Friends Are Everywhere
I was in the children’s wing of the local library, scoping the shelves for books to read to our grandsons back in Pennsylvania during our weekly FaceTime sessions, a ritual we practice faithfully while we are overwintering in Florida, when a young boy darted by. “I will be in the back room with my friend!” […]
Encountering a Most Unlikely Teacher
When you think of someone who can be your teacher, what comes to mind? Someone older? Wiser? More accomplished? Someone with special expertise or who seems to have their life “together”? Is it possible you may have missed some “unlikely” teachers (and what they had to offer) because they didn’t come wrapped in packaging you […]
The Church is Not a Building!
This is the church This is the steeple Open the doors and see all the people! Do you recognize those words? Perhaps, like me, you learned this song as a child, along with the hand motions that went with it. First, your index fingers form the “steeple” in front of your interlaced fingers (the “church”); […]
Heavy Stuff
What are we going to do with all of this stuff?!? As you may know by reading my past posts, based on our advancing age and increasing physical limitations, Rita and I are planning to move into some kind of life care community at some point in the future. In looking at several communities and […]
Learning from Barry
The question came completely out of the blue. I was talking with a friend who has very strong opinions politically, often quite different from my own. He generally tolerates (appreciates might be going a bit too far!) my questions which are usually focused on helping me better understand his positions and how he came to […]
The Best Investment Advice I Ever Got
When I was a youngster just starting my own newspaper route, I got some advice from a friend of the family. “You need to open your own savings account and get into the habit of saving,” he told me. “If you pay yourself first and make those deposits on a regular basis, between your savings […]
No Dying for Me!
“Wow! I thought we had a lot of cicadas at our house!” said the FedEx deliverywoman as she viewed the “too many to count” carcasses spread over our macadam driveway. “During the summer,” she went on, “I like to sleep with our bedroom windows open but I can’t stand to do that now because of […]
My Two “Go-to” Questions
How it is that the close 20-year friendship of two next-door neighbors ended over dandelions? That is the question I pondered when I heard about the rift that had developed between two couples who live in a rural development near me. The development is quite attractive; the lots are between one and two acres and […]
Choosing Transformation
For Easter this year, in addition to the obligatory basket of candy, we gave our two grandsons a butterfly farm. It’s an all-inclusive package with five very tiny caterpillars that grow so fast that I swear you can actually see them get bigger if you can sit still for a period of time! Rita and […]