Still Advocating
Writings of a retired educator, advocate, & baby boomer

Ouch, that knee hurts Fear of falling is a vexing problem for women my age. Like many people who fall, even if they're not injured, I have become afraid of falling. This fear causes me to cut down on my everyday activities, ironically making me weaker and increasing my chances of falling. According to Harvard Women's Health Watch, women are at a big disadvantage when it comes to falling, especially indoors. We're 50% more likely than men to show up at an emergency room due

Not really Shirley Temple I was born with black hair. Unlike my beloved cousin Annette, my mother didn’t have to cover my bald hear with cute bonnets. She could tie it with ribbons and braid it, but despite her and my paternal grandmother’s best efforts, they could never make me look like Shirley Temple. The image above is as close as they got, and it held up just long enough to take this picture. Growing up, all of the adult women I knew had beauty shop hair. After their w

My father was a huge fan of Jeopardy. He had an extraordinary memory for certain categories: history, sports, art, classical literature, and music and entertainment from the 1940s. I remember him shouting out the answers he knew and grumbling about categories like popular culture that were out of his wheelhouse. Much like his obsession with watching or listening to every inning of a Tigers baseball game, his daily devotion to Jeopardy was for old people. I avoided it like the

Still have the Y-K glasses we used to toast in the new millennium In 2000, we had just survived the Y-2K fiasco (there was some concern all computers would crash because they wouldn’t recognize the new century). I was foolishly hopeful that a person of integrity and intelligence would be the next president. I remember reading about George W. Bush in a magazine at the doctor’s office. How could a man who had basically failed at everything in his life, from his businesses and

The years I was busy raising kids, 1977 I loathed “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The war and draft continued to ramp up. Despite his proclamation that “I am not a crook,” he was. In 1972, the Democratic slate of Senator George McGovern and Sargent Shriver lost in a landslide to Nixon and fellow crook Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign in 1973 due to corruption and taking cash bribes in the White House. Thankfully, Agnew was replaced by Gerald Ford, so when Nixon was forced to resi

Not me but could have been - University of Michigan circa 1966 My nineteen-year-old granddaughter Maya, who is a sophomore in college, broke my heart when she said she didn’t remember anyone but Trump since she became aware of politics. I assumed she remembered some of Obama’s presidency, but she claims her earliest actual memories were of Trump coming down the golden escalator and of watching in disbelief in her “pants suit” when he defeated Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the tr

The fall happened in my kitchen on Friday, June 13. Given the date, I should have been more careful. It was quite dramatic and frightening as the glass teapot I was taking to the sink to wash slipped out of my hand and shattered, covering me and the kitchen in shards of glass. I fell trying to prevent the inevitable disaster. I was lucky as I only had a few minor cuts. After rinsing myself off in the shower to be sure there was no glass in my hair or on my body, a couple of B

On this 24th anniversary of 9/11, I’m lamenting the loss of community and caring I felt in the aftermath of the attack. My memory of that...

Still fighting! We don’t like to talk about it. We kid about it, but avoid sharing our deeper fears. Some of us are struggling with...

Our last picture together Today is my late mother’s birthday. She died ten years ago and I still miss her dearly. When looking for some...