Maura Casey's Blog

Every year in late spring, my mother would walk into the house from our backyard and say with satisfaction, “The bride is in bloom.”

The bride was not a person, but a bush heavy with white flowers that would appear as the weather warmed in our tiny, urban backyard. Also called the pearl bush, the flowers cluster on branches which bend downward, looking like a bridal veil.

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My mother was a skilled gardener, but the location of our house on the west side of Buffalo fought her at every turn. When she and my father bought the Victorian-era structure the yard ended at the red brick wall of a movie theater behind our house. Yet the wall lent the plot of land an intimate feel, like a hidden courtyard. It muffled the constant traffic noise of nearby Elmwood avenue, with its wheezing buses and shrieking ambulances.

Alas, in less than two years the Elmwood Theater was torn down to make way for a bank parking lot. The brick wall was replaced by a chain link fence. The view was unremittingly ugly. In summer the asphalt radiated heat. In winter it was covered in drifts of snow that eventually became black with dirt, salt and sand.

Stars of Bethlehem, running amok in our yard

Still my mother tried to wrest some beauty from the yard. She had my two brothers and our father get flagstones from a dilapidated mansion a few blocks away that itself was slated for the wrecking ball. They did, but the flagstones mostly sat in piles at the end of the driveway. None of us made it a priority to help her complete her vision for the yard. But she persisted in her efforts. She planted tulips, lilies of the valley and hyacinth. Together she and I went into the backyards of once-grand homes, now abandoned and falling apart, and dug up bulbs of Stars of Bethlehem, replanting them in the yard. Mom planted two Kwanzan cherry trees. In spring, their branches were covered in double pink blossoms, reaching up like they were glad to see us.

The Elmwood Theater before it was torn down.

Yet we kids never used the yard much. It was too small for games. The view was grim.

The years passed. So did my mother, then my dad. My sister Ellen insisted on buying the house when Dad died. It was a money pit. Dad never maintained it. That neglect showed. I always thought Ellen bought the place because she wasn’t ready say goodbye to our parents. But in four years she would see them again. When Ellen’s estate sold the house it was slated to be torn down for yes, another parking lot, this time for a nearby bar. I visited the house once again to dig up some bulbs before the entire lot was paved over.

That’s when I could see it, in the spring sunshine, from an upstairs window: The outline of a Japanese rock garden. Mom must have planned it all along and there it was: The Japanese cherry trees, a riot of pink; the bride in full bloom, blossoms cascading and nearby, the stacked-up piles of flagstone. Why hadn’t we made it a priority to take an afternoon, buy some sand, do some digging and imbed the flat stones in the garden? Mom asked nothing for herself and it would have given her so much joy. The thoughts haunted me as I dug up the Stars of Bethlehem. The flowers could not quell regret, but they had become a form of remembrance.

I planted the Stars of Bethlehem around our rural home, but to my disappointment, they never bloomed. A few months later I suffered a miscarriage. It was spring. I bought the biggest bleeding heart bush I could find and planted it to comfort my own bleeding heart. The bush grew bigger every year.

Bleeding hearts in front of our house

When we sold our house and moved midwinter, I dug up the bush and the soil around it, and replanted it at our new home on a quiet country lane.

As the weather thawed, the bleeding heart branched out and bloomed, content in its new environment. And, somehow, the Stars of Bethlehem appeared, too, as if my mother wanted to send comfort.

Every spring, scattered in the grass, Stars of Bethlehem now bloom in unexpected places. I think of them as my mother waving to me. “Hi, Mom!” I say, as I admire them.

And the bleeding heart? I have split and replanted the original many times now, dividing it in fall and giving some away to friends. This month, all the bushes in front of the house and in our backyard bloomed once again. There are six of them now, 34 years after I brought the mother plant home.

When I see them, I smile, touch the delicate flowers and I whisper, “Hello, love. I haven’t forgotten you.”

We just finished Memorial Day in America, the day when we honor those who died on battlefields defending our country. Parades, speeches and trumpets playing Taps abounded.

My social media feed was replete with pictures of soldiers and everyone’s memories of them, whether or not they died in the middle of a war or warm in their beds decades later. Such attention and gratitude is absolutely right and honorable.

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Even I got into the act, posting a picture on Facebook of my mother’s grave with its proud “WWII” etched at the top, indicating that she was a veteran, and its ever-present little American flag in the grass before her tombstone.

But we have gone from pride in the selfless military service of those who agreed to walk through hell for America to canonizing for sainthood absolutely anything to do with the military.

And even my mother, Cpl. Jane Irene Murray, would have said that the government and the country have gone overboard.

This is my Mom when she served in the Army as a corporal., and the medals she earned. The medal second from the right has the head of the helmeted Athena, goddess of war, the symbol of the Woman’s Army Corps. Women were fully integrated into the Army in the 1970s and the Women’s Army Corps disbanded.

Right now, the Trump Administration has proposed a $1.5 trillion budget for the military, an incredible 44 percent increase over an equally jaw-dropping $895 billion that is the current budget, the largest in history. (With supplemental money passed for the Pentagon the true figure is about $965 billion.) The current American budget is more than the combined totals of the next 10 countries which spend the most on the military. The proposed budget would cut programs that help the poor to buy more bombs.

This is utter insanity. It makes the U.S. and the world less safe and vulnerable to presidents with itchy trigger fingers - like the current one. Why negotiate when you can drop a bomb? Why discuss when you can send aircraft carriers to do the talking?

Our military budget is the nation’s biggest jobs program, with projects in virtually every congressional district. So it grows ever-larger and makes it harder to cut.

But the other reason is that we elevate people in the military.

Until Vietnam, it’s safe to say that veterans, most of whom were drafted, were thought simply to have done their duty. Perhaps in retrospect our admiration grew, particularly for those who joined the armed forces during World War II to fight the Nazi menace. No wonder we call them the Greatest Generation. They - my mother among them - helped to save the world.

But Vietnam was so unpopular that vets were shamefully subject to unrelenting insults and vitriol. They were called baby killers, murderers and worse. This, despite the fact that so many who were sent overseas were bewildered boys who were drafted and dropped into a nightmare from which many never emerged. They came home to find peace, and instead were reviled.

That was a disgrace.

But now, Americans have overcompensated. We are told, over and over again, that we owe our freedom to those who serve in the military. That we would not have any rights at all unless people donned a uniform and marched off to battle.

That is a too-narrow viewpoint at best, propaganda at worst, and political opportunism on the part of the government.

I see many people who fought for our rights who have gone unrecognized.

There is little public applause for the aging Freedom Riders who risked their lives to register Black voters in the South in the 1960s, for students vilified for integrating public schools, protesters who marched so that gays not be jailed, injured or fired for their sexual preference, for people attacked for questioning the status quo, for playwrights, journalists and others who shone a light on injustice or lawyers who went to court defending the innocent.

In my view, those people fought for the rights of everyone.

I see zero correlation between fighting for freedom and the Korean War, the Vietnam War (based on a lie), the war in Iraq (based on a lie), the present war in Iran (based on an impulse) and all the military acts that our current commander-in-chief has indulged in: dropping bombs on Venezuela, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and Somalia, among others.

Any see-no-evil attitude towards the military makes a bloated military budget inevitable, and it becomes a vicious circle. The size of our military budget is a clear and present danger.

It’s time for a reset.

I’ve learned a lot in the last year.

In spring of 2025, my book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery,” was published. Lucky me to be a debut author - not, God knows, to be confused with a debutante - at the youthful age of 67. I planned for post-publication like a military invasion. The days when an author has a fairy godmother to arrange publicity is mostly in the past, if it ever really existed. Marketing would mostly be on me.

Because we are living in a tsunami of books due to the self-publishing revolution, a book is published every seven seconds. Last year, in the United States, 4.6 million books were published, according to Publisher’s Weekly, 15 times the number of books published 20 years before. Publisher’s Weekly is paywalled, so those statistics can be found in this web post from Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

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I knew that getting any attention for the book would be a daunting task. All that said, it’s been tougher in some ways and more rewarding in welcome, surprising ways.

Among other occasions, in 13 months, I spoke at or attended:

Ten libraries

Four bookstores

One college

Three conferences or meetings

Had a table at two book fairs

Spoke on eight podcasts

Signed books and taught writing at the Okoboji Writers’ and Songwriters’ Retreat in Iowa.

Attended five book clubs (one in person and the others via zoom) where members read the book and were eager to discuss it.

The book was also the subject of four articles in newspapers, three magazines, and three (blessedly favorable) book reviews.

None of this, you may be unsurprised to hear, resulted in an invitation to a second book deal, a movie, an interview on The Today Show or an appearance on the NY Times bestseller list.

Seeing my book displayed in a bookstore will never get old.

There have been speaking engagements at bookstores and libraries where hardly anyone showed up and one memorable occasion when nobody at all showed. (It was a frigid evening in February; I didn’t take it personally). And there was another occasion, at a local college, where 40 arrived and nearly every seat was filled, proving that you just never know how these things will go.

The book opens up with my childhood habit of stealing from my father while he slept so I could give the money to my mother. Many people remarked on that scene, and it has become a common occurrence for women to whisper to me while handing me a book to sign, “I stole from my father too.” Proving, once again, that none of us outgrows childhood without some pain.

Early on, The Buffalo News did a generous and lengthy article on my roots in the city and the book. But what is, perhaps, a commentary on the decline of newspapers, more people from my past contacted me after an events and arts magazine, Buffalo Spree, published an article in January. Mary, a former roommate, got in touch; so did Carol, a friend from my teenage karate lessons, as did Jim and Kevin, both of whom were ushers at my wedding and an unending source of laughs when I was in college. What gifts, to have these precious people in my life again. Former classmates from graduate school were incredibly kind during an appearance in Washington, D.C. One even wrote about the book in his own Substack (Here’s looking at you, Jim Buie!)

In the year since publication, I’ve been assured sales would increase once I publish another book. Untold numbers of people have asked, what am I working on now and when will it be ready? It’s enough to give me a panic attack. I have only begun to formulate an answer to those questions.

I am in awe of authors and friends such as Luanne Rice, J. Courtney Sullivan, Jeff Benedict and Nicole Baart in this regard. They seem to pop out books every two years or so like they are baking muffins. They make it look easy. I know. Appearances can be deceiving.

Yet I’m a turtle, not a hare.

On August 4th, I’ll be in Wilson, NY at the invitation of the town’s library. My book’s settings are divided between Buffalo, N.Y., the town of Wilson, and nearby Lake Ontario, on which we had a summer cottage. I renamed Wilson in my memoir, but, to my delight, that didn’t fool anyone in town. I am honored by the invitation and the occasion will be a homecoming. Wilson’s library provided endless books all the summers of my childhood. Like all libraries, it is holy ground.

By then, I hope I will be better prepared to answer the question of, “When will you write the next book?” In the meantime, I am beyond grateful I wrote even one.

About 10 days ago I saw a blanket of yellow flowers in the field across the street, blooming in the morning dew. They had appeared overnight.

That’s when I knew it was time.

When my husband began his farm on our land 15 years ago, there was one crop for which I lobbied hard. Despite my white hair, I said, “I’m an Irish girl at heart. Make me happy and plant potatoes.”

So he did. Every year, he waits for dandelions to bloom. Then he plants potatoes.

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If it was an old wives’ tale that potatoes are best planted when the weeds bloom, it is one that is many centuries old. The timing of planting, in fact, is now supported by the science known as phenology. Dandelions, that curse of gardeners everywhere, have maddeningly long roots that burrow deep into the soil. Warmth, soil temperature and the length of day all influence their growth and when they flower, the soil temperature for potatoes is just right when the sunny blooms appear.

The view across the street from our house, with its bumper crop of dandelions.

Nobody approved of Pete starting his farm more than my cousin Sara Murray, who lived on the family farm outside of Westport, County Mayo. The first topic of our transatlantic phone calls during the warm weather always involved the potato crop. During one summer when we had a particularly robust yield, I said to Sara, half-joking, that I should send her some of our potatoes. There was a silence, and then she said, her voice lilting with hilarity, “A Yank sending an Irishman potatoes? Now THAT would be a news story!”

Indeed.

So with the dandelions in their first bloom, we examined all the seed potatoes we were to plant — five different kinds.

“I ordered too many,” Pete sighed, and I had to agree. We had bags and bags of organic seed potatoes, freshly arrived from the Maine Potato Lady. (That’s a company, not a person.) I wondered where he would put them all. “I’ll plow a new field,” he said. Still, we had plenty of room in the land he had already prepared. So he cut the potatoes up, leaving three eyes in each piece, applied a treatment to the tubers and after a day, we brought them out to the fields to plant. Pete dug the trenches, and I placed the potatoes, eyes up, one after another with room to grow.

Customers at farmers markets go wild for fingerlings, the long, small, slim potatoes.

Their names sound like the nicknames of illegal drugs: Magic Mollies, Blue Ecstasy.

Others are old friends. Pinto Gold is a lovely combination of golden and red potatoes. The purple potatoes have such a vibrant color they look like jewels when they come out of the earth. But that won’t be for another few months.

Pete does nearly all of the farm work himself, but he knows I’m always willing to get my hands in the dirt to plant potatoes. Maybe it’s swirling in my DNA, with ancestral memory of the Irish famine.

In a tragic missed opportunity, in 1845, the first difficult year of the blight that destroyed most of Ireland’s potato crop, there was a letter published that offered a tantalizing clue to a solution. It was a chemical that would have fended off the disease that caused the hunger and deaths of hundreds of thousands and years of suffering. The London-based Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette published a letter by one Matthew Moggridge, who lived near a smelting factory. The nearer a potato field was to the factory chimney, which belched out copper smoke, the more free of disease were the potatoes. The fields within 200 feet of the chimney were completely untouched, he wrote.

Decades would pass before spreading copper sulfate on leaves was found to prevent the blight that altered Irish history. Such a simple solution, but one that was then unknown.

My satisfaction in planting tubers might have its roots in the echoes of that complicated history, but I think it’s far simpler than that.

The work of writing, unlike my husband’s work of farming, is not physical at all. It mostly resides between my ears. There is a real satisfaction in engaging in activities that get me out of my own head. I plant, something grows, I can feed it to my family. I can measure it. There’s nothing for me to intellectualize, thank goodness.

I’m not ready to give up my pen for a shovel anytime soon, but let the potatoes grow. And dandelions? They have served their one positive purpose, so from here on out, I wish them only limited success.

Two things happened this week that gave me rare hope about the future of the United States.

One involved the king of Great Britain, Charles III.

The other came from my beloved hometown of Buffalo.

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Both combined to show that there is a glimpse of a kinder, stronger, even wiser United States than anything the Trump administration has shown to the world in 15 months.

First: Who’d have thought years ago that it would take a king, addressing (transcript) a joint session of Congress, to remind America what democracy is all about? (video link)

To help the 535 members of Congress that they are more, should be greater, than the bullied, servile lapdogs too many have become since Donald Trump took office? That the America that has stood up for NATO, that came to the defense of Ukraine, is worthy of rising again?

Buffalo Sabres fans belting out the Canadian national anthem (video imbedded)

The king is far too polite to say, “Exactly what have you people been THINKING since January of last year?” But he got his message across nonetheless, with tact, clarity and wry humor.

He reminded Congress of how they are supposed to act, and of our shared roots. “The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” (Emphasis mine)

He also said, “…it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s founders is present in every session and every vote cast. Not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many.” (Emphasis mine) Congress loudly applauded.

He reminded Congress that Great Britain has stood with America in conflicts for the last 100 years and NATO came to the aid of America after 9/11, the only time that Article Five of the organization’s mutual aid agreement was ever invoked.

And he added, “Today, Mr. Speaker, that same, unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people.”

Congress roared its approval. Members leaped to their feet.

What King Charles staged was less a speech and more an intervention. He reminded members of Congress of their higher calling; that they are capable of much more than they have shown lately.

Of course, the only true intervention can come from American voters, whose biggest mistake is sitting in the Oval Office right now, wreaking havoc. And interventions are powerful, but are, by nature, temporary. Still, the messenger and the message made a welcome impact.

The second sign of hope came from my hometown of Buffalo.

The city has had a tradition for decades: When the Buffalo Sabres hockey team plays at home, both the Canadian and American anthems are sung. It doesn’t matter if the Sabres are playing another American team; the words of “O, Canada” echo to the rafters.

The only other American city that follows this tradition is Detroit which, like Buffalo, is a city on the Canadian border. Everyone in Buffalo grows up knowing the words to the Canadian anthem; as a vestige of our childhoods, I do and my husband does, too, even though we haven’t lived in Buffalo for 40-plus years.

This affection we feel toward our northern neighbor has made it all more heartbreaking for us to watch as Trump has been vicious, belittling, and rude to Canada, outrageously saying it should become America’s 51st state and insulting beyond all reason.

So what happened in Buffalo? As usual, before the Sabres took to the ice against the Boston Bruins, a woman began to sing the Canadian national anthem. Unfortunately, the microphone malfunctioned. Her voice could not be heard after the first few words.

It didn’t matter.

After a moment’s hesitation, the crowd, dominated by people from Buffalo and at least some Canadians who drove across the Peace Bridge to attend, took up the words and began to sing those beautiful verses without a missing a beat, their voices getting clearer and stronger, together:

O, Canada, our home and native land

True patriot love, in all of us command,

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,

The true North strong and free.

From far and wide, O Canada,

We stand on guard for thee…

By the end, most of the 19,000, American-majority crowd were singing the Canadian national anthem, showing the traditional respect and affection we have always had for that wise and good country.

And together, the crowd roared their approval when they finished.

The moment has gone viral. I am profoundly moved whenever I see the video, not just because of the grace of the act, but because it symbolizes the promise of a return to decency. I also know, no matter what spews out of this administration, that given the chance, Americans would stand on guard for Canada. And despite everything, I believe Canada would stand on guard for us, too.

A year ago I set Google alerts with my name. Skyhorse Publishing was about to release my first book, and I wanted to be notified if articles or reviews about it came out. (One can always hope.) The settings worked; I did, indeed, get an email every time Maura Casey got ink somewhere.

But which one?

Google alerts have made me meet, virtually, my doppelgängers from all over the country.

“Doppelgänger “ is an imprecise term in this context. It implies that we look alike, and of course, we don’t. Our ages are all over the place. The name Maura Casey may not be Jane Doe, but it is remarkably common.

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Casey is the most ordinary Irish names, behind the likes of Murphy, Sullivan and Kelly. So this was not unexpected. But the combination of my first and last names occurs far more often than I once thought.

Photo by Tooth and Toad on Unsplash

There’s the Maura Casey who is a National Weather Service meteorologist. She keeps an eye on conditions out west. With my google alerts, I can tell you all about the snowpack in the mountains of Montana, the danger of wildfires, and high winds. Better yet, her title reveals that she is a “warning coordinator.” We all need a warning coordinator in our lives, and I’m delighted to hear that Maura Casey is vigilant.

There’s more, of course. One Maura Casey is a physical therapist in New York City. Another Maura Casey is a pharmacist in Pennsylvania. Maura Casey also competes in canoe races in Ireland - who knew?

Another Maura Casey is a sommelier - a wine expert. From her website: “About a decade ago I found myself in wine and spirits and haven’t looked back.” Yup, that happened to me, once. Speaking from the vantage of four decades of sobriety, I hope that her journey is smoother than my own. I was a whiskey woman, though. Maybe I would have had better luck sticking to wine.

There’s also a Maura Casey who is a realtor in Scottsdale, Ariz. I’ve known about her ever since I tried to buy the domain name of mauracasey.com and discovered she grabbed it first. She also got mauracasey@gmail.com. She used to be a marathon runner, too, putting my little 5K races to shame. Clearly, Maura Casey is quicker on her feet and on the uptake than I am, or at least more internet-savvy.

This array of people with whom I share my name isn’t entirely a surprise. When my husband and I lived in Somerville, Mass., and were in the process of buying our first house in the 1980s, my financial records got mixed up with a Maura Casey who either worked for or was on the Boston City Council. Then and now, Boston is the city with the highest percentage of people of Irish descent in America, so at the time I was more amused than startled. I was also grateful that she wasn’t a bank robber.

I get a kick out of knowing there are versions of me out there, and here’s hoping they are better humans than I am. Even knowing someone with my first name is rare enough that it amuses me. For example, the office manager of my dentist calls me for appointment reminders. She is a lovely woman, originally from Ireland, and when she calls me in her lilting voice, she always begins the same way: “Maura, hi, it’s Maura.” “Hi, Maura!” I respond. We both laugh. Perhaps we are easily amused.

I suppose we could all make things less confusing for each other if we used our middle initials. My middle initial is J, for Joanna, but I grew up with mixed feelings about my middle name. I was named for an aunt who was a virtual stranger to me. But later, I became friends with a Miami Herald editor whom I loved and admired, Joanna Wragg, who by her example helped me get sober. So for a time I used my middle initial more as a sign of gratitude for my friendship with her, rather than its familial ties.

Most of the time, though, I’ve been just plain Maura Casey, like the rest of the Caseys canoeing, sniffing and sipping wine, selling houses, measuring wind speed and serving in government. Who knows how many of us there are. Godspeed, everyone. Please don’t get arrested and pay your bills on time, for the sake of us all.

The only city I know better than my hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., is Washington, D.C. That has been a gift of my sister Claudia, who has lived in the Washington area for most of the last 50 years. She first worked there as a 21-year-old Marine, and at 16 I saved money to visit, dazzled by the city’s monuments and history. Later, I lived with Claudia while attending graduate school; she was, by then, an officer in the Army.

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Just two years after my first trip to the city, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum opened, in 1976. It is one of the few museums I have visited regularly over 50 years. I have gone there alone, with my kids, with my daughter Anna’s eighth grade class and last week, when I went with Anna and her daughter, Ellie. The place was mobbed. The gift shop cashier mentioned that he had just waited on a couple from New Zealand. The people in line behind us were from Japan.

Despite the crowds, in the most important ways the visit was exhilarating. The museum has evolved. Planes still hang from the ceiling. But the exhibits are now so different from decades ago, when I first attended as a teenager with long, black hair, up to this past week, when, as a white-haired grandmother, I panted hard to keep up with Ellie.

Early on, the museum was a paean to human creativity and male testosterone with just one exception: Amelia Earhart, the world-famous, courageous pilot and feminist who was the second person to fly across the Atlantic nonstop. Otherwise, the contributions of women were scarcely represented. The same could be said of Black pilots. That changed in 1982, with the exhibit “Black Wings,” which showcased the barriers and struggles African Americans faced who wanted to fly.

That early exhibit was a step forward, but still separate. The achievements of Blacks were not showcased as part of the main museum. They were still Other. The same could be said of women. The treatment of the exhibits spoke volumes.

Every museum conveys what is, or is not, important to a society.

Fast forward to this year. When the visitor enters the main hall, a banner with the image of Katherine Johnson hangs from the ceiling. She was the NASA mathematician showcased in the movie “Hidden Figures,” so flawless in her calculations that astronaut John Glenn wouldn’t fly unless she approved his flight trajectory. She and other female, Black “computers” – so called because they were experts in math – made space flight possible. There are also exhibits throughout the museum of women astronauts, astronomers, and aviators like Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to get a pilot’s license. They are no longer separate.

Katherine Johnson at her desk at NASA

Times have indeed changed. On April 1, while watching the countdown to the launch of Artemis II in its journey to the dark side of the moon, I noticed a woman, Emily Nelson, directing the final preparations of the flight from NASA headquarters. It matters, just as it matters that this museum now gives everyone a seat at the table.

Now the question haunts me: Will that last?

In the name of purging any and all efforts at DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), the Trump administration has gleefully fired women and Blacks. Pete Hegseth, that superbly unqualified secretary of defense, has implemented such efforts in the military with enthusiasm, best described by Lucian Truscott, whose Substack I follow. Hegseth intervened less than three weeks ago to remove two Blacks and two female officers in a committee-approved promotions list to brigadier general. Hegseth apparently believes that if women or minorities hold high office, it is proof they did not merit promotion. Yet he is proof that this administration promotes incompetent white men based on their loyalty, race and gender. The qualified need not apply.

For example, last year Hegseth fired Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be named the Navy’s highest ranking officer. Before becoming CNO, she had led the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, headed U.S. Naval Operations Korea, commanded a naval destroyer, led a destroyer squadron and twice commanded aircraft carrier strike groups. But her ample qualifications didn’t matter.

The bigotry of the Trump Administration is bound to affect even cultural icons like the Smithsonian, and indeed, the Administration is acting like the politburo of the former Soviet Union. It has aimed its racist and sexist efforts squarely at the Smithsonian Museums to censor and alter exhibits, insisting that they “remove divisive narratives.” Happily, the Resistance has emerged in an army of volunteer citizen historians who are documenting any changes for the blessed day when this administration ends.

For now, my excited granddaughter and her completely exhausted grandmother absorbed the museum’s core message, the only acceptable one in a decent society: That for every child, the sky is the limit.

One of the stupidest things I ever said occurred after watching the election returns on Nov. 5, 2024. The country had, disastrously, elected Donald Trump as president, again.

I knew how bad this could get for America and the world. Over the previous summer I had forced myself to read half of the 900-page tome outlining the far-right “2025 Project” and from its deeply depressing pages I knew that a cultural war against women’s equality, minorities and LGBTQ people was about to commence. It outlined huge cuts to the federal government. It was clear that the international order was about to be upended the way little Donnie Trump allegedly used to throw around chunks of birthday cake at children’s parties. (Tells you something, doesn’t it?).

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Yet, as is my nature, I reached for something, anything, to feel a glimmering of hope, even as my stomach churned. And so I said:

“Well, at least he won’t get us in a war.”

Ha.

Trump had for years railed against the wars that America pursued since the turn of the 21st century, but since Trump lies about absolutely everything, there was no logical reason on my part to believe he hadn’t fibbed about this, too. I was suckered.

The prime-time, nationwide speech he made last night, appropriately on April Fools Day, was a 19-minute word salad of bluster, lies, shifting arguments, empty promises, dissing former presidents and general grandiosity. He even used the phrase, “bomb them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.”

Trump sounded like an aging barfly watching Fox News while swilling a beer and mouthing off at the neighborhood ginmill.

He - and his moronic, bigoted, ideological twin, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth - are treating the war against Iran like a video game. Even as American bombs blew up a girls school, and recently, dropped a bomb in the middle of a girls volleyball game.

Trump started war against Iran on a whim, and its admittedly loathsome government immediately moved to lob missiles at its neighbors as well as U.S. servicemen and women, bottle up 20 percent of oil traffic in the world and vow it would never, ever stop fighting. Given Iran’s thousands of years of history and deeply ingrained sense of honor, it probably won’t.

These are the repercussions America faces from being vacuous enough to elect Trump not just once, but twice.

The Founders of the United States created a government of checks and balances. On paper, it is brilliant. Congress would be a check on the president; the Supreme Court would restrain both. Under some narrow circumstances, Congress can also modify Supreme Court decisions.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

But the Founders never predicted a supine Congress of the president’s party held hostage by the power of money and threats, Nor did they foresee a Supreme Court willing to grant sweeping powers to the presidency that they had never envisioned.

Yet there are signs of hope.

Republicans in Congress may be groveling, but millions of Americans are not. Consider:

The “No Kings” protests of 8 million people that took place last weekend no longer look like a Woodstock reunion of aging hippies; this new war - and the prospect of yet another Mideast quagmire - attracted noticeably younger people. Thank God for that, because my generation has messed things up so badly we could never apologize enough. We need the voices, energy and activism of the young to begin to make things right.

Europe and other allies are standing up to Trump. They aren’t racing to open the Strait of Hormuz, or offer their bases in support of a war they were never consulted on by a man who has done nothing but lob threats and insults toward them.

American courts are handing the administration one defeat after another. They have taken awhile to get going - the wheels of justice move with agonizing slowness - but in the last two months courts have slapped down Trump’s tariffs, his shuttering Voice of America, yanking federal funds from National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, imposing Orwellian requirements on defense reporters and halted the building of his mega-ballroom attached to the White House,

It isn’t enough, of course. We need not just regime change in the United States, but also a change of heart, which is infinitely more difficult. American voters elected Trump and Republicans in Congress. Will they change?

We have seven months before election day, when one-third of the U.S. Senate and all of the House of Representatives, both now controlled by Republicans and the White House, face the voters. That day of reckoning can’t come soon enough. Trump is proving once again that he is the king of chaos, and he didn’t launch America into a war with a plan.

He’s just throwing around chunks of birthday cake.

I sold my sailboat a few days ago. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out how it is that I could cut it out of my life without even a twinge of regret.

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Sailing is like getting high without the hangover. I fell in love with it at 12, when I first sailed in a 19-foot Lightning on Lake Ontario with my sister Ellen, my neighbor Tony and his wife Linda. We got caught in a brewing storm. Then the mainsail got stuck and for tense moments could not be wrangled down in the rising wind. While the adults white-knuckled the boat into safety at last, I loved every minute.

I stayed hooked into adulthood. I owned a 26-foot Columbia until it was clear that my husband would rather farm than sail. It was too big for me to handle alone. I sold it, then spent a few years pining to sail. When my friend David and I decided to purchase a sailboat together, it seemed to be a perfect solution. He was the husband of my beloved friend Dorothy and was a far better sailor than me. In fact, David did nearly everything well. He was one of the best men I ever knew.

Owning a boat together was seamless. We named the 17-foot pocket cruiser, Second Wind and agreed on everything, except one: How long we would own the boat together. Sadly, David died suddenly after 15 months. I became a solo sailor.

I financed repairs to a crack in the boat’s hull that had not been repaired correctly by the previous owner; a less stubborn person would have seen it as a sign to get rid of the boat altogether and find another.

One summer day my friend Macy, a pilot on a ferry that criss-crosses Long Island Sound, took this picture of me sailing.

I added mechanisms to make the boat easier to sail single-handedly. And I learned, through a lot of mistakes and small adventures, how to be a better sailor, although I am still not the sailor that David was.

But last year, my beloved, down-at-heels marina where I happily kept the boat was sold to a businessman who immediately raised rates by 50 percent all the while bragging about the improvements he was going to make. I didn’t want the improvements. I wanted the same scruffy atmosphere, affordable docks and camaraderie. But, in truth, I knew I wouldn’t have time to sail the boat that summer. I was going to be traveling to sell my first book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery,” and time was at a premium.

This year, when the moment came to figure out where to put the boat for the season, it felt like homework instead of the beginning of new adventures. I knew it was time to sell. It took me 10 minutes to advertise the boat online and within two days I had six people who wanted to buy it.

But my lack of regret puzzled me. Why was this so easy? Was sailing just a phase of my life that was now over? I still look forward to the incomparable thrill of the hull pounding, the sails billowing, the sun dancing on whitecaps.

My love of sailing has not changed. I have.

It may also be that I was finally able, after all these years, to let go of my friend David.

There are aspects of life that I will never understand if I live to be 110. One it this: How a compassionate and brilliant physician, who could write poetry, cook a gourmet meal, paint lovely pictures and sing beautifully could be here one day and gone the next, stolen away by pancreatic cancer. I will never accept the cruelty of that.

But I can be grateful, and I’ll hang onto that, as well as the memories of all the sweet afternoons I spent on Second Wind that David wasn’t able to experience. Now someone else can enjoy our boat. My friend Joanne has assured me I’m welcome to sail on her much larger vessel in the coming months.

I know there are more sun-dappled days in my future. And gratitude will remain, always.

New London’s Ledge Light, over my left shoulder.

A year ago I read a column that both left me envious and made me think. I wished I had written it first.

I was appropriately green with jealousy after reading Rini Jeffers’ eloquent take on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. Her words had the ring of truth - the best of all reasons to mull over a piece of writing.

Jeffers is the talented columnist for the Chronicle-Telegram of Elyria, Ohio. In her column, titled, “The Irish never forget a kindness,” she wrote about the Great Hunger, commonly known as the Irish potato famine.

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Ireland was a nation of mostly poor tenant farmers, all scratching out a living for English landowners, as the island was a British colony. From 1845 to 1852 a fungal disease destroyed the potato crop that was a mainstay of the Irish diet; as a result, 1 million died from starvation and disease and another 2 million fled.

It was, “the greatest social disaster of 19th century Europe — an event with something of the characteristics of a low-level nuclear attack,” according to former Oxford University professor Terry Eagleton. British policies made the Great Hunger far worse, exporting crops that could have fed the starving, and compelling others to labor on public works projects, building roads to nowhere in return for thin soup. To qualify for relief, during the later famine years tenant farmers had to give up their two- or three-acre plots. If that wasn’t enough, Parliament passed laws that unwittingly gave landowners incentives to evict their tenants off the land entirely.

One of the “roads to nowhere” the Irish were compelled to build for food is still visible in County Clare, near The Burren, a famous, moon-like landscape.

I grew up knowing some of this, and had heard of the generosity of Native Americans who themselves had been cruelly evicted from their land and forced to relocate to Oklahoma. They were desperately poor, and yet they sent donations to help the Irish in 1847.

But I was transfixed by the rich details Jeffers included in her column: The Choctaws of Skullville, Oklahoma, sent $170, nearly $7,000 today; the Choctaws of Doaksville, Oklahoma, sent $150; the Cherokees, who had also been forced out of their tribal lands, sent $200. Slaves from the Caribbean sent donations. Children in a pauper orphanage in New York pooled their pennies to send $2. Inmates of Sing Sing prison in New York sent what little money they had.

The poor, the ravaged and those with almost nothing gave what they had while the well-off and well-fed made speeches about the flawed character of the Irish poor and their shameful dependence on government help.

Yet the same phenomenon happens today. Even in our more affluent era, the poor generally give a higher percentage of their income than the wealthy, although their smaller contributions don’t equal those of the rich. And I can’t count the number of times right-wing lawmakers have voted to cut school lunches or health care subsidies, while enthusiastically lowering taxes for the wealthy.

The stories of how the ragged poor helped those even more desperate so many years ago made me realize once again that the world will never have enough empathy and kindness, two qualities that seem increasingly removed from our national discourse. For decades, the poor have been seen as losers, more or less, and programs to help are denounced, disparaged, and seen by too many, mostly on the right, as a waste of money. They would have been squarely in the camp of those who imposed ridiculous conditions to help the starving Irish.

The impulse of the haves to view the have-nots as morally deficient is plenty common in the here and now, let alone the 19th century.

The Irish never forgot. In 1995, Irish President Mary Robinson formally thanked the Choctaw tribe for help during the famine. And this: When the Covid-19 epidemic ravaged the Hopi and Navaho tribes, the tribes had the indignity of starting GoFundMe efforts to raise money because our own government’s help was so inadequate. When the people of Ireland heard about it, they donated millions of dollars. Today, Ireland offers scholarships to enable members of the Choctaw tribe to study at Irish universities.

My ancestors’ experience of the famine has drifted down in the form of vague family stories of uncertain veracity. Still it lingers. In a cemetery near my late cousin’s County Mayo farm there is a marked, mass grave from the famine years, a grassy mound that remains a silent witness to the suffering of years ago, but whose remnants still swirl in our DNA.

If that long-ago experience makes us somehow more generous, more compassionate, it will be a small compensation for the heartache that still lives in haunted memory.

Several of the historical facts in this column come from the book, “The Graves are Walking,” by John Kelly, an excellent account of the Great Hunger.