Sign of the times: My news-addled friends, the ones who used to read three papers a day, have begun tuning out. I’m thinking of two in particular who, over their long careers, contributed deeply to our common wealth. One now says that, if he were starting out, he wouldn’t have kids because the world’s irreparably…
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Though it has been almost two years since the start of the pandemic, the news regarding COVID-19 is especially discouraging these days. Was it only seven months ago, in June 2021, that daily infections, according to the CDC, were down almost 95 percent from January 2021? By any measure, these were incredibly impressive statistics and…
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When my father suffered his first heart attack in October, 1979, other farmers from our township brought their combines to our fields. They harvested our soybeans, loaded them onto their grain trucks, and drove them to the elevator, all on behalf of my incapacitated father. They did what their fathers had done, and their father’s…
Read MoreWas it only a year ago that life as we knew it, came to a swift and unexpected halt as, what was then, a strange new virus, Covid-19, was moving like wildfire through Europe and Asia and then it was suddenly on our doorstep. “A pandemic is upon us. Two weeks.” they said, “will allow…
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Why wouldn’t there be geese? After all, it’s nesting season here in Ohio. I’m sitting with my wife Cathy in the parking lot at the Franklin County Board of Elections, waiting for my appointed time to go inside and receive my second dose of the Moderna vaccine, when a pair of Canada geese waddle by.…
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It was the height of the pandemic, the hospital ICUs were filled with COVID-positive patients, respirators were in short supply, everyone was stuck at home due to the lockdown watching the daily death tolls rise, the Jacob Javits Center in NYC had been converted to a makeshift hospital, and Grubhub couldn’t keep up with the…
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Remember that old commercial, “Reach Out and Touch Someone”? How quaint it all seems now. And while we all got the message—that “touching” was a metaphor for being connected—today the absence of touch is emotionally devastating. I am a retired congregational rabbi. For over forty years my life was immersed in the joys and struggles…
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It’s like traveling to a foreign country, where you know absolutely no one, are confused about the customs, and don’t speak the language. If you are a couple, well, here you are, just the two of you (and kids and dogs and cats and Zoom and portents of doom), coming face-to-face with all the things…
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I don’t think I really understood how much I loved to dance until the pandemic hit. I had always danced, whether it was in the living room doing interpretive dance to my dad’s CDs as a child or in classes at the rec center. In high school I was on the Hip Hop Team and…
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When I was a teenager, I had a poster of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on their Harleys from the movie, Easy Rider, taped to my bedroom wall. It was the early 1970s, and I lived in a town of one thousand people in rural southeastern Illinois where conservative values held sway. Those values left…
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