Decades ago, I equated competence with knowing how to do things. It embarrassed me that I wasn’t sure I could change a tire in a pinch, even though I’d been shown. I’d never lived alone but didn't doubt my ability to do so.

My first “aha” came when my ten-year-old called me at work to say the toilet was overflowing. An hour away, I couldn’t run home to fix it. Instead, I told him to get the building maintenance number from the basement door and phone for help. By the time I got home, the plumbing was repaired and the mess cleaned up. Proud of my son for handling the problem so competently, I realized what mattered wasn’t whether he could fix the toilet, but whether he could get it fixed.

Fast forward to life in Wisconsin. My husband was out of town when half the power in the house went out. The electric company located the underground outage beneath our rear deck. They couldn’t do the repair until we removed all or part of the deck to provide access. I couldn’t possibly decide anything till my husband got home, I told them. Though it was true—neither of us would tear up the deck without consulting the other—it felt like playing the role of a simpering little wifey, helpless without her man.

I have the same sensation of playing a role when I carry a walking stick to board a plane. Everyone lets me jump the line. Seatmates lift my bag into the overhead compartment. I don’t need the stick to fly, but standing long or walking far is harder without it. So why this almost mischievous feeling that I’m getting away with something?

Perhaps it’s a mismatch between my strong, independent self-image and my actual present self. Now more than ever, I am blessed by the kindness of strangers. I watch for ways I can pass that blessing on. None of us are helpless while we help one another.

Image: Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash.

The spelling “Xmas” pushes buttons. Many decry it as commercial secularization of a religious holiday. A few enjoy it for the same reason. History tells a different story. The first letter of the Greek word for “Christ,” X was a shorthand for “Christ” at least as early as the year 1100. “Xmas” came into use in England by the 1700s if not before. Though I usually write Christmas in full, it’s from taste, not principle. Nor do I fret about commercialism debasing the holiday. Never mind ads, malls, and sales. I relish Christmas for its lights, music, stories, human connections, and many cherished memories.

In my childhood, my father and brother would carry home a spruce tree from a nearby lot. We set it in a bucket and wedged grapefruit-sized rocks around it till it stood up straight. Ornaments culminated in a homemade star on top and tinsel icicles on the branches. (Remember icicles?) Though we’d open gifts the next morning, it’s Christmas Eve that lingers in my memory: carols by the piano, the Christmas Story with illustrations from the Museum of Modern Art, and the beloved poem “King John’s Christmas” by A. A. Milne.

My year in Ethiopia began in the fall. In December, with only a footlocker to sit on yet and no suitable trees for miles around, my mate and I hung stylized aluminum foil branches on the wall. We baked cookies and rode a gari cart—a kind of horse-drawn taxi—to bring batches to neighbors and friends. At almost the last minute, the Post Exchange surprised us with real pines, shipped from Germany around the tip of Africa and up the Red Sea. (The Suez Canal was closed at the time.) We stood a pine in our almost-empty living room and decorated it with more cookies. Next day we woke to a thick column of ants marching between wall and tree trunk, toting away all the cookie crumbs they could carry.

Later I joined a choir in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. Many winters we sang carols in the community: to nursing facility patients in their rooms, to customers in Broadway Street bars, or to retirement home residents in their common room. In the bars, we took donations to support the Broadway Night Ministry; men who’d been drinking proved especially generous. Caroling in the retirement home gave us a glimpse of old Lakeview back when it was the heart of Chicago’s German community. At “Silent Night,” our listeners sang along with the words they’d known since childhood: “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht . . .” Their eyes filled with tears of joy at the ghosts of Christmas past.

Image: Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash.

You can’t prove walking under a ladder won’t sometimes cause bad luck. No hard evidence rules out the chance that seeing a black cat brings misfortune. Scientists ignore reported cases of accidents during the week after such events. Enough people attribute unexpected trouble to walking under ladders or seeing black cats, it’s surely worth more study. Right?

Science hasn’t proved vaccines don’t cause autism, nor could it. You can’t prove a negative. A new web page by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is correct in saying that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” It’s not clear whether the CDC plans to keep studying vaccines and autism forever if no relationship is found.

Ice cream may be dangerous, too. During the polio epidemics of the 1940s, people noticed that outbreaks coincided with increased consumption of ice cream. Some public health campaigns recommended cutting ice cream from children’s diets to slow the spread of polio. Correlation does not imply causation. Both polio and ice cream cone sales peaked in the heat of summer. Both vaccinations and early signs of autism are concentrated in the first few years of childhood.

As CDC focus shifts from evidence to political messaging, many scientists on its staff face a tough choice: to resign or to adapt? Neither option will help make America healthy again.

​Images (left to right): Photos by Nick Page, Gio Bartlett, and Ian Dooley on Unsplash.

Of many events competing for the headlines, some hit me harder because of links to my experience. The shooting of two National Guard members feels personal; they came from West Virginia, where I grew up. Anti-vax policies haunt me after decades of work to help cut global polio cases by 99.9 percent. ICE activity and resistance grab my attention especially in Rogers Park, Chicago, very near my former home.

Two recent news items take me back to the Vietnam era, when my now-deceased husband served a four-year enlistment in the U.S. Army. On hearing that U.S. troops had killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai, he denounced not only the officer who gave the order but every soldier who followed it. His military training, he told me, had clearly spelled out how to tell a legal from an illegal order, and the duty to obey the first and disobey the second.

A couple of weeks ago, six lawmakers released a video notifying members of the military of the obligation not to obey an unlawful order. Regardless of the lawmakers’ purpose, wisdom, or actual target audience, they weren’t saying anything our men and women in uniform didn't already know.

Questions of legality now surround Congressional inquiries into U.S. strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug boats and the killing of two survivors clinging to the wreckage. This called to mind another statement from my soldier husband. We’re not a military dictatorship, he said. It’s for the elected and appointed civilian officials to decide questions of policy, and for the military to carry out those decisions impartially, within legal bounds. Ultimately, it’s for us voters to make our voices heard.

Image: My Lai, Vietnam, March 16, 1968. Photo by Ronald Haeberle, then U.S. Army combat photographer, cropped.

Have you heard that the day after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday” because, after months of red ink (operating at a loss), that’s the day retail sales soar? True, many retailers earn most of their revenue toward the end of the year, when holiday shopping finally puts them in the black. True, by long-standing convention, stores delayed putting up their Christmas displays until after Thanksgiving. But that supposed origin of “Black Friday” is as mythical as the folktale of how the tiger got its stripes.

The term first appeared in print to describe a stock market crash on Friday, Sept. 24, 1869. Sixty years later, the Great Depression began with the “Black Tuesday” crash of Oct. 29, 1929. In the 1950s, police in Philadelphia dreaded the day after Thanksgiving. Unruly crowds poured into the city to shop. The Army-Navy football game that Saturday, most often played in Philadelphia, made matters worse. Crime soared. Police worked twelve-hour shifts. They called the day “Black Friday,” and the name stuck.

Retailers hated the term “Black Friday,” with its connotations of financial disaster and civic chaos. They tried to rebrand the busiest shopping day of the year as “Big Friday.” It never caught on. At last, in the 1980s, retailers devised a clever ploy. They’d give the disparaging old term an exciting new origin story: the black ink of profits. It conjured up visions of financial abundance, with steep sales to pull in the crowds.

As for the introverts among us who prefer to huddle at home, we’re more than happy to leave Black Friday behind and move forward into December.

Image: Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash.