Interrogation Can Be Fun

 Some Mondays, finding the topic challenges me more than on others. Today, I’m taking inspiration from yesterday’s church service during which our minister answered questions on the fly that were submitted by congregants in advance. But who could I get to submit questions to me?

 I have probably mentioned in other posts how I use AI to figure out problems from fabric measurements for quilting to technical issues on my computer, from how to apply for a Canadian certificate of citizenship to how to get to Prague from Vienna by train. As long as I am careful to fact-check and watch for hallucinations, I find my AI to be very useful in daily life.

 So today I asked the AI program—I use Copilot—to pose several questions for me based on what it had learned about me from our interactions. I got eight surprisingly good questions. I’m not going to tackle all eight of them because I’m writing a post, not a magazine article, but let’s see where I get.

 Question One: What small domestic ritual has quietly become essential to your sense of order and comfort?

 Answer: I thought this one would give me trouble. I don’t think of myself as particularly domestic, despite having been home-based for decades. And I don’t feel like I have rituals; I’m more of a do-what-presents-itself kind of person. But a moment’s thought brought clarity. Every morning I make a cup of coffee with a touch of sugar-free salted caramel syrup and a splash of half and half in it. While it’s brewing, I unload the dishwasher and then go outside to get the newspaper.

 I slip into my recliner, coffee and paper in hand, and read as I sip. I like to read the actual local paper even though I have an online NYT subscription and I’m on plenty of news lists. It’s kind of expensive, about $1.50 a day, but the coffee’s cheaper than Starbucks, so I figure it works out. Today I had to leave for an appointment before my coffee/paper routine. When I returned at noon, I brought in the paper, unloaded the dishwasher, and made my daily cuppa, then sat down and enjoyed it. My day just wouldn’t have been the same if I’d skipped this.

 Question 2: What has gardening taught you about patience, timing, or control?

 Answer: This has to be a trick question because I am a totally useless gardener! I didn’t even think I’d ever asked a question that would lead Copilot to think I gardened. But wait, I did ask about rototillers not too long ago to use in the garden that borders our front patio. Michael and I built that patio decades ago. Originally planted with rose bushes and lots of other good stuff, it has become, over the years, mostly weeds. On a good day, it is green and the roses still bloom.

 I recently found a big can of Texas wildflower seeds that I impulsively bought two years ago. That gave me the bright idea to till the garden bed, rake out the weeds, and sprinkle the seeds in to see what would happen. Maybe we’d get a flower garden! Copilot did instruct me on the correct conditions for using a rototiller; one of them is mostly-dry soil. Sadly, we’ve had buckets of rain in the last few weeks, so nothing has happened. The biggest lesson gardening has taught me is that I’m incompetent as a gardener. Since I don’t have enough money to hire one, I’m always going to be flower deprived. I am thankful for my apparently invincible roses and my lovely crape myrtle trees.  

 Question 3: What recent moment of awe—artistic, natural, or unexpected—shifted your perspective, even briefly?

Answer: Birdsong. I went out to get the paper one day last week and I noticed, in the morning stillness, that I heard a lot of birds singing. Cornell University has a wonderful free app that I can’t recommend enough called Merlin. Merlin listens to birds calling around you and identifies them. As a bird is recognized, an image pops up so you can see what it looks like. As different birds call, it switches between them so you can follow the conversation so to speak.

 The other day when I first noticed the birdsong, I turned on Merlin and just stood in my driveway for a few minutes. These are the birds it identified: Carolina Wren, Northern Cardinal, Yellow-throated Warbler, White-winged Dove, Carolina Chickadee, Yellow-rumped Warbler, American Robin, American Goldfinch, Egyptian Goose, and American Crow. I stood transfixed for a moment, serenaded by ten different kinds of birds, all tucked out of sight in the green leaves of trees, while I watched their photos flick across the screen of my phone. Awesome!

 Question 4: When did you last surprise yourself in the kitchen, and what did that moment reveal about you?

 Answer: I was going to skip this one because I don’t think I surprise myself much in the kitchen these days. I am a competent cook and an excellent baker, though I much prefer baking to cooking. Copilot probably posed the question because I have used it to solve cooking problems, like the day I needed marinated artichoke hearts, but had purchased plain artichoke hearts by mistake. Copilot told me what I needed to add to my recipe to make up for the missing marinade.

 I did have an insight the other day. I made coleslaw for dinner, which always includes making my father’s coleslaw dressing. I don’t have a recipe for it; I just know what to use. And I don’t measure beyond dollops and spoonfuls, I just know how much. When it’s made, I do a taste test and adjust as needed. I can make it in my sleep. Likewise, I can make my version of fried rice without a recipe and, surprisingly, a Basque cheesecake.

 The insight is this: I have become one of those cooks, like my mother and grandmothers, who can make things because they just know how, not because they followed a recipe. I can pour salt into my palm and, if I check, by golly it will be the teaspoon or half teaspoon I intended. I can whomp up some chili without a starter mix or a cookbook. Likewise something Chinese, although it will not be a “named” Chinese dish. I guess I’ve finally earned my KP stripes!

 That’s it for my Monday Q&A. Answering these questions turned out to be more revealing than I expected. Thanks, Copilot, for the assist.

 Ciao

The Art of Walking Out

 Saturday night, it stormed in Houston. The weather service had predicted it for days, although without enough specificity to make plans around the weather. The storm’s timing remained in question right up until Saturday. And Houston’s enormous footprint made that even more tenuous—what part of Houston’s skies you lived under would make all the difference in how bad the storm hit you.

 Ordinarily, that wouldn’t make much difference to us, all snug and cozy in our little ranch house. We’d sit in the living room, reading or watching TV or just visiting, and enjoy the lightshow outside the three large windows by the deck. Our only fear would be loss of power, a regular occurrence during thunderstorms.

 But this Saturday, things were dicier. We had tickets to the Houston Ballet. As season subscribers, our tickets and our seats are assigned long before the performances, sometimes to our surprise when we try to schedule something else on the calendar. Occasionally, we had to exchange tickets to another evening, but it couldn’t be a last minute event because our regular performance happens on the last Saturday of the two-week run.

 We had no choice but to brave this weather if we wanted to see our performance on Saturday. Complicating the equation, we knew the program and it wasn’t a favorite of ours. The ballet, Sylvia, is a complex story of ancient Greece with three female leads: Artemis, Psyche, and Sylvia in three convoluted love stories that intertwined.

 We had already seen Sylvia twice—it’s opening season in 2019 and a few years later when the company reprised it. Why they felt compelled to perform it a third time was beyond us. Of course, the company returned to well-loved canons of ballet like Swan Lake and Coppelia regularly. The Nutcracker ran every year for a month at a time. But Sylvia is no Swan Lake, IMHO.

 We attend all performances unless we absolutely can’t and then lucky friends get our tickets. We go even if it’s not our favorite, because the dancing is always excellent and it’s a chance to see different performers tackle new roles. We were going to Sylvia Saturday night if the storm didn’t make it impossible. If fact, we planned to leave early, just in case.

 Late afternoon, the storm came through Cypress, our northwest Houston area. Winds whipped anything not tied down around the yard; lighting strike after lightning strike pierced the sky overhead; thunder boomed right on top of us. We held our breath, so to speak, but surprisingly, we didn’t go dark. As things settled into rain, not storm, we decided we could go out safely.

 I had planned an early, simple dinner and by 5:30 pm we were finished and changing into good clothes. We left around 6, certainly early enough because the performance started at 7:30 and the drive usually took about 40 minutes. Steady rain beat down, but not the downpour we had experienced earlier. All seemed well.

 A note about highways here: the lane markings are abysmal, even during daylight hours with no rain. Driving them in rain was challenging. Using the drivers ahead helped some, but with twisting roads, we were both tense and watching traffic like hawks. About 15 minutes into the drive, the skies opened, thunder and lightning exploded above us, and the highway all but disappeared. Drivers in front of us turned on their flashers which, combined with the windshield wipers at top speed, reduced visibility to almost nothing.

 It was, frankly, terrifying. We couldn’t even tell how far we had driven because we couldn’t see the buildings along the side of the road. I had a moment of clarity, realizing that we were risking our lives driving to a performance we didn’t even care about. “We don’t have to go to the performance, Michael. Let’s just get off the highway and go home.” He kept driving and I kept quiet for a few more tense minutes.

 The rain let up a bit and then poured down on us again in a deluge. “Seriously, let’s just turn around,” I tried again. Holding the steering wheel in a death grip, Michael finally said, “It’ll be more dangerous to exit than to keep going.” We were coming up to a long, high flyover with no way to exit and I just swallowed and said okay.

 We did make it to the performance. We parked in a ridiculously expensive garage so that we would have underground access to the theater ($18 versus our usual $12 and walk a block outdoors). And we got there with 15 minutes to spare. Not bad.

 We watched the first act. It was a trial for me because I had trouble seeing clearly. I had brought my small binoculars, but the action was wide-ranging and not conducive to viewing through a narrow field of vision. Michael’s view, he told me at intermission, was obscured by BIG hair in front of him. (BIG hair is still a Texas peril, even today.)

 We looked at each other quietly. One of us, or maybe both of us, said, “We could leave.” We let that marinate a minute. Yes, we could leave. It was a revelation. Just because we bought tickets last March for this performance, this March did not require us to stay if we weren’t enjoying it. Intermission wasn’t over. We gathered our things and strolled out, pleased to be leaving.

 The weather had improved during our hour indoors and we got home without the clutching fear we had arrived with. In the house, I suggested we have a treat of cantaloupe and vanilla ice cream. “I’ll fix the cantaloupe and you can get the ice cream ready,” I suggested. “Sounds like a deal,” Michael answered. Dessert was delicious and well-deserved.

 Have something delicious tonight yourself!!

 Ciao

 

Fractal Fun

 

Michael and I recently spent an intriguing afternoon at Artechouse in Houston, the same place we took the grandkids when they visited after Christmas. Artechouse is a fascinating and fun immersive art-and-technology environment with interactive exhibits. We saw the holiday special with Felix and Gabe and enjoyed it so much we had to go back.

 This time, we saw the exhibition Fractal Worlds by acclaimed Dutch artist Julius Horsthuis. I know what fractals are and have even put together jigsaw puzzles of fractal images. That doesn’t mean I understand them. To my eye, they are fascinating swirls of colors—usually, but not always—repeating in ever-diminishing patterns.

 Imagine sitting on a riser in a room so dark that you aren’t sure where your feet are. All around you—floor, ceilings, and four walls—images are spinning and eddying, larger renderings breaking into ever-smaller variations of the original elements.

 The more I tried to focus on those elements, the faster they seemed to whirl away and become something else. But were they actually different? My mind boggled to the point that I stopped trying to see and just enjoyed experiencing the pageantry of motion.

 What is a fractal, really? The Fractal Foundation explains them like this: “A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop…” The definition goes on (and on) and you can read the full version using the link I’ve provided. The bottom line is that fractals use complex math.

 That wasn’t helpful, because recursion was its own mystery. When I tried to get a definition, my search engine offered me a lot of coder-worthy gobbledygook that made no sense either. After several unproductive stabs at it, I finally typed, “Explain recursion to me like I am a fifth-grader.”

 That did the trick. The actual definition didn’t help so much: “Recursion is when something solves a problem by asking a smaller version of itself to help — and it keeps doing that until the problem is so small it’s easy to solve.” Huh, what?

 But boy oh boy, did the example ever help! A teacher hands a stack of test papers to the first kid in a row of desks and says, “Take one and pass them on.” Every kid takes one, hands them on, and repeats the instruction to the next kid. By the end of the row, the last kid gets the last test paper. Recursion complete. That I understand!

 The delightful, unpredictable (to my eye) series of images surrounding me in the dark were created with a particular fractal equation called a Mandelbrot Set. It’s not just the complicated mathematics or the images the equations create that make the results so mesmerizing, but also the cinematic filmmaking Horsthuis employs to present his work.

 There were four different rooms of fractal images, each unique. In one of them you stood, in another one you could stand, sit or lie down, one simply had benches, and a fourth one had large bean bags to lie on while you watched the fractal film on the ceiling. Michael and I used those beanbags when we visited with Felix and Gabe. To our dismay, getting back on our feet was an embarrassing spectacle neither of us wishes to repeat.

 In addition to the room displays, there were about ten large, interactive wall displays where you could make the fractals bend and move, shrink or grow, recede or advance by moving your body. Each one had a different image and it was a lot of fun to be in control of the action, so to speak.

 The final area of Artechouse is a suite of rooms with complex laser displays. I found them fascinating, but hard on my eyes, with vivid red lasers or very bright white light lasers, sometimes in combination. After making the rounds of that area briefly, I decided to call it a day and get a soda at the lobby bar. Watching fractals is very dry work, probably because your mouth is hanging open in awe so much!

 That show is now over and the new one—Blooming Wonders: A Celebration of Spring—is coming soon, with pricing specials available. I haven’t seen it, of course, but I highly recommend the experience at Artechouse, whatever the show. Go out and have a little fun!

 Ciao

 P.S. They have locations in New York City and Washington, D.C. as well as in Houston.

Where has All the Civility Gone?

 I think I’m living the good life. All my needs are met and most of my wants are, too. I don’t fear becoming homeless, being arrested, getting murdered (except by awful happenstance), or any of the other dire events that dominate the news.

 My country is not likely to be invaded. An armed uprising isn’t likely to happen in what remains of my lifetime. Food insecurity—let alone malnutrition or starvation—isn’t something I face.

 We have enough to live safely and happily, and enough to share with less fortunate people. We’ve even saved enough to celebrate our 50^th wedding anniversary with a big trip next fall. (Vienna for a month—I’ll be writing about that before long.)

 So with all this comfort and security, why am I so anxious and apprehensive? Why does the other shoe feel perpetually ready to drop? And why am I cocooning instead of enjoying my family and friends? It feels like I’m stuck in an existential quagmire on par with Everything Everywhere  All at Once.

 Here’s my answer: we are victims of emotional abuse on a gigantic scale.

 Too much is happening in the world and too much of it is terrible, bizarre, and frightening. Question: How many wars or conflicts are raging right now? Answer: According to World Population Review, there are 40.  

 In a world with 193 countries, 20% of them are in some type of armed conflict. Five major wars—including Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine—and 35 smaller conflicts involving terrorist insurgencies, civil wars, and drug wars. The casualties are massive.

 And as if that weren’t enough, the President of the United States is threatening to start several wars of his own. Venezuela, Greenland, and Iran come quickly to mind. I often hear that he’s not serious, he’s just stirring the pot, trying to intimidate people. In my book, that’s emotional abuse on a world scale.

 Then there are the deaths, injuries, and destruction from CBO/ICE abuses of power—not only harming protestors and immigrants, but traumatizing everyone who sees the replays. Those un-uniformed masked men with rifles and guns pointing everywhere, smashing car windows and dragging bystanders out of their cars are terrifying. Terrifying on purpose.

 Even in public speech, civility has evaporated. The President throws the F-bomb around like a toddler who discovers he can make the adults go nuts just by saying it. He calls learned, cultured, and accomplished people names like the worst high-school bully you can remember. He insults other countries and their leaders with apparent relish.

 In my opinion, the man is the definition of vulgar. And his vulgarity has infected what used to be called civil discourse. I see rude behavior and rude language everywhere—from TV talk shows to the local Kroger. I hear about it on the news when reports come in of road-rage assaults and mass shootings at birthday parties and weddings for heaven’s sake. I tell my husband, in all sincerity, not to honk at someone who cut him off because that driver might have a loaded gun on the seat next to him.

 And so yes—I’ve answered my own question. I’m anxious and apprehensive because I’m a victim of nationalistic (in contrast to domestic) emotional violence. We need someone to issue and enforce a restraining order for our own safety and protection.

 I’m looking at you, Congress. And at you, SCOTUS. Do your damn jobs!!

Awe-ful Art

 I had a wonderful time visiting my sister Janet and her husband Dave in Port Aransas this past week with Michael. Such a fun time that I didn’t write my blog on Monday like I normally do, but I’ll try to make up for it today. Janet and Dave are Winter Texans, fleeing North Dakota’s freezing temperatures and snow for several months of benign and even lovely weather on the Gulf Coast. And we usually visit them in mid-February, mainly because that’s when Janet's birthday falls.

 For the last several years, it has been ridiculously cold in Port A during our visits. Winters around here are supposed to be mild, but it’s not guaranteed. We've had terrible timing on these trips weather-wise in the recent past. We were happy to be there during a quite nice period of mostly sunshine and warmth this year. The one day of rain didn’t interfere with our plans a bit.

 On a side trip to Rockport, we visited the Rockport Center for the Arts. It’s a lovely small gallery/museum that features local artists and has quite nice jewelry and artsy tchotchkes for sale. On our visit, we saw an exhibit that mesmerized me by the Austin artist B. Shawn Cox.

 Titled Hanging by a Moment, Cox’s work is, to quote their website, an “exploration of perception, cultural subtext, and the elusive nature of “the moment” … using painting, drawing, installation, and lenticular techniques.”

 His subjects, primarily cowboys and cowgirls, are sometimes rendered in ballpoint pen and other times in very large paintings. But the eye-catching and breathtaking element of many pieces was that the picture changed and followed you as you walked by. This is called, I learned, lenticular art.

 I had never heard of lenticular art, but I discovered that I had a childhood familiarity with it. Remember those little squares with images on them that once upon a time came as prizes in Cracker Jack boxes? When you tilted the square, the image jumped from one view to another. A magician might wink at you or a baseball player might swing the bat as you moved the square around.

 It seemed like magic in grade school and Cox’s paintings seemed even more magical to me at 75. One very large painting featured a cowgirl with bouncy curls and a happy-go-lucky smile rendered in bright, saturated colors. She looked straight at you … until you walked by. Then she turned and followed you, still smiling.

 Startled by this, I turned around, walking back to the center, and she looked forward again. I walked to the left, and she turned left, still smiling. For a few moments, I walked back and forth on a three-foot-wide path just for the delight of seeing my cowgirl friend turn her head this way and that, smiling the whole time.

 Wow, what is this lenticular art? I'd never heard the term, and I'm fairly art savvy. I looked it up and discovered that it's a painstaking process of making small crosshatches on special media called a lenticular lens. It’s too complicated for me to explain, so here’s a description I borrowed from a helpful website, Labyrinth Art.

 “The term ‘lenticular’ comes from ‘lens.’ In this context, it refers to the plastic sheet covered in tiny lenses (lenticules) used in this type of printing. These lenses refract light at different angles, allowing your eyes to see different images as you change your viewing position.”

Seeing behind the curtain on this trick doesn’t change the magic for me because I still don’t have a clue how anyone creates a lenticular image. God bless you if it makes more sense to you. The bottom line is that Cox’s images were awe-inducing and made my visit to an art space in a very small town as wonderful as a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

 Keep your eyes open and you might find something awe-ful in your life this week!

 Ciao

 

 

 

O Canada!

 Sometimes the current state of the nation makes me fantasize about running away. I’ve felt that way under more than one administration, notably Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Admittedly, my views on those fellows have moderated since then. Compared to our current president, they weren’t so bad.

 But whenever I get really upset, the idea of going someplace else pops up. After all, there are lots of lovely places in the world to live and many of them are affordable for Americans like me who have a stable income. Thank you, FDR, for social security. Language is the biggest barrier. Although I studied Spanish, French, and Latin in school, I am sadly not multi-lingual.

 Canada is, of course, the natural place to look when running away from America. Except for Quebec, it is English speaking, which is a big draw for me. And I grew up near the Canadian border, about a two-hour drive south of Winnipeg. I traveled a lot in Canada as a child, camping with my family. Canadians are nice people and, from my North Dakota-nice point of view, regular people just like us.

 Canada has been the shelter for many Americans over the centuries. Enslaved Americans used the Underground Railroad to reach freedom in Canada for over hundred years because Canada offered legal freedom long before the US abolished slavery. And draft resisters famously escaped to Canada to avoid or to protest the war in Vietnam during the 60s and 70s. Those were my high school and college years and the draft resisters were my peers.

 LGBTQ+ Americans found shelter in Canada during the 80s and 90s before the US recognized same-sex marriage or even basic protections. Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, 10 years before the US did. And since the 90s, some Americans have relocated to Canada for healthcare or for economic stability because the country offers universal healthcare, lower medical costs, and a more predictable social safety network.

 Today, people talk about escaping the political climate in America by going to Canada. As the US begins to look more and more like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s prescient dystopian novel that we seem to be leaning into, Canada is certainly inviting.

 Would I really move to Canada? Honestly, it is not that easy to accomplish. You can’t just show up on their doorstep and ask to come in for longer than a visit. You have to qualify under the rules of one of their immigration programs. Those include skilled worker, provincial nominee program, family sponsorship, or an employment sponsorship. But wait! There’s another possibility for lucky people like me.

 My great-great grandparents were Canadians from the Township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands in Ontario. My great-grandmother Eva was born there as well. Eventually, they moved to Michigan where Eva met my great-grandfather, Wallace Petrie. He happened to be on his way from upstate New York to North Dakota to make his fortune. Love happened in Michigan, marriage happened in North Dakota, then my grandmother, my mother, and I happened. (Along with a bunch of other children in each generation.)

 On December 15, 2025, Canada passed Bill C-3, a significant reform of its citizenship laws. In a nutshell, Bill C-3 made people with Canadian ancestors (considered “lost citizens”) recognized citizens. All you have to do is apply for Proof of Citizenship by Descent, documented with birth certificates or legal records establishing your lineage, and suddenly, with a bit of paperwork, you’re Canadian. You have dual American-Canadian citizenship. And you can get yourself a Canadian passport to go along with your American passport with a minimum of difficulty.

For those of you who didn’t have ancestors smart enough to be born in Canada, I’m sorry, but you will have to do it the hard way. Even if I never move — unless things get REALLY bad — it’s comforting to know that a door is open, one my ancestors walked through long before I ever thought about walking back.

Now to get busy collecting 200-year-old birth records!

 Ciao

 

 

Come Sing a Song With Me

I left my church service Sunday frustrated and unhappy. It wasn’t the sermon—our minister delivered an engaging and thought-provoking talk on the sin of pride. And it wasn’t the choir’s performance that bothered me—they were in good voice. It was the congregational singing that upset me. Let me tell you why.

 I’m a Unitarian Universalist, have been for over 50 years. Our denomination has two main hymnals, the grey hymnal, with 415 hymns, and the blue hymnal, with 75. The grey hymnal is the old standard; the blue hymnal, introduced in 2005, offers fresh music with contemporary themes and modern rhythms.

 In all my varied congregations over the years, there are some songs that have been used more than others. Some songs have different words but share melodies. When the blue hymnals came out, we purposely learned the new music and developed new favorites there. Congregations sang in strong, confident voices because we knew the songs.

 Cut to yesterday, which is only an example of a bigger phenomenon. The two hymns selected for the congregation were entirely unknown to me. They both came from the grey hymnal, which I’ve been singing out of for 50+ years, but I couldn’t remember ever singing either of them. And from the halting, mumbled voices around me, neither had anyone else in the pews.

 People weren’t using hymnals because the words floated above us on a giant screen over the altar, with no musical notation. The hymnals were available, of course, but they’re unwieldy and mostly unused. I’m pretty sure someone picked those hymns to enhance the message of the sermon. They did not pick them to be sing-able.

 I remember loud, vigorous singing in church that could lift your spirit and engage your heart. That only happens if people know, or can read, the words and music. If they know the melody, they can make the words work, the reverse is much harder. Although we do sing familiar hymns at my church, we don’t do it often enough. I miss vigorous, heartfelt church singing. In today’s fraught world, I need vigorous, heartfelt church singing.

 I talked with Michael about it on the ride home and mulled my dissatisfaction for a while. And then I had an epiphany. Why do I expect my congregation to sing with heart when a whole culture has forgotten how? Group singing, community singing, used to be a thing in America. And it isn’t any longer. I don’t just miss raising my voice confidently in song at church; I miss it everywhere.

 Where has all the singing gone? At the beginning of athletic events, at birthday parties, at church, at concerts for those who can afford the tickets. That’s about it. But we used to sing together a lot.

 Now is where the old lady’s remember-when, in-the-olden-days, stuff starts. We used to have shows on television with a lot of music. The Lawrence Welk Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, the Smothers Brothers, Hee Haw, The Andy Williams Show, The Dean Martin Show, Sonny and Cher, and Donny and Marie, to name a few.

 We had folk singers, hootenannies, and sing-alongs. Remember Mitch Miller’s Sing Along with Mitch from the 80s? Okay, just the old people do, but look him up. Americans used to sing together, even if we were in our own living rooms among family. And at marches and protests for Vietnam and civil rights, we sang folk standards and old-timey hymns like We Shall Overcome, Blowin’ in the Wind, Kumbaya, and The Times They Are a-Changin’.

 Schools, especially elementary schools, had music classes where we learned the standards. All Through the Night, Amazing Grace, America the Beautiful, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Blue Tail Fly, Bingo, Buffalo Gals, Camptown Races, Dixie, Down by the Bay, Farmer in the Dell, Frѐre Jacques, Go Tell Aunt Rhody, God Bless America, Home on the Range, The Hokey Pokey, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad… I could literally go on and on.

 We knew these songs and we sang them at Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, around campfires of all kinds, at gatherings of all kinds. And, of course, we sang Christmas carols, in public, with other people. And we knew more words than the first two lines of the songs. We had song sheets or song books when we needed them.

 What happened to singing? What happened to group fun? Why is everyone sitting in front of a computer or cell phone or TV set watching other people do things and not doing anything themselves? Where are our friends besides in text messages?

 Sadly, I have no insightful conclusion today, simply a longing for something missing from life in 2026. If you have any answers, I’d love to hear them. Wouldn’t it feel great to get together and sing your heart out with a bunch of other people?

 What are you doing next weekend?

Ciao

P.S. Here's a rendition of one of my favorite UU hymns from the blue hymnal. It's not rousing, but it is SO heartfelt. Plus, I know the composer. Come Sing a Song With Me