For my entire life anytime I complain about anything my mother responds with some newly acquired anecdote about someone who has it harder. I first noticed the pattern in college after I griped about a roommate and she told me about a boy born without hands who had taught himself to paint by holding a paintbrush between his teeth. 

We’ve all heard horror stories about small town medical practices.  I guess I got off lucky. I grew up in the 1950s in Frederick, Maryland, at the time a town of fewer than 20,000 people. I never had to go to the local orthopedist, a man nicknamed “Wrong Knee” or had a colonoscopy performed by that doctor who kept his patients awake and just had them lean over a sawhorse to let the scoping begin. Things were a little dicier for me, though, in the dental arena.

When things go wrong in my life, I blame it on the fact that no one in my family knows what day my birthday is.

It was the morning of my eighth birthday when it was brought to my attention that I’d had the wrong date for my birthday.

For eight years.

If you have aspirations of publishing a novel, you might think that once you’ve finished writing the manuscript, you’ve conquered the hardest part. Although this is a great accomplishment and an important step, it’s a relative piece of cake compared with what lies ahead. To realize your goals, you’ll probably need to secure representation by a literary agent, and for that, you’ll need a query letter. You may have heard that the agent query letter is the most important letter you will ever write, and likely rewrite upwards of 17,500 times.

A phrase has been frequently popping up in the media and on signs in establishments recently that I’d never heard before: “out of an abundance of caution.” It most commonly appears, of course, in reference to mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic, though I have also seen it used in military contexts such as the holding back of 12 National Guardsmen from inauguration day duty.