The Late Arrival

It’s taken nearly a week, but I’ve figured it out: Staycations are overrated . And people who happily tell you that their family wanted to staycation are lying on two counts: They wanted  a staycation. No one wants a staycation, but sometimes you must Staycation. That the time off is staycation in the first place. It’s not staycation, it’s time off , and that’s all it is. If a name must be attached to it, it’d be whatever the snappy pun is for “Of course we’d like to leave this crappy weather and spend our time off school and work someplace tropical, but we just can’t aford it." So there it is. My family is on whatever that snappy little pun is, but we’ll call it Staycation because I haven’t come up with a snappy little pun yet. The truth is that we would’ve loved to escape to Jamaica or Disneyland or anyplace without snow, cold or the threat thereof, but it just wasn’t in the cards for us. Or more specifically: the bank. Or our wallets.     I put a good fac...

You’ve got six words to tell me about yourself. Six . Only six. Could you do it? Even though I know myself relatively well, I’m not sure I could because I have a penchant for flowery language and on occasion: bloviating. Six words sure doesn’t leave a lot of space for bloviating. But it leaves just enough space for. The Truth. Now let’s spin the question a little: You’ve got six words to relate your thoughts on race . Six words. No flowers, no bloviating. Just. The Truth. It is possible; and, in fact thousands of people are posting their six word thoughts on race via author and NPR contributor Michele Norris’ Race Card Project . The online project invites everyday people to submit their thoughts, their stories on race. These thoughts and stories are intended to act as a catalyst that stimulates conversations about race, a particularly touchy subject and sometimes sorespot in America. Race makes us shift uneasily in our seats. We dance around it. Don’t talk it about i...

Oh, everyone can sing. That was the encouragement my musician mother gave many a reluctant choir member who claimed “I just can’t sing solos” throughout the years. She nudged me along with the same admonishment when I joined the high school choir and offered the same protest. Mom knew I was keenly aware that my voice was nowhere near the caliber of her classically trained soprano and that of my sister’s pipes with an insane range of tenor to alto to coloratura. Oh, I could carry a tune in a bucket, but it was clear that Carnegie Hall wouldn’t call for a command performance anytime soon. My voice was different from theirs. Not bad. Just different . Fortunately for her musical charges -- and for me -- one of the many wise things about my mom was that she could see the beauty in The Different and open your eyes to see it too. So...her reluctant singers would sing. Including me. Not sounding like her, not sounding like my sister, but sounding like… me. Today,...

What I’m about to say may put me at risk of being drawn and quartered by an angry, torch-wielding mob, but before I go on, a preface: I love women. In fact, I am a woman who comes from a long line of women. My mother was a woman, as was her mother before her, and her mother’s mother’s and as far as we all know, so was her mother’s mother’s mother. However when I found out that March 8 was International Women’s Day , I rolled my eyes and sighed heavily. I was not moved nor was my heart aflutter. I get it. We’re women. We function and think differently than men. We don’t well up at the mere thought of a male dog being neutered, and yes we are aware that our monthly hormonal shifts make no sense to anyone, including us – so don’t expect logic and/or ask for logic during those times. We accept that, with each passing year, our breasts slide downward, yet we sojourn on wearing constricting contraptions to veil gravity’s sag, er…I mean pull…uh, perhaps effect is a better choice o...