Trish Hermanson's Blog: Croutons - Seasoned Bits of Life, page 22

Genius or Dimwit?

     A full-page advertisement one page over from the newspaper comics caught my attention: pay $55 and learn if I carry the seeds of genius. Find out whether I can join the ranks of Mozart and Rembrandt and Jefferson and Einstein and Newton. All I need to do is pay $55.
     Hmm. I’ve fallen for promises before. For instant wealth. Quick cures for health. And helpful hints to happiness. I know how well they worked. And now it’s genius?
     I may not be the brightest bulb in the pack, bu...

So What's the Point?

      My heart always aches at estate sales, especially when I knew the owners.
      Colt and Monette were pioneers in our neighborhood. Now treasures they accumulated over a lifetime are selling for a pittance. Everything parceled out - like the days of their lives.    
     We sift through Colt’s tools. He was a rocket scientist back in his day, a neighbor mentions.
     I didn’t know that.
     Monette was a counselor at Columbine High School who saved students at the shooting, someone...

When Rodents of Unusual Size Attacked Me

Image: Clipart Panda      I hadn’t prepared to be attacked by Rodents of Unusual Size.
     All I knew was that Duane and I needed a good night’s sleep to have the energy to babysit Third Daughter’s young girls the next day while Third daughter had oral surgery.
     But before we turned off the lights, First Daughter texted that her infant son still hadn’t recovered from bronchitis, and they’d seen the doctor again. And Second Daughter, fourteen hundred miles away, texted she’d gone into...

Can We Stop Comparing?

     Comparison is deadly because it’s never apples to apples.
     Take my friend Nancy. We hadn’t seen each other for decades when she rolled into town. Nancy asked about my writing.
    “Some books and articles,” I told her.
     She shrugged. “All I’ve done is care for my family.”
     That’s all? Let me tell you what Nancy had just shared. For eight years, she oversaw cancer treatments for her adult son Bryce. They even relocated to Germany twice for surgery with a specialist.
     Now...

Would I Dare Pledge?

     I was shocked when I first read the pledge Martin Luther King Jr. required of those who joined him in the civil rights movement in Birmingham. Would I have taken it?
     Here it is, with my thoughts in parentheses:
     1. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus (because Jesus embodied the perfect blend of power and compassion.).
     2. Remember always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation - not victory (Am I willing to align myself with what is mor...

What's Your Risk?

     Nobody relishes a risk, but Margaret Coel dared to take one.     She spent five years working on a manuscript she didn’t know whether she could get published. “And if I did get it published, whether anyone would read it,” she says.
     But she was obsessed with Arapaho Chief Niwot and the slaughter of his people at the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado in 1864.
     In her thirties with young children, Margaret already had a successful career as a journalist. She didn’t have to take t...

Why I'm Watching My Step

     If I walk ten thousand steps each day, I’ll be healthier, right? But this won’t be the magic bullet. It also matters where and how I tread.
     I learned this from novelist Lorna Landvik. In Patty Jane’s House of Curl, one of her characters warns that life can be like a ballroom dance or it can be like walking through a barnyard. Either way, you have to watch your step.
     That’s true for me. Sometimes life is as graceful as a ballroom dance. So smooth I get caught up in myself an...

How This Scene Saved Me

     What a year it’s been. Violence, uncivil discourse, hurricanes, fires. And a black cloud of nuclear war.
     Tension about all this threatened to explode in me until I recalled a skyline that took my breath away one day as I drove back into metro Denver. Our urban area encompasses three million souls, yet the city looked as small as LEGO pieces hugging the horizon. I realized this was a microcosm of the whole world, miniature under a canopy of billowing white clouds.
     This calme...

How this scene saved me

     What a year it’s been. Violence, uncivil discourse, hurricanes, fires. And a black cloud of nuclear war.
     Tension about all this threatened to explode in me until I recalled a skyline that took my breath away one day as I drove back into metro Denver. Our urban area encompasses three million souls, yet the city looked as small as LEGO pieces hugging the horizon. I realized this was a microcosm of the whole world, miniature under a canopy of billowing white clouds.
     This calme...

Is God a Scrooge?

     Honestly, sometimes I’ve pictured God as a prune-faced miser. But a speaker I heard pointed out how crazy that is. After all, the first thing the Almighty told people after creating them was to have sex - that’s what it takes to “be fruitful and multiply.” The Master Designer could have shaped us into single-cell organisms that simply divide to reproduce. Instead, he fashioned a sizzling modus operandi.
     The next thing the Deity told people was to take charge. In other words, do...