So, in 2022, my two brothers and I took our second road trip since early childhood, “old people on the road” as my nephew called it. Our 2021 trip took in Washington D.C. , baseball at Camden Park and jazz in New York City. This time we went “down south.” …

“…just eat it!” It was my mom’s go to phrase for the concoctions she often created from whatever was in the refrigerator or from her perennially altered recipes that often bore little resemblance to the printed page. She never really followed a recipe exactly as it was printed — always…

I’ve been stuck in the mode of “wanting to write”, needing to write, and I’ve just not done it! I start each day, each week, saying “this is it, I’m gonna write!” And then before you know it, the day is over, the week has ended and rarely have I…

People do it every day, I suppose. Because life, indeed, does go on. It goes on while you are grieving. The mortgage has to be paid as does the electricity and water bills and all the other expenses you have. …

This was my first Valentine’s Day since Hank passed away last year. I tried not to give it much thought, because I did not want to lapse into the looming poor me pity party that I felt coming on. Somewhere midway through our 44 years, he had come to accept…

I am on the Honolulu African American Film Festival and I am thrilled that we will be screening this documentary at our 10th annual festival (limited by Covid!) online on February 26-28. Join us at honolulumuseum.org

My husband of 46 years just died. It was cancer, yes, a long and ugly cancer, like cancer always is. He was 82, a young 82, and the prospect of spending his months in a home hospital hooked up to IVs to sustain him, and meds to make him “comfortable,”…

Judges, especially in the criminal courts, see folks and experiences that would be incomprehensible to the average everyday person. In the course of a term of office, you can see hundreds of defendants with an astonishing and sometimes disturbing array of backgrounds and situations that ultimately bring them into your…

My dad never talked much about his experiences growing up in Bloomington, Illinois, the central, nearly southern Illinois town where he was born. The most we knew as kids was that he grew up there and we went there every summer or so to spend time with our grandmother and…