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My friend Claudia always says, “God is so good at his job.” I have to agree. He meets my every need. He is in the details. Sometimes he takes care of me in rather unusual ways.  Like with a pool table. Yes, I said pool table. You know, billiards? A rack of balls you try to shoot into side pockets of the table with a stick and another ball? Sounds a bit silly when you try to describe it, but there was nothing silly about my own pool table experience. I shared the story recently with a friend. She asked if I’d ever written in down. It’s worth sharing…and preserving. So I offer it to you today for reasons I’ll share later. Many years ago I bought Tom a beautiful pool table for Christmas. He enjoyed playing pool at the student center when we were in college so I thought this would be a nice way for him to relax. We had room for it in our unfinished basement. I gave him the rack, balls, and pool cues for Christmas with a note inside explaining the table would be deliver...

I cut my hair. Perhaps I should back up to establish my credentials as a hairstylist. Especially since most of you know me either as a teacher of young children, a professor to young adults, or an author of books. For forty-three years I cut my husband’s hair. Well, there was that one time he went to a barber. It was shortly after the birth of our first daughter. I was sleep deprived at the time. His decision to have someone else cut his hair was a good one that day. So with that one exception, I cut Tom’s hair for the forty-three years we were married. Tools of the trade... I started my one chair, one customer shop because we were in college and had limited financial resources. I eventually moved from my sewing scissors to a real pair of barber scissors. We would spread newspaper on the floor, drape a sheet around Tom’s shoulders, and I’d cut. He cleaned up. We had the routine down to a science.  He was pleased with my haircutting skills. I was pleased with my...

Be Transformed By the Renewing of Your Mind. Transformed. Changed.  Last week I outlined ways the American experience during the COVID-19 pandemic has followed the pattern, the stages of grief, described by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.   If you missed that post, you can find it by clicking HERE.  Not everyone responds to these strange times in the same way. We mourn losing the “way things were before.” Change is the one constant we can actually count on in our lives. The truth is, we are always in a state of change. What has made this change difficult is the suddenness of it all. There is the fable of putting a frog in a pan of cool water. (Hold on, because this is gross.) According to the tale, if you put a frog in a pan of boiling water it would jump out. But if you put the frog in cool water and very slowly turn up the heat, the frog will adjust to the slow change in temperature, making no attempt to escape. You could cook it alive…or should I say cook it to...

Graduate school at the University of Cincinnati afforded me the opportunity to pursue my interest in both education and psychology. Through my studies I learned a great deal about Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who worked with people diagnosed with terminal illnesses. In her book,  On Death and Dying , she wrote of five stages she observed terminally ill individuals wrestling with from the point of learning their diagnosis through the course of the illness. Those stages are often referred to as the stages of grief or the stages of loss. Over time, people have often tried to use the stages to explain behaviors during all types of loss. I don’t always agree with those applications. That said, I’m sharing an application of my own. I’ve been observing the ebb and flow of American responses to COVID-19 over the course of these last few months. I can make a case for our reactions following Kübler-Ross’s five stages. You probably can, too. The stages are as follows: Denial Ange...