There were many things I liked about President Obama. However, my big disappointments with him came on my home court, education. First, there was the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. My more prescient friends were more troubled by the choice than I. I pleaded to give him a chance to prove himself. He seemed like a good guy. He played basketball with the kids in the ‘hood whom...

Although this piece starts in the garden, that’s not where it will remain for long. At the start of every growing season, we gird ourselves for another battle with the evil and tenacious weeds which threaten to engulf our vulnerable crops, so we jumped at the opportunity to attend a workshop a few weeks ago devoted to strategies for keeping the weeds at bay. The recommendation was to turn the...

On a recent morning we had a conference – Zoom, of course – with the lawyer who will be updating and revising our wills and powers of attorney. The originals were drawn up in 1997 and, as we discovered in the course of our conversation, there have been changes in the law as well as in our thinking about the contents of the will. It turns out that in the eyes of the state, dying is a complicated...

Item: I have just finished my Zoom presentation about Mississippi and the Civil Rights Movement to the LA classroom I visit weekly. Alex, their teacher, has opened the chat for any additional questions or comments. “Do you root for the Dodgers?” inquires one student. For the many of you who are not baseball fans, The LA Dodgers were last year’s World Series champions. They operate with one of the...

We agreed to meet them in the parking area outside the terminal. Diving into a sea of people after living all that time with what the Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton called a “cave mentality” was a bridge too far. And what to do about hugs? All week we had been reading contradictory recommendations about the safety issues around this most human of gestures. We decided we would have to see where...