Tag: history

• January 18, 2023

  A Lifetime of Reading

  January is a good month for reading. It’s cold outside, new books are coming out, and we may have received a few as holiday gifts. Getting lost in a book is one of the ways I deal with stress. My passion for reading has carried me past many rough patches: an emotionally fraught childhood, lonely […]
• October 13, 2022

  Election Time. Who Cares?

  Around this time of year, when I was quite young, a car rolled slowly past our house with big round “loudspeakers” fastened to the roof, from which blared the voice of a man telling us who to vote for, a voice I heard even after the car rounded the corner and moved down the next […]
• August 10, 2022

  The Mysterious Black Madonna

  Her face was everywhere. Growing up Catholic in the 1950s, statues of saints and their pictures on “holy cards” were a part of daily life. But the scarred face of the Madonna of Czestochowa was special. In our immigrant community, she represented the Polish people’s struggle for nationhood. A fifteenth-century Polish historian wrote that the […]
• July 15, 2022

  The Last Witness

  There is a poem I love called The Last Uncle by Linda Pastan. It captures the feeling I had when my own last uncle died. My mother’s brother John was the last person I knew who had witnessed the Great Depression and WWII. Everyone who knew me as a child had now left the planet. […]
• March 16, 2022

  Are You a Dangerous Woman ?

  Did you know the FBI kept a 300-page file on Nobel-prize winning novelist, Pearl S. Buck? Or that civil rights organizer Pauli Murray was openly transgender? For Women’s History Month, Pearl S. Buck International, where I volunteer, is offering a virtual exhibit entitled “Dangerous Women.” You can view it here. When I took a look, […]
• February 15, 2021

  Only You Can Tell Your Story

  The Covid 19 pandemic has changed lives all over the world, and we cope in different ways. Often, we look for distraction from it. But I’m a big believer in the saying, “The only way out is through.” The isolation, lack of hugs from best friends, missing restaurant meals and movie theaters, takes a toll […]
• January 15, 2021

  Eyewitness to History

  We didn’t always have television, as I’m sure you know. Some of us remember the day that big box was carried into our living rooms and the screen lit up with the faces of people in “black and white.” And so it was on November 24, 1963, that a black and white TV console in […]
• April 5, 2017

  When Things Were Not So Different

  We’ve been through tough times before. The world is like that.
• December 20, 2012

  Kat’s Tales – first in a series

  This is the first in a series of posts by Kat Kowalski, protagonist of my novel in progress, Memoirs of the Queen of Poland. Ever since I came back from the nineteenth century, I have wanted to tell my story. It’s taken me a few years to get it all down on paper. Life intervenes, […]