A Confusing Day
For some reason, all day yesterday – Thursday – it felt to me like it was Friday. That used to happen often on days right before or after holidays or vacations, but not since we retired and moved to Georgia three years ago, when there was no longer much difference between weekdays and weekends. And it certainly hasn’t happened since stay-at-home guidelines went into effect in mid-March. I can’t attribute the feeling to the 4th of July weekend coming up, [...]
Homebound
Not long ago, my book club read A Gentleman in Moscow, a novel about a man who was put under house arrest by the Bolsheviks in 1922, and ordered to spend the rest of his life in the elegant hotel he had been living in for several years. He was warned that if he set foot outside the hotel, he would be shot. I’m starting to understand how he felt. Not about getting shot if I step outside, of course, [...]
A nod and a smile could lift our hearts
“My head understands it, but it was hard on my heart.” I heard that last night from a woman in British Columbia. I was attending a special “Pandemic Presentations” Toastmasters meeting via Zoom, and the person giving the speech – who is single and lives alone in her apartment – was talking about the feelings of isolation she was experiencing while social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. At one point, she talked about how she feels when she goes outside [...]
A plea for help
My blog this week is a plea for help, one that will benefit people in desperate circumstances in one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet it has to do with the medical crisis that is affecting us all – here in the United States and around the world, including the Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Southwest Uganda. Those who have been regular readers of my column and blog know about my work in Uganda with Pathways to Hope Africa, [...]
No black or white answers
“We’re black, aren’t we?” That’s the question my friend’s five-year-old granddaughter asked her this morning. Her heart broke when she heard the question, and mine broke when she told me about it. It broke even more when she told me her granddaughter’s next question, in which she asked about a close family friend. “She’s white, isn’t she?” It’s not as though her granddaughter didn’t recognize the difference in skin color before, it’s just that it didn’t matter. But now it [...]