Last night I dreamed about John. John was long married to Julia, my father’s cousin, once removed. “Just a shirt-tail relative,” you might be thinking. But John and Julia happened to live in Goshen, Indiana,…
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Once, returning from a trip abroad, Jihong brought me the gift of a Russian matryoshka set. At first glance, all you see is a wooden doll, around 7” high. It’s painted to resemble a happy peasant woman, with a city scene on her plump belly.
However, if you lift away the top half of the doll, you find a smaller matryoshka hidden inside—the peasant woman’s daughter. Open that second doll, and you find an even smaller daughter. And then another daughter. Finally, at the center, you come to a baby.
I admit that I counted my proverbial chickens. Once the distribution of the COVID vaccine was well underway in the U.S., I thought the pandemic would soon be over here. Bursting with optimism, I changed…
This weekend in the U.S., we’re observing Father’s Day. We’re also celebrating Juneteenth, a festival that commemorates the end of American slavery. Juneteenth was just signed into law as a new federal holiday on Thursday….
Your phone rings in the middle of the night. As you reach blindly to answer, do you fear that someone you love has been in an accident? Has suddenly died? For a time, early in...
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More than 100,000 Americans are now dead of COVID-19. Think about that. One hundred thousand lives, each with a unique way of walking through this world. On May 24, The New York Times marked the…
WAKING IN TRUMP’S AMERICA Jan Steckel The Statue of Liberty’s arm is tired. She may have torn her rotator cuff. She still has dual citizenship, wonders if her passport is in order. She imagines lowering…
I submitted this piece some days ago to run in my local paper, The Brookings (SD) Register. But it’s likely to be obsolete before it’s run, since Mr. Trump is so quickly squandering my good…
Note: This blog post was submitted today as a speak-out to the Brookings (SD) Register, my local newspaper. Imagine a large piece of prime farmland where your relatives have lived for generations, getting married, working hard,…
I’m writing to ask your help. Perhaps you’ve been following the strong nonviolent resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, particularly on the part of native peoples who have established the Red Warrior Camp in its…
Too much grief. Too much hate. The killing of Alton Sterling, the killing of Philando Castile, the police ambush in Dallas … these ongoing tragedies make clear that our nation is diseased. The disease…
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