In the October 9, 2024 New York Times, Jessica Grose wrote, “It has been four and a half years since public schools across the country closed their doors to in-person learning. There is evidence that this generation of K-12 students has not fully recovered academically — and may never do so.” Sadly, this is an issue neither Harris nor Trump addressed in the recent campaign. Harris was largely focused on childcare and Trump’s concept of a plan was to abolish the Department of Education and ban critical race theory. In our community, schools were closed for almost 18 months.

I am heartbroken over how the pandemic impacted my grandchildren. What they lost can never be fixed.

In March 2020, when life as we knew it shut down, my grandchildren ranged in age from 18 to seven. The oldest, twins, also have disabilities so this may be a good place to begin. For students with special needs and IEPs (individualized learning plans), remote learning was a disaster. Removing the routine of attending school and the personal relationship with their teachers and therapists meant their educations ceased to exist. Their attention span for zoom instruction was limited. Many did not have parents or adults to supervise their learning experience, so they lost two precious years of education.  When my granddaughter graduated from Cove Junior High School in 2018, she was poised and delivered her speech beautifully. By her high school graduation in 2022, she was masked, anxious, and had lost the confidence and joy of her junior high school graduation. She had suffered a huge social setback.

Her younger sister was in 8^th grade in March 2020 when life as she knew it ground to a halt. She missed graduating from middle school and started high school via zoom. Most students did not turn on their cameras, so there was no way to know if they were even attending class. A devoted dancer, she took her instruction remotely and alone in the basement. Despite putting down a safe dancing surface, buying a barre, and hanging a mirror on the wall, she injured herself by not having an actual human instructor to see if she was doing things correctly. High school didn’t open until her sophomore year, leaving her socially in 8^th grade for 18 months. Any girl can tell you this would be a nightmare. When the high school finally opened and she was able to attend masked, academically it was, and continued to be, a “soft landing.” Learning standards were lower, students were allowed to be late, and attendance was poor.

For my grandsons in Newton, Massachusetts, who were ten and seven in March of 2020, the extensive school closure resulted in a total upheaval of their lives. Their mother is a pediatrician who had to return to work wearing protective gear, which caused them anxiety that she would be safe. Their father was able to work from home, but he needed to do his job along with supervising zoom learning. They rearranged their house to provide a virtual classroom space for each child, but the seven-year-old needed help with his assignments and found it hard to sit in front of a computer screen for hours each day. For both children, this was a lonely, isolating time that lasted through the 2021-22 school year. When their school finally reopened, they were anxious about attending in person and vigilant about wearing their masks.

My Indiana grandkids fared better because, living in a red state, in person learning resumed after being shut down from March through May, 2020. Still, it was difficult to supervise them as my daughter had to work outside the house during that time and there were five kids, ages 16 to 8, supposedly learning via zoom. Two of my grandchildren tended to be anxious before the pandemic, and the shut down and worrying about getting COVID only made things worse.

According to Jessica Grose’s story about the education crisis we are now in due to loss of learning of academics and soft skills (how to be students and interact with peers) during the pandemic, the achievement gap between students like my grandkids, whose parents tried to keep their online learning on track, and students whose families were unable to provide supervision for their children has widened. Teacher interviews by Grose revealed that “some of their students are behaviorally and socially stunted in ways that aren’t always captured by statistics.” Our schools were already on a downward trend and the pandemic accelerated it. Math and reading scores are at their lowest in decades, while absenteeism has accelerated. Many students who transferred to private schools because their public school remained closed for up to 18 months as ours did never returned. The resulting sharp decline in enrollment has become a crisis as our school district will have to close schools and come up with savings to balance the budget.

I am heartbroken over how the pandemic impacted my grandchildren. What they lost can never be fixed.

I started writing for Retrospect in July, 2018. John Zussman found a post I had written on another site and asked if he could use it. Then he asked if I wanted to write for Retrospect. I loved the format and, as a woman looking at her 70^th birthday in the rearview mirror, I could definitely think back. I had retired from my career as director of Cherry Preschool in May of 2013, so this was the perfect time for me to share my stories forward.

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it" -- Goethe

I have seen many endings in my life: The loss of loved ones, changes in jobs, retirement, and writing opportunities that were in a constant state of flux. Rather than viewing these as endings, I have chosen to follow the wisdom of Fred Rogers, one of my great heroes:

Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.

 My life journey has been filled with so many new beginnings. Getting married, starting a teaching career, raising three kids, going back to work as a preschool teacher (a far cry from teaching high school English pre-kids), and deciding to learn about what I was actually doing by getting a Masters in early childhood education. Becoming a preschool director just fell into my lap. Founding Cherry Preschool evolved from having to leave the old one. Most of my new beginnings happened with little planning. Serendipity.

Kids leaving home evolved into new beginnings for them as they married and later had their own children. Grandkids. That was an amazing new beginning for me. And then I bumped into a really tough ending, retirement. Determined not to spend the rest of my life babysitting my grandchildren, taking classes, participating in a book club, and meeting friends for lunch, all activities I enjoyed, I was also searching for a new beginning just for me. At that point, I was feeling what my friend Marcia wisely called the “Loss of the Boss” syndrome. I felt at the mercy of others who didn’t want to open their doors for me. What I learned after many breakfast meetings and collaborations with Marcia was that I never needed to have anyone open any doors. I just needed to create a new path for myself.

I’ve always loved to write, so when a friend suggested I give blogging a try, I thought, why not? As a newbie blogger for ChicagoNow, I struggled to learn the ins and outs of writing short, blog-worthy pieces, doing Internet research, trying to get comfortable with WordPress, setting up a Facebook page, and writing an emailed newsletter. I came to love it. Sometimes my posts were well-read and other times almost ignored. Sometimes folks made complimentary comments and other times not so much. But I learned to enjoy this new path for the sheer joy writing brought to me.

Having grandchildren with special needs and young grandkids just entering preschool and elementary school combined with my career as an educator to provide the fuel for many of my initial posts. There was just so much that needed fixing in education. I soon discovered I had a multitude of other interests outside of education. I developed a strong need to share how I felt about a wide range of topics, including generational shifts, aging, retirement, pop culture, politics, healthcare, genealogy, parenting, and grandparenting. More and more, my posts fell under the category of “life style opinion.”

My mother’s death in 2015 marked a huge turning point in my life. I was now an orphan and about to turn seventy. I was truly in desperate need of a new beginning, so I decided to write a book. Why not? My mother was my biggest fan who thought everything I wrote was brilliant and worth sharing with her lady friends. While I wrote Terribly Strange and Wonderfully Real, I was haunted by Paul Simon’s lyric, “How terribly strange to be seventy” (Old Friends/Bookends). I really wrote the book to honor my mother and to create another new beginning in my life to cope with that huge loss.

In addition to working on the book, I kept blogging. Opportunities came and vanished. My editor at Alternet left. Huffington Post changed its format and my editor there also left. Once again, I sought new beginnings for my work. Debbie Galant from Midcentury Modern Magazine saw something I had written and asked if I wanted to write for her via Medium. That lasted until she ended her blog. And then there was Retrospect.

When I learned that Retrospect was ending I was heartbroken. I loved the concept of thinking back to share forward. I enjoyed the challenge of writing to a weekly prompt, and I was just starting to make virtual friends through the comments we made on each other’s posts. Then I discovered that Suzy Underwood, Marian Hirsch, and Barb Buckles were looking for another partner-in-crime to keep the site alive. I again thought, why not? Almost 300 stories later, I still hope to write under the new, prompt-less format. I also spend countless hours revise my own website to include stories that were lost when prior blogging sites folded.

My dear cartoonist friend and collaborator Marcia, drew the images at the top ad end of this post for things I wrote. I especially love her incorporating the Goethe quote in the featured image,

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Here’s to dreaming big, being bold, and to a finding the seeds of new beginnings in the end of yet another part of my life.

On January 21, 2017 and January 20, 2018, I donned my pussy hat and brought my hand-made poster to downtown Chicago to join the Women’s March protesting the election of Donald Trump. Both times, the weather was glorious for January in Chi-town. Both times, showing resistance to the man who unbelievably defeated Hillary Clinton in the electoral college to become president gave me a sense of hope. Look at all of the like-minded people filling the streets. Somehow, we would overcome.

In the face of injustice ... resistance.

Now it’s eight years later and we are back where my nightmare began. Sadly, there are some painful differences. My marching days are over, as these years have not been kind to my back or knee. And for now, my fighting spirit is a bit broken. I love reading Heather Cox Richardson’s blog Letter from an American. On December 7 she wrote:

“Donald Trump and his cronies have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists and their political opponents, and end abortion across the country. They want to put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live. Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?”

When she puts it that way, I have to shout NO and think of how I can once again become part of the resistance. I remind myself, as Robert B. Hubbell wrote in his Today’s Edition Newsletter on December 7,

“We must remember that Trump is sowing the seeds of the GOP’s defeat with every outrageous nomination and ludicrous pronouncement. If we can hold that thought, we can make it through the next few months. Don’t cringe and cower; remember and prepare. The 2026 midterms have already started—and Trump is undermining his party every day. Let’s do everything in our power to leverage Trump’s depravity to our advantage.”

So, I cautiously return to watching a tiny bit of news again. Living in a blue bubble, I actually thought Kamala Harris would win. When she lost to Trump, I went on a bit of a news boycott, but I am slowly returning. I can’t spend the next four years being an ostrich with my head in the sand. I vow to find ways to resist the terrible people he has appointed to his cabinet. It is likely most of them will be confirmed, but reaching out to the few Republican Senators willing to join the Democrats to keep out the worst of the worst will be a decent use of my time.

While I can’t physically be there, I will donate to support The People’s March on Washington slated for January 18, 2025. I will protest whatever cruel actions the Trump administration takes. And I will work to help the Democrats take control of Congress in the 2026 midterms. In the face of injustice, resistance.

Originally published in Retrospect May 3, 2023

I have a long history of poor sleep. When I was still working, a colleague and I used to joke that we should have called one another at 4:00 a.m. because we were both up at ridiculous o’clock every day.

One of my favorite fairy tales is The Princess and the Pea. If you don’t remember it, the queen is trying to find a true princess to marry her son. She devises a test in which a pea is placed under mattresses piled so high, one on top of another, that only a true princess is sensitive enough to feel the pea. As is the way with fairy tales, a girl in rags is the one to pass the test, reporting that she was unable to sleep all night because she could feel a small lump in her bed. Perhaps that’s my problem?

We need a new mattress. Things have changed quite a bit in Mattress Land since the days when we bought a mattress and box spring and put them on a metal bed frame. Mattresses have become thicker and heavier. So heavy, in fact, that older folks like us struggle to make our bed without throwing out our backs. We selected one that will fit on the adjustable bed frame we already have, and I have convinced myself that once it arrives, I will sleep soundly for seven to eight hours, waking up only once to use the bathroom.

That’s probably not going to happen because I have a long history of poor sleep. When I was still working, a colleague and I used to joke that we should have called one another at 4:00 a.m. because we were both up at ridiculous o’clock every day. I’m not sure she still has the same sleep problems now that we are both retired, so, in lieu of calling her, I tried to lull myself back to sleep early this morning by reading An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine.

When I read this passage, I realized that Alameddine nailed my dilemma:

“Why is it that at an age when we need the curative powers of slumber most we least have access to it? Hypnos fades as Thanatos approaches.”

Or, in less elegant terms, a paradox for seniors — the older we get, and the more tired we are, the less well we sleep. My husband and I often begin the day with an important question – did you sleep? Of course, we did sleep some, but what we mean is a series of questions that describe the quality of that sleep. What time did you fall asleep? How many times did you wake up during the night? What time were you up for good?

Shakespeare must have had similar sleep issues. As I lay awake most of last night, my mind drifted and the former English teacher part of me recalled his words:

From Hamlet:

“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.”

From Macbeth:

“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

From Henry IV:

“O sleep! O gentle sleep!
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?”

From The Tempest:

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

Of course, in many of these famous quotes, Shakespeare is confounding Hypnos (sleep) with Thanatos (death). But let’s not go there. For now, I’ll take them out of context as they roll through my too-busy mind that refuses to yield to a reasonable amount of sleep.

When I was younger, late night celebrations or crying babies stole sleep from me. Next, worry crept into my bed. It’s 1:00 a.m. and where is my teenaged child who promised to be home by midnight? How will I solve this huge problem at work tomorrow?

Now, I’m not sure what continues to wake me at 2:31 a.m. (a time when there is still the possibility of drifting back  to sleep) or 4:25 a.m. (a time when some folks have noticed I may post a blog piece). Sure, I still can find tons of things to worry about, but I think my problem is more like the one described by Alameddine’s main character, Aaliya. I need those curative powers of a good night’s sleep, but as I age, they elude me.  If I don’t get enough sleep, I know I will crash in the late afternoon. Or if that is not possible, I will fall asleep at 7:30 p.m. watching a PBS mystery, with my husband prodding me every five minutes to wake up so I don’t miss the brilliant plot twists and turns. And me grumping that I don’t care.

Last night was a perfect example of my struggles with sleep. I slept for about 90 minutes, waking up because I had to use the bathroom. I’m not sure I ever fell back asleep, spending much of the night with Shakespearean quotes and earworm songs running through my head. I tried reading in another room for a bit, yet I was still up by 4:50 a.m., ready to start my morning exercise routine while watching a taped Rachel Maddow Show from last night and delighting in Tucker Carlson’s demise.

Shakespeare really understood the issue of poor sleep. Maybe he was such a prolific writer because he was a bit of an insomniac.  My dance with sleep is pretty close to watching Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, desert me just when I need him the most to make it through the day. Of course, Hypnos carried opium, poppies, and the water of forgetfulness with him. All I had was a good book that made me even more alert.

I’m sure I will once again drift off early this evening watching something we recorded on our DVR.  Then, I will wake up in time to go to sleep and have a hard time falling asleep. If I’m lucky, I will only get up once and fall back asleep until 5:00 a.m. I guess I’m the poster child for poor sleep hygiene. Despite knowing this, I just continue to rinse and repeat.

Maybe to sleep like a baby I need to sleep with one?

I have often longed to “have words with someone,” but rarely do. Being a conflict-avoidant person, I try to calm down before I confront anyone. My first step is usually to write something with the intention of sending it as an email or letter, usually to one of my kids or a friend who upset me. Recently, I went through these unsent letters and deleted them from my computer. No sense making waves after I’m gone.

Leaving aside his despicable political views and deeds, there is no way I would want this creep to protect me. He’s a gross, misogynistic pig.

There is one person, however, with whom I can no longer restrain myself from having words: Donald Trump. Never have I despised a politician more, and that’s saying a lot since I hated Richard Nixon. But Trump is far worse, which was unimaginable before 2015.

At several recent rallies, Trump has said that he will be a “protector” of women. If I vote for him, “You will no longer be thinking about abortion … because we’ve done something that nobody else could have done. It is now where it always had to be, with the states and a vote of the people.” He has claimed that women are “poorer, less healthy, less safe, more stressed, depressed and unhappy” than we were four years ago. Now, “women will be happy, healthy, confident and free,” and our “lives will be happy, beautiful, and … great again.” Trump reassures me that he will take good care of women.

This man who has been found liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll, also told us in in the infamous Access Hollywood tape, “I better use some tic-tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”

He also shared in the same tape, “I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it … I did try and fuck her. She was married … I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden, I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”

He had a 10-month affair with Karen McDougal, Playboy’s Playmate of the Year for 1998, six months after he married Melania. The Access Hollywood tape was recorded shortly after their marriage as well. Then he slept with porn star Stormy Daniels when Melania had just given birth to their son. Of course, she knew what she was getting into because he had divorced Marla Maples, who Trump married two months after she gave birth to their daughter Tiffany. His affair with Maples ended his marriage to wife #1, Ivana.

From 1996 to 2015, Donald Trump co-owned the Miss Universe Organization, which also included the Miss U.S.A. and Miss Teen U.S.A. pageants. He told radio host Howard Stern in 2005 that he went backstage during a Miss USA or Miss Universe pageant when the contestants were naked. “No men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in, because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. … You know, they’re standing there with no clothes … And you see these incredible-looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that.”

According to the New York Times, “Depending on how you count them, 19 or 67 women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. Women who have said he “squeezed my butt,” “eyed me like a piece of meat,” “stuck his hand up my skirt,” “thrust his genitals,” “forced his tongue in my mouth,” was “rummaging around my vagina,” and so on.”

The Washington Post, a reviewer of All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, describes the book as “a deep dive into the many allegations that depict Trump’s relationships with women as vulgar, misogynistic, demeaning, sometimes violent and always puerile. The accusations wash over a reader like a tidal wave of sewage until you are thoroughly caked in muck and lightheaded from the stink.”

Leaving aside his despicable political views and deeds, there is no way I would want this creep to protect me. I don’t understand how any woman could vote for the man who bragged about appointing Supreme Court judges to get rid of Roe v. Wade. He’s a gross, misogynistic pig. Word.

One of the more upsetting parts of aging is forgetting the names of people, places, and things. You know, those nouns that often receive the placeholder “what-cha-ma-call-it” until they float into my head when I stop trying to think of them.

Here’s something else I do remember. In the movie GiGi, which I loved when I was when I was a pre-teen, Maurice Chevalier sang to Hermione Gingold, I Remember it Well.

As we age, nouns become harder to access. Rob Reiner, age 77, joked that he was starting a game show for seniors called “Name That Noun.” I have a friend who records Jeopardy and pauses it to give herself time to recall the answer. She usually knows it but needs a few more seconds than the younger contestants. While my husband and I don’t do that, we are often amazed that very smart younger contestants have no idea about things like the origin of the folk song Marching to Pretoria. Originally, it was sung by British soldiers during the Boer War in the late 19th century as they marched to Pretoria, South Africa. My husband and I immediately began to sing the version made popular by The Weavers in the 1950s, which we both sang in grade school. The contestants were too young to know the song or its origins, although they may have known more about the Boer War than we did.

But even funnier, in the category 40 Years Ago, 1984, when shown a picture of Scott Hamilton winning the Olympic gold medal, a contestant identified him as Mary Lou Retton. So, there’s being very book smart but not old enough to know what happened at the 1984 Olympics, which I remember very well.

Here’s something else I do remember. In the movie GiGi, which I loved when I was when I was a pre-teen, Maurice Chevalier sang to Hermione Gingold, I Remember it Well:

We met at 9
We met at 8
I was on time
No, you were late
Ah yes
I remember it well
We dined with friends
We dined alone
A tenor sang
A baritone
Ah yes
I remember it well
That dazzling April moon
There was none that night
And the month was June
That’s right, that’s right
It warms my heart to know that you
Remember still the way you do
Ah yes
I remember it well
How often I’ve thought of that Friday-
Monday
-Night
When we had our last rendevouz
And somehow I foolishly wondered if you might
By some chance be thinking of it too
That carriage ride
You walked me home
You lost a glove
I lost a comb
Ah yes
I remember it well
That brilliant sky
We had some rain
Those Russian songs
From sunny Spain?
Ah yes
I remember it well
You wore a gown of gold
I was all in blue
Am I getting old?
Oh no, not you
How strong you were
How young and gay
A prince of love in every way
Ah yes
I remember it well

At the time, Chevalier was pushing 70 and Gingold was 61. Not really that old by today’s standards. But to me at the time, they were adorable oldsters and the fact that they couldn’t remember the details of their date was precious. Not so funny when it’s me who can’t remember it well.

Vietnam Tet Offensive, 1968

In 1968, as the war in Vietnam raged on, I chanted with others, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” I supported Gene McCarthy, and later Robert Kennedy, both running against Johnson for the Democratic Presidential nomination as anti-war candidates. I was hopeful for a bit, especially on March 31 when LBJ announced he would not seek re-election.

The violence exacerbated by Mayor Daley’s draconian crackdown on protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention helped to elect Nixon, a far worse alternative than Humphrey.

I was getting married that August 18, so I was also a bit distracted. But 1968 was a year that didn’t permit very much time for celebration. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Riots broke out, cities burned, and I tried to process that tremendous loss. Robert Kennedy’s words helped. He was in Indianapolis when he announced the assassination to a predominantly black audience, saying in part,

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country…”

By June 5, Robert Kennedy was gone, felled by an assassin’s bullet. And in the midst of wedding planning and joy, I worried. The war in Vietnam raged on. August 8, Richard Nixon, a man I both feared and loathed, won the Republican nomination. Would my husband-to-be or my brothers be drafted?

Still, life went on. Ten days later, I got married, went on a honeymoon, and returned to Chicago as the riots erupted during the Democratic convention. The “whole world was watching” in horror and disbelief as protestors were beaten by police and Hubert Humphrey, not Gene McCarthy, was nominated. 1968 was a pretty bad year. I fought with members my parents’ generation about the war, lived in fear of the draft, thought about moving to Canada, and never doubted that Nixon was a crook.

As I approach my 55^th wedding anniversary this weekend, I want to reach out to those who are planning to stage protests at the convention in support of the Palestinians. This coming election is likely to be very close. As the Democratic convention is set to meet once again in Chicago, I want to share some memories from 1968.

In November, Nixon defeated the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, by a narrow margin of the popular vote. Nixon garnered support by promising to restore law and order and to “end the war and win the peace.” We all know now that these were hollow promises, At the time, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about voting for Humphrey, but that’s what I did. Many of my peers chose to “Dump the Hump” and forgo voting, giving Nixon a slim majority, and ushering an ill-fated second term, which ended in his resignation after much domestic chaos and many more deaths as he escalated the war.

When Nixon became President in January 1969, the number of drafted US troops neared its peak of 536,100. There was no “peace with honor.” Nixon introduced a draft lottery system in an effort to address criticism of inequity within the draft, and people I knew chanted “Hell no, we won’t go,” and very few of them did. There were educational and other deferments for people of privilege as well as the possibility of moving to Canada.

In March of 1969, the fourteen-month Cambodian bombing campaign to cut off supplies to the North Vietnamese resulted in horrifying statistics. America dropped more tonnage in bombs during this time than the total tonnage dropped on Japan during WWII. Still, the North Vietnamese government refused to negotiate. On April 30, 1970, Nixon ordered our ground troops into Cambodia in an effort to “root-out” any communist forces concentrated there. Nixon knew this would stir up the anti-war protestors but believed it was necessary to win the war.

College campuses erupted to protest this escalation of the endless war in Vietnam. At Kent State, students set fire to the school’s ROTC building, resulting in the Ohio National Guard being called in on May 4,1970, to restore order. Students threw rocks and the guardsmen opened fire, killing four students. Less than two weeks later, Mississippi State Police shot into a Jackson State College dormitory after supposedly being shot at by anti-war demonstrators, killing two innocent young bystanders. Nixon’s narrow defeat of Humphrey, enabled by the clash between anti-war protestors and police at the 1968 Democratic convention, had prolonged a futile and painful war that resulted in the death of 5,820 American soldiers and two million Vietnamese civilians.

The protestors against the war in Gaza have a just cause. Protesting how Israel is responding to the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of over 1200 innocent Israelis and the taking of over 250 civilian hostages by killing more then 38,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, in an effort to destroy Hamas is understandable. But other than trying to influence our government’s policy toward Israel, it is not analogous to the Vietnam protests of 1968. American protests can’t effect a change in Netanyahu’s government. In 1968, we had a personal stake in the war, as young men we knew were subject to being drafted into an unjust war being conducted by our government. And because ours was government dropping the bombs, killing two million civilians in Vietnam and Cambodia, we believed our protests could effect change by electing new leaders. How would the current protests bring about a change in the leadership of Hamas and Israel?

In the end, the violence exacerbated by Mayor Daley’s draconian crackdown on protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention helped to elect Nixon, a far worse alternative than Humphrey. He escalated the Vietnam war rather than ending it as he had promised. As we are about to enter the 2024 Democratic convention, once again in Chicago,  I am hopeful the protestors will stay in their lane and not be confronted by counter-protestors. How would the election of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris be the outcome that will best serve the cause of the Palestinian people?

Where are George Clooney, Noah Wyle, Anthony Edwards, and Eriq KaSalle when I need them? Those TV docs from the 1990s hit show ER are not what I encounter when I need to go to the emergency room. Instead, I wait hours to see any medical staff at all, which is why I do anything I can to avoid the ER.

There has to be a better way to deliver medical care. ER waiting rooms are just another broken part of our system.

In January, I had severe back and leg pain and was running a fever. When the thermometer read almost 103, my husband and I decided it was time to go to the emergency room. We chose a hospital with what we believed would be a shorter wait than the one closest to us. The waiting room was not very crowded, but people were not being called in to see medical staff. After five hours, it was finally my turn. What I saw in the ER was many empty rooms and very few staff members. I was given pain relief medications and an ultrasound to see if I had a DVT. When they wanted to admit me, I declined. If I was going to be hospitalized, I wanted to be in the hospital closest to where I live. This was a sister hospital in the same network, so I stupidly assumed I would be admitted with no fuss. I was so weak that I needed a paramedic to lift me into the car.

I went home to get a few things and slid to the floor. It was the classic “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” My husband called the EMTs and I had my first ambulance ride ever. I stupidly believed that patients arriving by ambulance went straight to the ER. Wrong. They put me in a wheel chair and I went straight to … the waiting room. We naively explained that we had already waited five hours at the sister hospital. It didn’t matter. There was no credit for time served. Six hours later, I was finally in the ER, where they admitted me to the hospital. That was a total of 11 hours of waiting in pain before I was seen by medical personnel.

A friend of mine had a similar experience at the same hospital’s waiting room. During her time there, a man fell out of his wheel chair onto the floor. When she approached the triage nurse to inform her, she was told they already knew about the problem but had to wait for medical personnel to lift him from the floor to his wheel chair … so he could continue waiting. For reasons like these, I avoid the ER. Immediate Care can be spotty in the skills of the personnel who deal with minor emergencies, but they don’t make sick people wait for hours to be seen. There has to be a better way to deliver medical care. ER waiting rooms are just another broken part of our system.

Off to college in 1963

When I graduated high school in 1963, I was terrified by the prospect of starting college, even though the University of Michigan was about an hour from my home. Aside from sleepovers, I had never been away from home. If my mother had her way, I would have lived at home and commuted to Wayne State University, the only other school to which I had applied. I will always be grateful to my father for pushing me to go to Michigan, even if it was for the wrong reason. He loved their sports teams.

1963 was the year I became my own person with my own values.

That first part of the year was rough. I was pretty homesick and my father was always happy to bring me home for the weekend, probably not the best idea to help me adjust to being on my own. I so clearly remember the day JFK was assassinated, November 22, 1963. I was in a Spanish class I detested when there was a commotion in the hall. The teacher left and returned to announce that the President had died, followed by telling us to “get out of here.” After wending my way back to my dorm, passing by hysterical students, I called home and my father came to get me.

To understand what happened next, I have to share that my father was a history buff who loved to hold forth and lecture his children ad nauseam. His way of comforting me for the loss of my idol was to go on endlessly about how the death of FDR was for worse. By the time we got home, I realized that his world view and mine were miles apart. I was already unhappy about our involvement in Vietnam while my parents would come to view draft dodgers as unpatriotic. They were not very interested in King’s March on Washington while I had very passionate about civil rights. I was hooked on the Beatles, but my father viewed them with contempt and insisted their music, unlike Sinatra’s, would never stand the test of time.

In retrospect, I realized that had finally left home. I no longer shared the same values as my parents. When I returned to school after Kennedy’s funeral, I stopped calling so often to come home for weekends. 1963 was the year I became my own person with my own values.

Can you find me in the picture? I also learned to party and drink!

Dedicated to the late Penny, the perfect dog for a child’s phobia

Dog lovers, please don’t hate me. I really, really like dogs. I adored my own dog Checkers as a child and loved our Yorkshire Terrier Rocky when my kids were growing up. One of my daughters is a vet, and all of my kids have dogs. But I have to agree when it comes to banning dogs from children’s playgrounds. In fact, I have to go further and ask dog owners to think twice before bringing their dogs to places like street fairs and school grounds. Yes, dogs have rights, but so do the folks who fear them.

Not all kids, or adults for that matter, love dogs. Can’t there be a few dog-free public spaces where a young girl can ride her bike or play or simply take a walk and feel safe?

There was an ongoing controversy in Chicago over the banning of dogs from Maggie Daley Park, a beautiful play space for kids. Of course, the usual reason given for outlawing dogs from some city parks is the poop. Yes, I know you pick up after your dog, but not everyone does. And there are also those stinky treasures in plastic baggies filling the trash containers. But there is another reason for keeping dogs out of parks designed for kids that I rarely read about: Some kids have a phobia about dogs.

Like many children with sensory issues, one of my grandchildren is deathly afraid of dogs. So afraid that she was almost hit by a car running into the street to avoid the many dogs outside of her school. She had a full-blown panic attack. Some days, entering or leaving school was like running the gauntlet for her. I know what you are thinking. She should just get over it. It’s a dog’s world. Well, that’s not so easy for a child with special needs who was knocked down by a large dog in a park near her home at age two. And it’s not uncommon for children with special needs to fear dogs, even without a traumatic encounter. Dogs bark loudly, move suddenly into their space, and jump up on them – all friendly gestures that upset kids who have sensory issues.

Let me share how hard our family has tried to help my granddaughter “get over” her fear of dogs:

For over a year, I took her to weekly sessions at Rainbow Animal Assisted Therapy. It’s a wonderful program with extremely patient volunteers who bring their well-behaved dogs to interact with children like my granddaughter. Her fear did lessen to the point where she could walk a dog and brush its fur. If all dogs lived in a predictable environment like Rainbow, she would have made her peace with them. Unfortunately for her, the experiences at Rainbow did not carry over to dogs she saw in her everyday life. Those dogs barked, jumped, and didn’t sit quietly when she whispered, “Sit.”

Next, her mother arranged for sessions with a friend’s therapy dog, facilitated by a child behavioral therapist. That also fell flat as it was hard to coordinate the therapist’s and dog’s availability. So, we hired Susan, a wonderful dog trainer. My granddaughter did like Susan’s gentle 155-pound Leonberger, Sunny. That relationship helped a bit, but she soon discovered, once again, that most of the dogs she encountered out in the world were nothing like Sunny. They didn’t lie passively on the floor like Sunny did, inviting her to put her head on his immobile body. Tiny pups one tenth of Sunny’s size yipped, nipped, and slipped away from their owners. She could never anticipate what they might do. Unlike cats, dogs slobber all over you and crave interaction. The very qualities we dog-lovers admire terrified her.

Many friends and relatives tried to accommodate my granddaughter’s fear by promising their dogs would be locked up when she visited their homes. But dogs are social creatures that cleverly escape confinement to join the crowd. Every time, the dog inevitably bounded into the room at some point. One very special surprise was finding a family member’s Rottweiler on top of the dining room table when we went in to eat. She had supposedly been locked upstairs in a bedroom. Incidents like that only reinforced her fear that dogs could appear at any time, regardless of what she had been told.

Her parents finally decided drastic measures were in order. They bit the bullet and Penny joined their family. They had Penny trained as a therapy dog, and she was indeed a wonderful pet. I can’t say my granddaughter loved her, but she did grow fond of her and accepted her as part of the family. And her anxiety level around other dogs, while not gone, was somewhat reduced. Still, when she unexpectedly encountered a dog, she panicked and ran. Both behaviors would excite the dog, producing exactly the response she feared.

I hope all of you dog-lovers out there will try to understand how hard we tried. Despite this, when you tie your dog outside a grocery store or the post office or a school (and to those of you who ignore the “no dogs” sign and bring your dog onto the school playground during school hours), you are being unfair to those who fear dogs. When you bring your dogs to a children’s park or playground, you disenfranchise some children who can no longer feel safe to play there. And when you let your dog run off-leash in public places … well, there are no words for you. That’s just plain wrong.

There are so many places off limits to my granddaughter because of her dog anxiety. Her family can’t stroll through outdoor art fairs or even walk along a nature path. They accept this. But just as my granddaughter would never go to a dog park expecting pooches that don’t like kids to leave, I think she and other children like her have the right to go to school or the grocery store or a park created for children without having to worry about sharing these places with dogs. I know your dog is different. Your dog is friendly and loves kids. But not all kids, or adults for that matter, love dogs. Can’t there be a few dog-free public spaces where a young girl can ride her bike or play or simply take a walk and feel safe?

Learning to trust Penny