21 Sep 2014

The Roosevelts and the NFL: An Intimate History of Now

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Some weeks —well, in my case, maybe even most weeks—things get all jumbled up. In the past patch of recent days, a steady dose of daily news about the sorry state of the NFL has been accompanied by the mesmerizing nightly drama of The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Try as I might, I can’t keep them apart, like peas and potatoes resisting the directive to stay in their distinct locations on my plate. In my dreams, I think … Read More
21 Jun 2014

My Sports Cup Runneth Over

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It was just about exactly a year ago that I drove my son and a carload of stuff down to register for Harvard Summer School. While in the parking search that is a perennial part of visiting there, we came upon an enormous protest taking place on the Cambridge Common. There was a sea of green and yellow and plenty of shouting through megaphones, most of it in Portuguese. People, entire families, kept arriving, walking vigorously towards the event. It … Read More
9 Feb 2014

Snowflakes not turning into Circles and other Mishaps

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Can there be any glory at all in stumbling, in things not going as planned, in mess ups?  This has been the pressing question on my mind over the past few days, because I’ve been in the midst of some of the above and have felt, well, kind of de-railed from what it was I thought I was doing. With so many eyes on Sochi now, we’re ready to be thrilled by the magnificence of athletic displays….and to gasp with … Read More
29 Jan 2014

Learning From A Not-So-Good Wife

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  Since becoming a bishop’s wife, I’ve been paying more attention to how other wives of other public figures – perhaps religious, perhaps not – conduct themselves, establish their identities, make their mark. Is there any perfect formula, I wonder, for mixing the need to be oneself, to find one’s own particular way to happiness, with the need to be a supportive spouse for a husband in the public eye? I don’t have the thing down yet, completely, but I … Read More
23 Nov 2013

Ball of Confusion? Bring It On

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“You all should leave here feeling confused,” said one of my son’s professors during their semester in South Africa. Not what you would expect a representative of higher learning to say to students on a life-changing journey, but given what they had been absorbing at every turn about one side of an issue being just as compelling as another, they all understood what he meant. Listen to an advocate for wildlife preservation and then listen to a farmer struggling to … Read More
3 Nov 2013

Going Back to 1918 and Finding More Than the Last Big Red Sox Win at Home

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It was windy out there a couple of days ago, matching my sense of being caught up in the sweep of history during these late October days.  I’m in the here and now, absolutely, planning my day tomorrow like everybody else; but recent events have also had a way of casting me back, providing links with other times and even other continents.  It feels a bit like being on a trapeze, arriving at those little platforms with relief, only to … Read More
9 Oct 2013

Seeking Compromise — in the Capitol, and in the Home too

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It’s uncanny sometimes how events happening in the big wide world can be mirror images, at once identical and turned around, of events happening by the hearth. This week, I’m trying to figure out whether we have anything to learn from the government shutdown or the government shutdown has anything to learn from us. Washington D.C. is still in a “stalemate” – not really news at all, I guess.  Over in Egypt, they’re in one too, and that one is … Read More

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