From Meredith: 1. Feeling stressed. It’s a useless response to having to meet obligations. 2. Edinburgh. Fringe festival, Pan, Scotch, the Royal Mile, men in kilts. 3. Too many hard ones to name just one. All of them right as there is no wrong answer in life. 4. Peace. It’s...
Deanna showed up as a student in one of my online classes five years ago. After that, she became a mentor embedded into my courses; she drafted me to be the faculty advisor of our campus chapter of Phi Theta Kappa; and recently she achieved her Bachelor’s degree at the...
My friend Susanna, in England, writes: 1 If you could remove one thing from your life, what would it be? Greed. Why? Because I truly believe it underlies all the other atrocities in life such as cruelty, lust for power, lack of compassion, injustice etc etc. 2 What has been...
In the next week or so, I’ll be posting the survey responses of those who have given me permission. Let’s start that roll with the responses of Allegra’s pappy and our family best friend, Virginia. Quick aside: the first sentence of Virginia’s #6 (her ideal day) made me teary. Twenty...
Thank you to everyone who responded to my last post and completed a survey for our rising senior in high school, Miss Allegra. She’s at the point where she has around 60 surveys from folks, with new ones still trickling in. Eventually, when it feels like “time,” she and a...
When Allegra was seven, she — for the first but not the last time — created a survey. She had questions, and she wanted to know how a bunch of people would respond. And they did. After a few weeks, she had collected survey responses from folks around the globe,...
That Duchess Kate takes her own pictures of her kids for press release rather than having a professional photographer manipulating their little selves into pleasing moments. It’s possible I’m a fan of mothers with cameras stop calling my children “long-suffering” admire this birthday portrait of Princess Charlotte That the nieces...
Teddy said it was a hat, So I put it on. Now dad is saying, ‘where the heck’s the toilet plunger gone?’ –Shel Silverstein In Northern Minnesota, winter is long and spring capricious. By April, residents’ moods correlate to the thermometer. That’s why, on a rare, glorious, sun-drenched Saturday when...
