New View Askew

  . . . Bad Combo! Insult to injury for Father's Day? Father’s Day and the summer solstice, on the same damn day! I wonder if there is a hidden message or meaning to this  . . . "coincidence." Everyone knows that Father’s Day is the least important of all the made up holidays. Don't believe me? Then how come all the FD greeting cards say, "Dear Dad . . . Who Cares, XoXo?!” Also, you can count on one hand the number of times you see a kid waving and yelling “Hi dad” on tv, it’s always “Hi mom!” And that’s okay, that’s the way it should be, dads are meant to toil in familial obscurity. We can’t compete with a mother’s love so all we can do is try to compete with brute sincerity - and the occasional game of hoops or playing catch. A dad’s love may not make for clever Hallmark cards but that doesn’t make it any less real (just a little less obvious.) So we get this one day a year to pretend like we are an equal partner in the hearts of our fami

The View from My Bubble It has long occurred to me that we all live in our own little bubbles. My bubble contains friends who generally look like me, think like me, live the same sort of life and, sadly, often act like me. We don’t necessarily agree on everything but generally we experience life in the same way from the same perspective so in our bubble our understanding of “normal” is the same. I suspect most of us are like that. Clearly, however, everyone’s bubble is not the same and the truth of that has recently been brought home to me in a pretty drastic manner. These are extraordinary times. Because of that, I think everyone knows that our lives are going to change. Still, many of us seem to hope that we all go back to our old ways of life, back to our own “normal” bubbles. I’m here to suggest that is the LAST thing we should do. There is much to like in the “old normal” – but more so for some than others. Put another way, a growing percentage of our ne