Category: Uncategorized

I think if you’re an American, you have to watch the video. So I did. Here it is. Terence Crutcher getting shot while the emergency lights on his car are flashing. The irony of a man getting shot after he turns on his flashers to warn other people not to run into him and to alert passers-by, like police, that he needs help, it’s just too much.

For the past few days, I’ve avoided looking. It sounded even worse than the ones before, if that’s even possible. Could this shooting be worse than the boy shot holding a toy gun after the police officer assessed the situation for less than 10 seconds? I don’t know. Why are we even in the business of grading how terrible these shootings are? The pattern is so blatant. White bad guys are taken into custody with no injuries. Black guys immediately deemed to…

This is a difficult book to review, and I am not entirely sure why. It was an easy read with lovely writing and interesting characters, it made me cry absolute buckets of tears by the end, but I am having trouble distilling the main message. Be true to yourself? Those who love you never leave you? Don’t be so wrapped up in your own thoughts that you ignore others? Maybe it’s all of them and more. It seems to start one way and meander over to an entirely different path by the end. This may be a short review. Or I may ramble on ad nauseam. Probably the latter, who’s kidding who.

By the way. It is a wonderful story.

13-year-old Mia Winchell is entering 8th grade, and she dreads it. Math is impossible, she has to learn Spanish, which is just not going to happen, and she lives in fear…

I thought I’d found my son’s mother.

She had the right name. She was about the right age. She was born in his country. And she looked like him. I enlarged the photos of her on Facebook, studied her face. She was stocky like him, almost barrel-chested. She had a full proud face that looked like his, the melding of Indian and European that is Nicaraguan. I want to say she was the spitting image but it minimizes what I thought. I looked at her face and I thought, good Lord, I found her. In her profile picture, she was standing in front of a restaurant in Los Angeles, dressed up with a nice skirt and heels. She looked pretty. Oh, good, I thought. I was glad my son’s mother was pretty.

“I think I found his mother,” I told my husband. He was reading the paper in his chair…