When “virtues” may no longer serve you.
What If We All Told the Truth?
Telling our truths, our stories, and accepting each other.
Honor Among Thieves
He didn’t ask for anything in writing, though I anticipated he might. We’d had a running disagreement over a tree, the need for it to come down, the fact that it sat just over the line on my property but was threatening his. Then there was the financial issue – the real crux of the […]
Stella Dallas
It stopped me cold, and I couldn’t change the channel. It was Barbara Stanwyck, in 1937’s Stella Dallas, a film I hadn’t seen in years. It’s the story of a working class mother who manages to marry into money, leaves her husband, then raises her daughter under difficult (and questionable) circumstances. Years later, when the […]
Mad Men Episode 5: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
It’s a morality tale, and all about shame. About warfare and its aftermath, honor and its value, private shame according to cultural standards of the times, and personal experiences of shame. In Mad Men‘s Season 4 Episode 5, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, we feel the weight of the 1960s heavily; World Wart II is […]
Trickle Down Effect
Teaching children trickle down responsibility. And other life skills.
Can We Ever “Set the Record Straight?”
Those who provide the comforting advice that “one day, your kids will know what you gave up for them” are well-intentioned, and even kind. What parent doesn’t want to believe that appreciation will come for all our efforts, at some point in the future? But I question the premise, the concept of eventual “justice” when […]