All of you who’ve been complaining about the heat and the hot weather and the sweat and the high temperatures and how hard it is to fall asleep when temperatures are not even in the…
Posts published in “Essays”
By the summer of 1980 the China of Mao Zedong's Communist Party was the result of 30 years of applied radical ideology. Every aspect of life had been relentlessly re-thought and restructured to conform to…
Travel broadens one’s horizons (it also shrinks one’s wallet, but that is a discussion for another day). During the pandemic years, my travel was limited to car trips. However, broad acceptance of the Covid vaccine…
The National Association of Piano Dealers reported 364,545 sales of new instruments in the United States in 1909. That was four times the number of automobiles manufactured in the country that same year. This output…
“I am not now, nor have I ever been…” If you grew up in the 1950s, as I did in a lefty American family, the name Joseph McCarthy elicited as much loathing as that of…
My condo building is peopled for the most part by liberal Baby Boomers interested in the world around them, and on a recent balmy afternoon a group of us sat chatting as neighbors do at…
Try whistling a few bars of the Star-Spangled Banner in downtown Kabul if you want to find out how effective a national anthem is at making enemies. A less deadly outbreak of red-flag-waving hymnody made…
Riding downtown to Seattle on the #99 bus, I seated myself behind two 30-something women speaking Swahili or something, and their young kids in strollers. Behind me sat a white or lightly ethnic man, folded…
When I was a little girl more than 40 years ago, I thought fish were slimy, yucky, disgusting things. An opinion that I held for a long time, punctuated only with a tolerance for poached…