Category: Uncategorized
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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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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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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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Of What Value is a Book?
A few weeks after I arrived to spend a year with a German family in Berlin, I celebrated my sixteenth birthday. They gave me two books: The Diary of Anne Frank and Cry, the Beloved Country. These two books informed my life as no other books have. Until then I had no knowledge of the Holocaust, no idea that…
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Meanwhile, Across the Atlantic
On the morning of September 12, 2001, my husband, Jim, and I walked along the narrow brick street of a small Italian hilltown. At an outdoor newspaper stand a front-page photograph caught our attention: billows of smoke over New York. Likely an image related to a new movie. Yet we stopped. Relying on the little…
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Dear Senator Cruz
(My friend, Cannan Hyde, wrote a letter to Senator Cruz about being “a good dad.” Do the pandemic and natural disasters offer unique opportunities for parenting? I thought the letter is worth sending to a wider audience.) Dear Senator Cruz, Here are some ideas for how to “be a good dad” in the middle of…
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Repeating our History
Election Day, 1920, Orange County, FL, the county where I grew up. Black groups had been conducting voter registration drives. When Mose Norman, a Black man, tried to vote, a white mob went after him. In the next two days homes of nearly all of Ocoee’s Black families were destroyed by fire. Some estimates are…
Nancy Werking Poling 