Featured image: Miracle granted to Puglisi Giovanni, 1980. “Medical Miracles: Medical Imagery in Ex-Votos.” U.S. National Library of Medicine. (An ex-voto is a religious offering given in order to fulfill a vow.) “At 76, I am old enough to die.” So says Barbara Ehrenreich, author and political activist—who describes herself as “a myth buster by […]
Featured image: Atomic and Uranic Melancholic Idyll, Salvador Dalí (1945). Last week Monday, July 2, 2018, a giant saucer-shaped UFO, large enough to eclipse the waning gibbous moon over the Salt Lake Valley, entered Earth orbit and deployed a saucer-shaped “destroyer” module that settled over Wilmington Flats, obscuring even the little paradise of Hidden Hollow. As […]
Image credit: “Massacre in Korea” by Pablo Picasso, 1951 Dementia can go like this: In a blog entry over a year ago, I introduced you to Edith Buchsteiner Schmidt, whom I have never met, but with whom I have a complicated link of non-blood relationships, the fellowship of being a first-generation immigrant mother, and the bond […]
Over the 7 years of retirement since my dementia diagnosis, I have gradually realized that direct activism has become a thing of the past for me. Every now and then I get so mad, though, that I have to participate, for example, in the rally protesting the LDS church making apostates of the children of […]
The idea of the Ouroboros, or tail-eating serpent, first lodged in my mind during an organic chemistry class when I was 18 and in my second year at the University of Pretoria. By then I had already met Peter and we had moved from being “just friends” to “going steady.” We were in class together […]
I have been lucky enough to accumulate four strings of pearls in my lifetime. Last week, I lost them all. Above, wearing my first pearls on my 28th birthday in 1977, when Marissa was 6 months old. Peter gave me bunches of flowers, wrapped in newspaper those days. My first pearls were from Japan, which […]