Columns

I told my husband, Peter, when he first announced the idea, that I thought it was dumb.

Theodore Roosevelt was an American statesman, author, explorer, soldier, and naturalist who served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909. He was also either the most daring, toughest SOB who ever lived or he was crazy as a loon. You be the judge. What follows are 11 of the wildest things my man TR ever did.

I am writing this hard on the heels of watching footage from Butler, Pennsylvania from the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Probably like you, I have been hungry for accurate information. The footage shows the former President slightly turning his head while speaking, then reacting as a bullet clipped his ear, and then going to the ground while being surrounded by members of the Secret Service. What that footage didn’t show was that one person was killed from a head wound while protectively crouching over members of his family, and two others were critically injured. The person killed was a firefighter and former Fire Chief in his community, and I have subsequently learned he was also a Methodist who attended a sister church in my Annual Conference (that’s denominational speak for a larger grouping of churches based on geography). I’ve also learned that the shooter was a 20-year-old man (a kid to someone as old as me) whose family was as shocked upon learning the news of his involvement as the rest of us.

Xi Jinping, China’s 21st-century communist emperor, has vowed that Taiwan’s “unification with the motherland” is part and parcel of his goal of restoring the People’s Republic of China to global prominence if not preeminence.

It is construction season.

As someone who writes for the simple pleasure of doing so, I sometimes go to the old thesaurus in order to mix things up a little. You know, to keep the old newspaper contributor fresh rather than stale. Nobody likes a stale contributor, do they? Sounds like an engine problem on a 1955 Buick Riviera, but I digress. Anyway, you may have noticed that I like certain words more than others. An example of one of these is “whatnot.” I love the word “whatnot,” and I’ve no idea why. It just sounds cool and sort of rolls off the tongue, ya know? Go ahead, say it aloud, I’ll wait right here.

With summer in full swing, I’ve been thinking wistfully of many summers ago when I’d spend a good amount of my time swimming at a neighborhood pool or at a lake at summer camp. We’d have competitions with one another about how long you could hold your breath under water. Do you remember what that was like?

Living in the shadows of the rich and powerful can be a dicey thing, unpredictable. Signs that the wealth gap is widening are increasing. Evidence of the gulf between higher and lower income Americans has been mounting for not just months but years, albeit the recent pace of separation is quickening. The underlying causes are multiple and the downstream effects are substantial. This gap is changing the nature of our society. The perception both domestically and abroad is that this gulf is changing basic assumptions about who we are as a nation.

Our cat, Felix, traveled up north with us for the first time to visit my parents and their cat, Katie.

In honor of the Fourth of July, and as a former social studies teacher and history expert extraordinaire, I am going to rank my top 10 signers of the Declaration of Independence. I’m sure you know that there were 56 colonial freedom fighters that had the courage to sign, so whittling the list to 10 was not easy.