Category Personal Reflections

Who in this land can resist thinking about their mother today? My own mother has been gone nine years now, but I suspect you already know the answer to the question of how many days since then that I have not thought of her: a big fat zero.

So in observance of Mother’s Day, and as tribute to my particular mom and all the moms and moms of moms I know whom we honor today, I decided to revisit the eulogy I presented for my mom at the time of her passing at age 80 in 2006, abridging it just slightly to get to the heart of the matter—which, of course, was that great big heart that guided my mother’s life and loves through all her days.

What a life. It never ceases to amaze how much sheer living can be packed into one mortal life, particularly in the historically turbulent era our parents lived through...

What could I have been thinking? It’s a question we ask ourselves with regularity when we have acted like dunderheads, making some half-baked decision on a purchase or a course of action, a relationship, a career move or a business deal. It can apply when we have done something we shouldn’t have or not done something we should have, and it can always apply—probably more easily, given how we’d rather point the finger outward than at ourselves—to others.

What were they thinking? (Bush and Cheney invading Iraq, Clinton with Monica, every person who consents to being grilled on 60 Minutes, all karaoke singers everywhere…)

It’s a beautiful question, so aptly and succinctly does it frame, with a dose of sardonic humor, the human tendency to act really, really stupidly on occasion. And no one is immune.

Shrewd and worldly, lowly and dim, middle class midwest or upper class upper east side: you’d need ...

We got a letter the other day inviting our family to a banquet honoring my daughter’s high school’s “Students of the Month.” My daughter was honored as such in the fall for unhesitatingly stepping forward to hold, comfort and prevent further injury to a classmate as the girl suffered a seizure and fell to the floor while the teacher summoned help. My daughter was pleased a few weeks later when they honored her as a Student of the Month in recognition of her compassionate, forthright response. Her classmates, in typical enough youthful human fashion, had recoiled in a kind of frozen discomfort.

And my daughter’s response to the banquet? “Do we have to go?”

Then she went on to say something very interesting, and perhaps more mature even than her action to help her classmate. “I only did what any human being should do; it’s not really that big a deal.”

She’s right, of course...

I have probably always—or at least frequently— tried too hard and said too much and stayed too long at the party. My struggle has been to dial back my ardor, let things rest, temper my essentially romantic spirit, not make too much of things, quit being so extravagant.

But jeez: life is important and colossal and epic, isn’t it? Mine feels like that, and when I listen to you talk about yours, I could swear yours is, too! Your challenges, visions, conflicts, frustrations, triumphs, desires to live more fully and do right by yourself and those you love—what’s not epic about that?

When you get right down to the nub of things, your life is of fundamental, earth-shattering importance to you, isn’t it?

Isn’t that true even if you’ve dedicated your life to helping others? Heck, if you’re dedicated more to others, you had better consider your own life important. No you, no helping them!

But: are...

The fallen hero Lance Armstrong wrote a book years ago, It’s Not About the Bike, which I read with great satisfaction. The headline above is a take-off on that title and a lead-in to rectifying what appears to have been a misleading impression I may have left with some readers of my most recent post, Sex As Worship.

It seems some people took that post to mean I’d perhaps been having great sex recently as a single person in the wake of a marital separation. So I am here to say, “Oh no no no—it really was about the bike!”

Perhaps I should elaborate.

As I’d stated in the post, my Unitarian Universalist bloggers’ group had decided to take up the subject of sex in observance of Valentine’s Day, as a way of lifting up a topic that is usually verboten in mixed or any kind of company, whether strangers or friends. (Prurient and exploitative media a significant exception.)

Sex: so fundamental to life and love, so...