Author: Sharron Burnett

I do not like to argue. I generally find that if a discussion devolves into an a disagreement there is little chance that any points I may be attempting to make will change a person’s mind. In fact it is more likely that such situations will switch from logical debate to an emotional word salad. Nobody is actually listening anymore when that happens so attempting to clarify my position is fruitless. 

The few times when I have attempted to hold my ground with someone while expressing my views have generally gone badly. Unless the airing of differences is controlled by agreed protocols the results can often be devastating to a relationship with little progress made in reaching an agreement or at the very least some kind of compromise. Maintaining cool heads in which each person is respectful and honest is the only way to reach a common voice. Particularly of late we humans appear to be struggling with the concept of allowing differing points of view to give voice without being ridiculed or derided. We seem to be more inclined to quickly choose sides and stand firm while making so much noise that common ground is unlikely to be found. 

Emotions and insults all too often become the stuff of disagreements which sadly lead to ruptures in relationships. Those kind of breaks end friendships, divide families, and sometimes lead to all out war. When we turn each other into enemies simply because we choose differing ways of living in the world, everyone suffers.  There may be winners and losers for the moment but the enemies that we make will be around long after the dust settles. How wonderful would it be if we might find a way to talk about our differences without hurting each other or being implacable?

We all have moments, however, when we must plant our feet and become at least somewhat immovable. For years I had to insist, with the aid of my brothers, that my mother see her doctors and take her psychotropic medications. Simply allowing her to devolve into a state of extreme mental illness was out of the question. We worked as a team to keep her healthy even when she raged against us. We do similar things with children or teens who are heading for trouble. We push long and hard to keep them from harming themselves or others. Doing such things requires love and patience and determination. The issues are so serious that turning away is not a viable choice. 

I totally understand the sorrow and difficulty of having a child who is acting out in frustrating and dangerous ways, especially if they are threatening to do something violent. Such instances are not always amenable to simple persuasion. Nonetheless we have surely seen enough tragedy as a society to know that we have to find ways to get those young people aggressive care and monitoring. I can’t imagine thinking that providing such a person with access to guns might help them to get past their anger or depression. 

We should be able to enlist the help of counselors, doctors and intensive therapies with every ounce of our concern. Instead I know that our system is littered with roadblocks that make it undeniably difficult to get the care and support that our loved ones need. It is as though we are incredibly naive about mental health and the needs of those who suffer. When we see them calling for help with frightening words and actions we seem to have no idea what to do. We back away, look the other way, make excuses for their behavior, choose all the wrong ways of handling the escalating illness.

If someone we know bleeds, we not only immediately clean and administer to the wound but we also want to know what caused the hemorrhaging in the first place. We notice the physical aspects of the people in our families and get them to medical care as soon as possible. We are far more reticent when the ailment is mental. We shy from dealing with it and many times there is no help to be had even if we were to put our hearts and souls into the effort of getting them well. 

I often sat on the phone for days attempting to find someone willing to take my mother as a patient. She was too old or she had the wrong kind of insurance or not enough money. She would have to wait for weeks or sit for hours in an emergency room only to be told that there was nothing anyone might do for her. Hospitals were full. Budgets for psychiatrists were slashed. While hearts and cancers garner public interest and funding, mental illness is the stepchild of our medical communities. Nonetheless every time there is a mass shooting we find out that efforts were made by people who were concerned with an individual but they somehow came to little or nothing. In other words we can say that we need better mental health for such people but we have yet to take our resolve seriously. 

I don’t like to argue in situations that have little hope of changing minds, but I do believe that somehow inside each of us there is a nagging feeling that we must do better when it comes to helping those whose mental states have become unravelled. This should be a societal issue that everyone rallies behind. When we look away or walk away children at school are killed, an assassination is successful, innocents lose their lives at ordinary events. Surely we can agree to quit shouting at each other and focus on building a serious mental health system that will not require anyone to wait unnecessarily or be so expensive that people have to walk away. Our safety demands that we humanely use all our resources to help quickly and with firm determination. Surely we can agree on that!  

I must admit that writing lightweight news articles for a high school newspaper does not give me status as a journalist. Being editor of that same newspaper does little to sharpen my credentials either. That being said, I learned a bit about the difference between chronicling the news and voicing an opinion with my words. I was schooled in the rules of “Who, What, When, Where and How.” My job was to seek facts and to verify them before emblazoning them on the front page. I also had to learn how to write headlines that might attract readers without attempting to sway their thinking. “Just the facts” was the rule by which I ran my page. 

I admittedly would have preferred editing the opinion page or being in charge of the literary section. I felt as though I was in a bit of a straight jacket having to be so precise and concise in checking what my staff wrote. I suspected that a lack of titillating stories probably made my part of the paper seem a bit boring. The students much preferred the opinion page and the sports page was a smash hit. Nonetheless, I often dreamed of working for a major newspaper or magazine and be charged with going after the big stories. For a long time I considered majoring in journalism in college and Edith Bell, the editor of The Daily Cougar was my heroine.

I understand the importance of honest reporting, checking sources, maintaining truth rather than spewing innuendo. Sadly with so much print available from hundreds of sources in today’s world there are often stories that are not true because nobody took the time to vet the information. Innocent people’s lives are ruined when this kind of thing happens and it actually did last week when posts showing a video of a young woman yelling at a baby during a Kamala Harris rally in Houston went viral on X and Facebook. 

While the behavior of the young woman was despicable what happened later was even worse. A rush to determine who she was ended up placing the blame on a woman named Jordan Bowen. Those ready to find her guilty as charged came up with information on where she had attended high school and college and even the fact that she had at one time worked for the Democratic party. There were even postings of her phone number and address. The trouble was that Jordan Bowen was not the woman in the video. In fact, Jordan Bowen looks nothing like the screaming person and on that day she was wearing different clothing and a name tag. 

Even though it has now been verified that Jordan Bowen was misidentified as the woman in the video, she continues to get texts and phone calls threatening her and her family. Even her mother is being insulted. When facts are not checked before being publicly published this is what happens. Even as the Bible warns us, idle and untrue gossip is much like throwing a bag of feathers into the wind. The likelihood of retrieving them all again is unlikely. No matter how many photos and alibis are presented to prove Ms. Bowen’s innocence he name is permanently and wrongly smeared. 

I’ve always remembered the rules that I learned as a cub reporter in high school. I am religious about checking my sources before speaking publicly about an incident or an individual. Even then I have made mistakes now and again. With so much false information floating around it can be daunting to find the absolute truth. We all know that even eye witnesses to an event may sometimes walk away with totally different recollections about what actually happened. We consciously or unconsciously filter reality through our belief systems which almost always affect our worldviews. 

I remember taking a course on the works of William Shakespeare in college. The professor insisted that we first read a text outlining the Elizabethan worldview. By knowing the history of the times we were better able to understand the thinking of Shakespeare himself. Our analyses were sharper by putting ourselves in his shoes rather than relying on our modern thinking. This exercise taught me the importance of context along with the need to judge events as factually as possible. It has helped me to better glean truths about controversial situations. In many ways it makes me a kind of journalistic detective who is unwilling to go with only my initial gut reaction to what I see and hear in the media.

I myself have mucked up things. In a particularly emotional situation I spoke publicly before thinking during the pandemic. My failure to follow my own rules resulted in the loss of a long time friend whom I still love in spite of our seemingly permanent split. We do indeed hurt people when we jump to erroneous conclusions without taking the time to calm down and gather facts rather than relying on our feelings. 

We have a hard political season that has created massive divisions between the citizens of our country. Perhaps they have always been there underneath the surface but now so many of them have become public. Sadly they have led to misunderstandings when they might have been prevented if only we were all willing to first do our research with an open mind for find the truth. Let us hope that we can learn how to tame the beast of misinformation that is out there so that we might make fewer hurtful mistakes and always be in search of only the facts. It’s worth the effort to search for the truth.

When I was working full time I had to awaken as early as five in the morning so that I would not be late for work. I had a standard routine for getting ready for my day and often dreamed of the moment when I would retire and no longer have to be somewhere by a certain hour. When that event finally came I learned that my inner clock had become so attuned to rising early that I was unable to sleep past six or six thirty. I resigned myself to using the time before  sunrise for enjoying the quiet in the house. 

I tiptoe through the dark to the kitchen where I prepare my tea and a small breakfast. While those things are brewing and cooking I open all of the blinds in the rooms to let in the slowly emerging light. Then I go upstairs and sit on a couch armed with my food, drink and the pills and vitamins that I regularly take. I’ve usually said some silent prayers while setting up for my morning “me time.” I’m all set for welcoming the new day.

I love the different word games in The New York Times. I go to Spelling Bee and find as many words as I can with the letters allowed for each day. So far I have yet to fail in finding enough words to earn the rating of Genius. I think of the vocabulary studies and spelling practices of my youth that introduced me to words that had at one time been foreign to me. I thank my English teacher for requiring me to read books and record new words and their meanings. I don’t think I would do as well without the education from my outstanding teachers or my father and mother who all understood the value of a strong vocabulary. 

My next challenge is the crossword puzzle. If I am hurried on a particular morning I stick with the Mini Crossword. I pride myself in knowing enough trivia to solve that one in three minutes or less. The larger puzzle takes a bit more time and effort on my part, sometimes leaving the task to rest my brain before coming back to finish it up.

Next  I turn to the game Wordle, for me it is actually more difficult than most of the others. It can be daunting to narrow down five letters from the alphabet to a single word, especially if there are dozens and dozens of possibilities with the same beginning or ending letters. There are some days when I narrowly escape running out of chances to solve the problem before it is too late. 

Connections is another fun option. I attempt to group the words according to some common feature. I probably enjoy this word game more that the others. I love to find the connections between people, events, and classifications. It’s something that I have always found myself doing. I like linking things with a common thread. I believe that understanding people and history is achieved with such linkages.

I end with a kind of strange word search called Strands that is a hodgepodge of letters hiding words with a common theme. Sometimes the hint for what I should be trying to find is somewhat vague or enigmatic. Other times it is a subject about which I know nothing. So I have to work really hard to determine the correct words and how they relate to each other. So far I have not been stumped but there are some mornings when I come very close to giving up.

After enjoying my word games for a bit less than an hour I go to Facebook to greet those celebrating a birthday and to advertise my blog for the day. Then I do what I love the most. I get serious about writing. I keep a log of possible topics and choose the one that calls to me on any given day. Sometimes I feel as though I am hitting a home run that will touch the hearts of anyone who takes the time to read my thoughts. On other days the words that I leave on the once blank space seem to be as mechanical and unmeaningful as those in the games that I play. I force myself to publish whatever comes to mind knowing that all too often my meanderings are trite and lacking in interest. Somehow I nonetheless seem to appeal to at least one person no matter what I post. 

By the time I have done all of these things the men in my household have come to life. They gather downstairs in the kitchen for breakfast but little conversation. My father-in-law is cheery and more than eager to talk but my husband needs a few more hours before he has any desire for chit chat. I learned long ago that he is like me in wanting to be alone in his morning thoughts until the cobwebs have been cleared from his head. He now often grabs his breakfast and brings it upstairs to escape the commentaries from his outgoing father.

It amazes me how two men from the same family can be so very different. I suppose that the way we each relate to mornings may be more related to nature than nurture, otherwise the two men would be gabbing away each day. I sometimes feel for my father-in-law for landing in a home where the people don’t do mornings very well, or least not like the extroverts that he is. 

I like my mornings. I actually look forward to them and no longer wish to sleep in and waste the lovely time of being alone with my thoughts. I slowly nudge my brain awake and feel frisky and ready to take on any challenges by the time the clock strikes eight. By then I have communed with God and the birds. I have been cheered by the sound of the children waiting for the bus. I have marveled at the power and beauty of words. It’s not a bad way to warm my internal engine. I think I’ll keep it up as long as I am able. 

When I was in the third or fourth grade my best friend, Lynda, let me borrow a book that had once belonged to one of her aunts. It was a well worn copy a Nancy Drew mysteries which I eagerly began reading that very day. From there I was hooked, asking for Nancy Drew books of my own for birthdays and Christmas. I accumulated quite a collection and those in the series that I did not own I borrowed from the library. 

Over time I became addicted to all of the mysteries of Agatha Christie and eventually found my way to Sherlock Holmes. I fancied myself a bit of a sleuth because I became rather adept at figuring who done it in various stories. I even perfected detective skills that helped me to find things that were lost and to have a sense of foreboding when I was in a dangerous situation. 

Nothing entertains me more than a good mystery whether it comes in the form of a book, a movie or a television series. Nobody does such series better than the British and I am hooked on the many crime solving characters on the BBC and PBS. Thankfully with streaming I am able to find new detectives with ease. Among them is Professor T, a quirky criminologist at Cambridge University who helps the local police with crimes that are stumping them. 

Professor Tempest is definitely neuro-diverse with his stiff inability to interact easily with people. He is plagued by phobias and frequent insomnia that is interspersed with bad dreams stemming from witnessing his father’s brutal death. He is obsessively compulsive and seemingly strange to most who meet him, and yet he is incredibly brilliant at reading the behavioral clues that lead to capturing criminals.  

Professor T is a tortured man trying to unravel the mysteries of his own life stemming from his tragic childhood. He attempts to control his present time with daily rituals and ways of doing things, a coping method that is not all that uncommon among those who have experienced unexpected trauma. It is something that I understand quite well and never really considered as an aspect of my own personality until the character of Professor T discussed it with the therapist that he visits as part of the ongoing plot. 

There was me on the day before my father died and the person I became in the aftermath of his sudden and unexpected death. To this very day I worry about people being killed in car accidents. I often have frightening dreams in which people that I love are hurt. I knew that I had to assume some kind of control of my life or end up hiding in fear all the time. For eight year old me creating strict routines and keeping things always shipshape was a way to keep order and design fully present. I was able to chase my demons away by channeling my thoughts into studying and working. I became known as a Mega Type A personality mostly because it was the one way that I could feel a steadying force in my life. It’s the kind of thing that people often do when something terrible has rocked the very foundations of their worlds. 

I suppose there was even a period of time in which I pulled myself into a protective shell, but as I healed I was eventually able to allow myself to interact in deeper ways with the people around me. Somehow I overcame much of the anxiety that had changed me but compulsive obsession with maintaining order wherever I can is stamped firmly on who I am. It has served me well in my profession as an educator and administrator but I fear that it often drives the people closest to me a bit batty. I am indeed one of those people who is constantly cleaning and straightening things. I can’t leave dirty dishes in the sink and just go to bed. If the trash is overflowing I have to take it out even if it’s late at night. Such behavior is the one clue that I am still working through the anxieties that came from losing a key figure in my life. 

Like Professor T my own experiences have also provided me with an uncanny ability to read how others are feeling and to understand why they are acting in a certain way. My empathy goes through the roof whenever I sense that someone is hurting even when they are being unkind to me. I generally find that few people in the world are truly evil and not to be trusted in any way. Most of the time even those who seem to be bad to the bone are simply crying for someone to help them. I learned a long time ago that I can’t fix every problem that I encounter but I am certainly able to guide the sorrowful or those who love him/her to sources of help. Sometimes I am able to begin the healing process for them simply by acknowledging the pain that I see in their expressions or behaviors. 

Thus far Professor T has not been adapt at relating to people beyond himself. His traumatic moment was far more violent than mine. It takes a lot of love and therapy to get past some horrors no matter the age when they happen. We are all vulnerable and we would do well to remember that when we meet someone who seems too edgy, too serious, too angry, too withdrawn, too strange. It just may be that they have witnessed something that none of us ever want to endure. Maybe all we can do is just be kind.   

In my head I am still young and energetic and beautiful. Now again when I catch a reflection of myself I am literally startled for a moment. I wonder who the older woman staring at me is. There is often a disconnect between the reality of our aging process and the way we feel inside. 

I was recently in a bookstore waiting to checkout. A little boy was ahead of me with his father. I noticed him immediately because he seemed to be unable to stop squirming. He even lay down on the floor and began to roll around. Suddenly he popped up and asked his father, “Have you completed your purchase yet?” 

I was impressed with his rather advanced vocabulary and manner of speaking so I suppose I may have stared at him a bit too long. The teacher in me was fascinated and wondering who this youngster was when he moved toward me and stood directly in front of me. “I greatly respect elderly people even if they are weird,” he declared as though announcing something very important. 

I had one of those moments when my brain told me that this child could not possibly be thinking that I was either elderly or weird but then reality set in as I noticed him looking me straight in the eyes as though he was challenging me to respond to his statement. I quickly gathered my thoughts and simply echoed his thoughts by saying, “I greatly respect young people as well.”

The boy seemed taken aback by my response as though he had been expecting me to react differently. He waited for me to say something more, so I simply asked if he thought I was weird. My omission to his reference of being elderly seemed to satisfy the young man. He knew that I was admitting to the truth that I am an older person. After all, I will soon be seventy six years old and by any standard that age places me in the ranks of senior citizens. With a grin he threw me a bone by insisting that he did not think that I was weird. “I was only telling you that I am a respectful person.” he concluded. That was the end of our conversation but his comments stayed with me. 

I suppose that I like to think that I still look somewhat young for my age. It is a matter of silly vanity on my part even as I know where my wrinkles reside and how grey my hair might be without the color that my hairdresser uses to disguise the signs of aging. Just because I feel young at heart and strong as a lion does not mean that others see me that way. 

I have to laugh at myself because people more often than ever before open doors for me, offer seats, ask if I need help carrying out my groceries. I know that they are not trying to insult me but rather to be kind and helpful. All of which makes me laugh at the idea that for a time we had two men who are even older than I am running for President of the United States. They both have made attempts to insure the nation that they are still young at heart but their ages are showing in multiple ways just as mine must be obvious to everyone who encounters me. 

My grandfather was an interesting character because he lived to be one hundred eight years old but he actually embraced his age. He let his head go bald and put his feet in orthopedic shoes. He made jokes about his dentures and stopped driving at the age of ninety out of an understanding that everyone would be safer if he stayed off of the road. He remained energetic and actively kept up the home where he lived but he never once pretended to be younger than he was. In fact, he seemed to revel in growing older and being honored for his wisdom which was the product of years of experiences. 

I heard a famous actress talking about the time when she totally understood that she was an older woman and that her roles as an actress would drastically change. She admitted to going through a brief time of grief over the loss of her youth, but then she realized that there was a different kind of beauty in accepting her wrinkles and white hair as just another stage of life. She pointed out how some older people have a glow that emanates from their inner confidence and freedom of worry about superficial things. She has found a better part of herself that does not require her to be superficially attractive. Now her beauty comes from loving herself as she is. 

I suppose that the little boy in the bookstore was a kind of gift for me. He reminded me that I have passed into another era that can be as lovely and exciting as my younger years if I handle it well like my grandfather did. I have reached a time for just enjoying each day to the fullest as a great gift. I really have nothing more to prove about myself, especially when it comes to my appearance. The wrinkles will continue to grow and I can let my hair be natural or color it red if I am so inclined. The circumference of my waist can increase and nobody will care. My hands can look old and worn and they will only tell someone how hard I have worked. I have no idea how much more time I have on this earth so my only job now is to seize each moment and laugh with the little boy who pointed out the obvious to me. I am elderly and maybe even a bit weird now and then but life is good!