Author: Nancy Werking Poling
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Synchronicity, Part I
Synchronicity: “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection” (Oxford Languages) Twenty-seven years ago, in a narrow column of The Chicago Tribune, I read that the Virgin Mary had stopped visiting a farm at Conyers, Georgia. (Really.) Until then, as many as 80,000 pilgrims would gather to hear Mary’s messages. The…
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Let’s talk about sex
“In case you’re curious,” I once told the grandchildren, “Granddaddy and I have never had sex on the dining room table.” “Nana!” they shouted in embarrassment. I thought it important for them to know that sex between loving adults is not expressed in a frenzy of the aggressiveness they see on HBO or Netflix. Book…
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Concern for the world’s children
The picture made me teary. My daughter, Christie, posted it on Facebook to commemorate Mother’s Day. At nineteen months she’s on my lap, clinging to me. After being gone three days, I’d just returned from the hospital with her new baby brother. The summer of ’68 was a disruptive one for our young family. We…
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A Florida Miseducation
I’m a product of Florida schools, the kind of educational system Ron DeSantis is trying to resurrect. I attended white schools. Black students had their own schools. Separate but equal, supposedly. My teachers were white. Not until, as a seventeen-year-old, I had a job as a waitress, did I ever engage in a conversation with anyone…
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Who pays when we prohibit abortions?
Mothers and families aren’t the only ones to pay the price for laws prohibiting abortions. We all will bear the financial burdens. Have Republicans proposed a budget for this?
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Where is the Republican budget plan?
I was in Canada when I read that the Buncombe County Public Schools (our local district) had been awarded $1.7 million for security upgrades. “Security,” we all know by now, means preventing intruders from killing our children and their teachers. There are 3,143 counties in the United States. Granted, many have fewer school buildings than…
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What you might not understand about student debt
For 19 years I worked in college learning centers. One of the colleges was in rural New York, the other in downtown Chicago. Both were small, private schools. Neither was selective. That is, they accepted many applicants who were academically unprepared for higher education. Whether or not the odds for graduation were promising, a Financial…
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Where’s the liberal church?
Several years ago John Lewis spoke at Montreat (a nearby venue, for readers unfamiliar with our area). Seated together on the front row of the auditorium, a group of elderly ministers were asked to stand. White ministers. Southern ministers. During the tumultuous sixties some of them invited Black speakers to their pulpits; some participated in…
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Watergate and Canned Tomatoes
During the summer of 1973—while I canned fifty quarts of tomatoes, fifty quarts of tomato juice, and twelve pints of catsup (not to mention the green beans and corn)—less than two hundred miles away Men in Power were asking what did Nixon know and when did he know it. Toiling in my narrow kitchen—with its…
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A message for graduates
No one’s asked me to speak at graduation, but I’ve prepared a message for seniors anyway. Theme: Values you’ve been taught in school—forget them. 1) Play fair. In sports and group projects you’ve been taught to work cooperatively, follow the rules, and lose gracefully. Forget it. Look out for Number One, remake the rules to…
Nancy Werking Poling 