While most of the city is waking up, the doctor is putting my son to sleep.  He’s six years old and doesn’t know what is happening to him.  He only trusts his mom and dad when they say, ‘things will be okay,’ and then the doctor puts a mask over his little face and off to sleep he goes.  The...

I recently drove from Los Angeles to Portland with my friend and her two small children.  We sang silly songs, ate snacks and read a stack of children’s books.  It was a fun adventure, until we were about 300 miles from home, and her son informed me that it was “taking too long.” “Are we there...

In the spring of my senior year of college, I made an S.O.S. call to my dad.  I was doing my taxes on my own for the first time, and it wasn’t going well. “Let me get this straight,” he said.  “You’re getting an A in Calculus, but you can’t fill out a 1040 EZ form?” I sheepishly admitted...

In 1883, Emma Lazarus, a young American woman from a wealthy Jewish family, wrote a sonnet called, “The New Colossus.” Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is...

Sometimes in the middle of the night, if I’m having a particularly hard time sleeping, I entertain myself by formulating the most ridiculous question I can think of. Recently I was lying in bed staring at the blackness that I presumed to be the ceiling when I wondered, Did God give Adam operating instructions...

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act, and by 1831 the first of five Native American tribes was uprooted from its homeland in Georgia and forced to walk 1,000 miles to a barren territory we now call Oklahoma.  Most of them walked the entire distance without shoes or moccasins...