You see, even the title of my essay is a problem. Just typing it induces guilt. Don’t I have a lot to be grateful for? In recent years, the gratitude movement — as I will call it — has really taken off. At the top of the list for most…

“The job is not worth doing for what they pay. The job is not worth doing for the grief. But it is worth doing for the principle.” These are the words of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in a speech to the Bar Association in 2001. That’s not a typo…

A couple of years ago, when I bought my first car (in my fifties), I signed up for Sirius XM radio, mainly so I could go back to hearing Howard Stern a couple of decades after he left terrestrial radio. Along the way, I discovered other fun channels such…

Last year, I took part in a local production of The Laramie Project, a play based on interviews with folks in Laramie, Wyoming, after the brutal murder of college student Matthew Shepard. …

As the summer season begins to kick in, we’ll be hearing more party music during street fairs, parades, barbecues, and outdoor sporting events. This year, I got a short preview in late winter when I went to Fort Lauderdale for a quick vacation. It was only my second-ever trip to…

I lived in New York City for a few decades. I was even the victim of violent crime, more than once. The incidents happened in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when I was young and naïve, and when the city was going through the worst crime wave in memory…

In the late ’80s, a couple of years after moving to New York as an ambitious but naïve twenty-something, my first boyfriend casually said to me, “You remind me of Mary Richards.” Much later, in the 2010s, I lived in a small apartment building and when the apartment upstairs became…

I recently saw a MAGA friend’s (yes, I still have a few) post on Facebook. She was decrying the evil of abortion and, among other things, stated, “These little ones are who evil will target in the end of days.” I hate to break it to her, but if that…

Here in the United States, Holy Week is dominated by the Christian and Jewish faiths, and because our country has a long Judeo-Christian history, the Holy Week traditions are visible to all, whether one practices those religions or not. This year, Holy Week falls smack dab in the middle of…