Skip to main content

Tell Me



There are serious issues out there in Columbia/HoCo today, and I am not on it. Give me a day to catch up.

In the meantime I highly recommend a thread on Twitter which begins:

Baltimoreans! what is the most Baltimore thing that’s ever happened to you?

Okay, technically it’s not a thread, but rather a question followed by many, many responses. If you know anything about Baltimore it’s a lot of fun.

Today I’m shamelessly stealing this idea and asking a similar question. What’s the most

  • Columbia
  • Ellicott City
  • Elkridge
  • Howard County 
thing that's ever happened to you? You pick the locale that’s most suitable to you. Perhaps you have one to add. River Hill? Western HoCo? Maple Lawn? I’d love to hear about those experiences which made you feel, “this could only happen here.”

I’ll start the ball rolling. Some years ago a friend treated me to a VIP ticket to Wine in the Woods, which grants you access to the VIP tent where a lovely spread of catered food is laid out and attendants are there to pour a variety of wines into your special Wine in the Woods glass. As I passed the wine table with my plate of food, a nice gentleman asked what he could pour for me. I politely declined, saying:

“Oh, no thank you. I never drink alcohol in this kind of heat.”

It wasn’t until I got home that the full weight of what I had said hit me, and understood why the poor fellow looked so nonplussed. It’s possible I may have failed Wine in the Woods altogether without even knowing it.

What’s your local story? 




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...