking about it, I realized that my dreams involve locations that…

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:

“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 company’s “Inspiring…

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…

My appointment with my oncologist went well yesterday. Four years and still cancer-free. I never realize how 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…

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…