Last week’s Musing revolved around friendship and the precious relationships we enjoy with other people. This week, my husband and I heard of the death of someone who was more than a friend to us; he was also a mentor. Dr. Garth Coonce, along with his wife Tina, may she live and be well, opened...
How many friends do you have? In her book, Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships, National Public Radio’s Legal Affairs Correspondent, Nina Totenberg, writes movingly and eloquently about her friendship with a number of people, most particularly, Ruth Bader Ginsberg. This specific relationship spanned the years both before and after Justice...
There are many ways to quash discussion. One of them, in vogue today, is to refuse to separate ideas from individuals. Do you think illegal immigration is a problem? You obviously hate migrants and what is more, you are xenophobic. Are you concerned about men adopting babies? This means that you surely hate men or...
Around three weeks from now, I will observe my mother’s 23rd yahrzeit, the annual acknowledgment of the (Hebrew) date of her death. It is, of course, impossible to know for sure how my mother would relate to today’s events, but I think that I have a pretty good idea. My mother had a sunny disposition....
I discovered a previously unpublished Musing deep in the bowels of my computer. From the anecdote therein, I must have written it over six years ago. Within the past few weeks, I have been bombarded with statistics about anxious children, suicidal teens, and emotionally precarious young adults. As society’s hysteria and behavior over COVID upped...
My husband and I enjoyed a delightful Shabbat meal with two popular and lauded teachers. These women taught different grades (lower elementary and high school respectively) in two different schools. Yet, they shared an important commonality. Both of them were getting less satisfaction from teaching than in the past. Both may stop teaching sooner than...
I first heard of Chloe Cole when she was a guest on Dr. Jordan Peterson’s podcast. At the age of 17, she became a public voice against transitioning children. Earlier, as an unhappy 13-year-old, she had quickly been “diagnosed” with gender dysphoria, leading to being prescribed hormone blockers and testosterone, and undergoing a double mastectomy...
After months of steadfastly refusing to add yet another potential distraction to my day, I succumbed and tried my hand at the online game, Wordle. Granted, I can think of playing this game as, ’honing my mental skills,’ and ‘whetting my thinking process,” rather than a distraction, but the danger of one more thing that...
When you need to reach out to a customer-service representative of a big company (let alone a government office) it is possible that, like me, your impulse is to discover that you absolutely, no question about it, must clean out that pesky catch-all drawer in your kitchen before you can do anything else. (My husband...
What would you do? A few weeks ago, a blizzard hit upstate New York, leaving emergency vehicles ineffective as motorists were stranded in almost 52 inches of snow. For drivers, the prospect of freezing to death in one’s car was a scary reality. In one small town, a mechanic by the name of Jay Withey...
