Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

I'm having a little bit of trouble with "Love thy neighbor" these days. My neighbor, whom I'll call Annie, is only a year older than I am, but is a recluse. No, seriously. I have not laid eyes on her in two years, and I didn't see her frequently before that. We have long suspected that Annie suffers from mental illness, some kind of paranoid condition, perhaps, because on her front door are many post-it notes forbidding anyone from knocking for any reason. She is long divorced, chronically short of money, and her house is falling down on her head -- there's a tarp over part of the roof, and the paint on the rest of the house has nearly all chipped away. The neighborhood regards it as an eyesore, and a neighbor who was once inside (many years ago) told me that Annie is a hoarder, and that the house is so full that she is forced to live in only one room. Following a back injury two years ago, Annie can no longer drive, and so the car sitting in her drivewa

Three months from today, I will be starting on a program called "phased retirement." It's a fairly new benefit here at the University, and, frankly, it has received mixed reviews from some of those who have participated. But I'm giving it a shot. So I will become a 0.6 FTE on July 7. My salary decreases by 40%, but my benefits remain exactly the same. I can do this for up to two years, and then I must retire. IN THE MEANTIME, I WILL HAVE EVERY MONDAY AND FRIDAY OFF! I couldn't resist the photo of the two rocking chairs at the left, even though there won't be much rocking in my immediate future. It will be nice, however, to be able to sit on my front porch and drink coffee on those two mornings, instead of trundling off to the commuter train every single weekday. The dogs will appreciate having me home more. And no more having to go to the grocery store on the weekends, elbowing my way through the mob around the string beans. I can go early on a Friday

So we're learning this morning, incrementally, that there's a good likelihood that Andreas Lubitz, the promising young pilot who apparently crashed a Germanwings flight on purpose, suffered from a mental illness of some sort. That his doctor had signed him out of work for the day of the flight. That he flew anyway. And during that flight, something in Andreas's head went terribly, terribly wrong. Now 150 people are dead. Moms and daughters. Opera singers. German schoolchildren. Little babies. It's all very tragic and terrible. But Andreas wasn't a monster -- he was a person like you and me. And he had an illness which he did not want his employer to know about. And you know what? Although I hold him responsible for those deaths, I don't blame him for that impulse to keep his problem secret. In an age when ads on TV deal with issues like painful intercourse after menopause, erectile dysfunction, and overactive bladder (do you see a theme here? We're e

I wouldn't ordinarily put a smiley-face into one of my posts, but I really am happy over something, so there you have it. A happy daisy. Our Head of Reference demonstrated, at a staff meeting this week, how he uses a certain database to track people down through public records (all nice and legal!). So ... I tried it. you see, at the tender age of 20, I got married for the first time. What was I thinking? I wasn't. The marriage lasted just short of three years, though we didn't live together quite that long. Our divorce became final in January of 1977. I did hear from my ex twice after that, in the summer of 1977, and again in the summer of 1978, as we both moved on with our lives. I moved to Philadelphia, and he went to work abroad. But I always wondered, you know. And I felt more than a little guilty, because the source of unhappiness in the marriage was me, all me. I went through that marriage like a dose of epsom salts, and emerged pretty much unscathed, I don&#

Well, let's hope so. In scenic South Jersey, we have had our largest snowfall of the year (so far) -- about 9 inches, in my yard. I took the easy way out and stayed home yesterday, catching up on the end of Downton Abbey's 5th season, and crocheting like crazy on a blanket I'm making for my son. The snow fell, the dogs reluctantly went outside when asked, and after dark the brutal cold descended again. 5 degrees this morning -- I believe that's a record-breaker for us. On the subway, all the riders looked cold and tired. We are all tired of this Endless Winter. And as for Boston -- I can't imagine how tired of it they are! Relief is apparently on the way, and will arrive next week in the form of much milder weather and a lot of melting. At lunchtime, I felt some actual March warmth in the sun (as I foraged for food across the ice). Let spring come quickly!