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A Cicada Left This Letter

    Kindly allow me to apologize for my behavior Saturday morning. I now know there is a loud, throbbing machine that sends shock waves through the grass into the ground. I mistook this phenomenon for a love song from what surely must have been a fine male specimen—and promptly humiliated myself. A lady tried […]

Famous Last Words

    Years ago, I snagged a job as an associate editor of Saint Louis University’s alumni magazine because my predecessor had suffered a fatal aneurysm crossing Grand Avenue. A thin, sharp-witted Brit, her last words were, “Something untoward has happened in my head.” When I was told, I was speechless, humbled from the start. […]

Matisse and the Sea

    “With color,” Matisse once wrote, “one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.” He knew how to cast the spells: when I close my eyes and see the Matisses I love best, it is those splashy but deliberate colors that bloom against my eyelids, lifting a humdrum mood into joy. There […]

New Harmony

    “I just hope the coffee roaster’s still there,” I say as we exit the highway. “Why wouldn’t it be?” asks my husband, whose world contains fewer neurotic imaginings. I shrug. “Things change from year to year.” I remind him about the other little coffeehouse, now vanished, and the bookstore we loved…. We have […]

Take Humanities for Your Health

    Entwined bodies breathing heat into cool marble. Poetry wrapping grief in soft truth. Literature that grapples with suffering of every kind. The humanities have always stolen their abstractions from the physical self. It is time for them to give back. Dr. Rebecca Messbarger, a professor of Italian, and Dr. Patricia Olynyk, who holds […]

Rocking the Spectrum

  A mom carries a sweet-faced blond toddler into We Rock the Spectrum, hoping to celebrate. “Happy birthday, my dude,” says the Fenton gym’s owner, Lyla Novakowski. He pulls back a little. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was too much. I get it. I have a son you can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to.” She continues speaking, […]

Empathy, It Seems, Is Overrated

    A heart willing to welcome someone else’s pain inside. A brain with the superpower of unlocking other psyches. Skin so tender, anybody’s mood will brush against yours—then penetrate. Empathy seems a noble trait, potent and generous, an instant cure for injustice and xenophobia. I watch “empaths” on my husband’s beloved Star Trek and […]