The scene of the newly elected Pope Leo XIV standing on the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica, his arms outstretched toward the throngs below in Saint Peter’s Square, was both emotionally stirring and spiritually inspiring.

The globalization of economies—that of the U.S. as well as most of the rest of the world—began in earnest in the early 1980s when China was entering the global trading sphere. But as early as the 1920s, American companies had already started building manufacturing plants in Europe—both General Motors and Ford Motor Company were in Germany…

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Albert Bourla, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Pfizer. The event took place at the Bruce Museum—a Connecticut-based museum of both science and art—an appropriate setting to hear from a man of science, who had recently published a book, Moonshot, with the subtitle: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible. 

I’m an early riser—sometimes an exceedingly early riser—and it is in those pre-dawn hours that I have found a new and pleasurable pastime. It’s best enjoyed in an environment of solitude because it takes a certain amount of concentration.

Friends are the flowers in the garden of life—they come in many varieties and they blossom when the conditions are right. Some take their time to show their colors, while others burst into bloom as if by magic. Occasionally, there are those who hibernate, but when they re-emerge, they are the same flower.

One day, when I was seven years old and had just learned how to do long subtraction, I took a piece of lined paper and wrote the number 2000 at the top of the page. Beneath it, I wrote the number 1948, put a minus sign to the left of it, a line under it, and did the subtraction. The result was fifty-two. That was how I discovered, to my horror, that I would be fifty-two years old at the beginning of the next century.

It’s of value to remember the quote from the great American statesman, Senator John McCain, who, in 2015 upon returning from a visit to Ukraine, said, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.”

There is a wise and witty lady who lives in Annapolis, Maryland. Her name is Marion. She has a keen mind, a wicked sense of humor and is proud to let you know that she is ninety years old. She had recently been exposed to COVID and alerted her family and friends that she would be getting tested, promising to share the results as soon as they were available.

By almost any measure, the level of employment in this country has recovered miraculously since the frightening days of the onset of COVID. From an impressive low of 3.5% in February of 2020, unemployment spiked to a frightening 14.8% just two months later.

Some issues have outsized importance.

Do you remember that mix of uncertainty and excitement when you started your first full-time job? Your first day, when you had to show up at nine o’clock and stay until five in the afternoon, or some equivalent of a 40-hour work week? Do you remember the hourly rate of that first job? I’m imagining that many of you do, because a first job is a significant new phase of life, a milestone – one that marks independence, autonomy and authority over your own life.

On a nearly daily basis, we read or hear of tragic stories about people around the country, often the elderly, who are desperate to become vaccinated but who cannot get into the online system or who end up waiting for hours on the telephone in the hope of speaking to someone who can get them an appointment.

News – from time immemorial, it’s been one of those things that we, as humans, crave. For some of us it’s the local news that we seek; for others it’s national, or international or even extraterrestrial events that pique our interest.

For decades, my husband and I have been early morning voters at the North Mianus School in Old Greenwich. The only time we ever experienced a wait of more than a minute or two was in the mid-term election in 2018, and I wrote about it as a good sign that the citizenry was involved.

In a quiet moment of reflection after the announcement of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, it st ruck me that the example she set in the mission of her life could be exquisitely epitomized by the four cardinal virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance.

It’s an understatement to say that the coronavirus has turned life as we once knew it on its head, with experiences ranging from truly life shattering to frightening to exasperating. But a quote from Buddha is worth keeping in mind, “Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.”

My town, like so many others across the country, is tiptoeing its way back to normalcy, or should I say, a new state of normalcy.

It was fifty years ago when Earth Day was declared – I remember the event as though it were yesterday. In Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was living at the time, the denizens of Harvard Square were elated to have another cause for demonstration – at least this was less disruptive than the daily and nightly clashes between the police and an assortment of students, supportive professors, beatniks and members of the Hari Krishna sect, in opposition to the Vietnam War.

Immigration is the bedrock of the uniqueness of America. Our cultural heterogeneity is indeed a hallmark of our Americanism. We are proud to discover where our ancestors hail from – proof is in the popularity of the presents we give to our nearest and dearest with names like “23andMe”, “AncestryDNA” and “National Geographic Geno DNA Ancestry Kit”.