One of my favorite authors, James Baldwin said, “The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

We want, I feel, a sense of empowerment that with all we face each day:  An intentional life is achievable if we charge forward and be willing to make mistakes. Continue reading →

              Life has a way of challenging the way we see the next day.

I dedicate this month’s writing to my friend, Rodney, who recently died from COVID -19. Rodney’s smile always lit up his face. His generosity and eagerness to help others made him an endearing friend.

Battling COVID is not like a school sick day. Your vital signs (breathing and oxygen to the brain) battle for survival in a ventilator. Rodney did wear a mask, not as regularly as needed, and even flew to large family gatherings. With underlying conditions, such as diabetes, Rodney’s life mirrored a time bomb. Continue reading →

It’s been a year and a few months since the outbreak of COVID transformed our lives. At first, I didn’t understand this virus’s serious ramifications because it was only a faint whisper in our country. Much has changed since the first months of 2020. By the end of last year, the shadow of coping dogged the new normalcy. What we wanted or thought we wanted needed re-examination. For most, craving socialization, to the simplest gesture like a hug, became an agonizing wait and sour pill to continually digest. Continue reading →

Finding the endgame or objective when there are many choices is not an easy feat. If one were to write down five things they’d want to be remembered for, what would they be? Thinking of death is ways off for many of us, yet with COVID-19, there is an urgency to as Spock (Star Trek) said, “Live long and prosper.” These times also hold labels, judgment, and radical thinking. So, again, what will your ashes lay to rest for? Continue reading →

Finding one’s comfort when life is anything but normal makes food, sleep, and everyday existence seem like a long vacation to nowhere. Finding joy with uncertainty is a task made of cement bricks.

As the year closes, not in the cheerfulness of the upcoming holidays, but rather in an exhausted breath of anxiety, we are reminded (in just a few weeks) a new year will force us to change the calendars. Can we dare hope for a more optimistic lifeline than the frayed one we’ve been holding onto:  preoccupied madness because of so many elephants in the room?

What will the new balance emerge in the NEW YEAR? Continue reading →

Inspiration for this writing is a reflection. October, years ago, my father died (age 52) from black lung cancer, after working half of his life in a steel mill. Coincidentally, I just finished re-reading the novel, A Raisin in the Sun, produced as a play, which I saw several times. One of my fondest memories was taking my nephew (Woodrow, named in honor of my father) and his classmate to Ashland, Oregon, to see the theater production of A Raisin in the Sun.

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer who died at the age of 34 of pancreatic cancer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play debuted on Broadway in 1959. Her work, A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances with an insurance payout following the death of the father. The title of the play was taken from the poem Harlem by Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” At the age of 29, Lorraine won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award—named the best play in 1959, making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.

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