Shari Della Penna
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"Small acts of kindness can change and humanise our world."
   Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 1948-2020
   ​Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, 1991-2020
                         Author, Advocate, Advisor

Promises, Promises

12/25/2018

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    “What’s a promise?” Baby Bear asked as they sat in the sun, drying off.
    “A promise is when you say you will do something,” answered Mother Bear,” and then do your very best to do it.”
    “But what if you don’t do it?” asked Baby Bear.
    “Then it becomes a broken promise.” 
    “Can you fix it?” asked Baby Bear. 
    “Not easily,” said his mother. “That’s why it’s so important to keep it.”

                                                                 from I Promise
                                      written and illustrated by David McPhail
                                             Little, Brown and Company, 2017

    One time, long ago, I made a promise I could not keep. I had no business making the promise in the first place. Life happened, and I had to break the promise. It is one of my regrets. 
    It was a well-intentioned promise to my children.
    I’ve since tried to teach them the importance of keeping their  word. Of doing what they say they will do, the importance of carrying through. Honesty is a value I hold high. I strive for kindness. I try to keep my temper in check. But no one is perfect, and sometimes (many times) I fall short of the ideals I hold myself to.
    My family was a family of immigrants. My gram and both grandmas, and both grandpas fled the countries of their birth. They traveled for many, many days in deplorable conditions. I don’t know what kind of documentation they needed or how they got it. They entered the United States through Ellis Island and Baltimore at a time when a flood of immigrants from all over Europe and eastern Europe were seeking safe places to live and opportunities to provide for their families.  
    The world is big and bad things can happen, even to good people.
    My grandparents lived the American Dream. They came to this country partly to ensure safety for themselves and their families and partly for the opportunity to provide food, clothing, and shelter.  
    Lucky for me, they found all of that. And more. They found friendship in the communities where they settled. Most new friends were people fleeing from the same countries for the same reasons, looking for the same things. They learned English, figured out how to buy groceries, and build businesses.
    They left the horrors of their past behind. At least, they never spoke of them to me. When I asked my grandpa to teach me some Russian words, he said, “nyet,” claiming that was the only word he remembered. Gram told me the same thing. She wondered why I even wanted to know. 
    And now in this wonderful land of opportunity and safe haven, immigrants fleeing from horrors I dread to imagine are being questioned about their honesty. Questioned about their need for asylum after traveling for weeks. A young father and his daughter detained for too long, babies (and older kids, too) kept away from their parents or sent to live hundreds of miles away without being able to communicate with each other. Fear of the known compounded by fear of the unknown, what they left and what they will find. 
    Maybe Dionne Warwick sang it best, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.”
    Maybe it was Emma Lazarus. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” 
    Sometimes someone makes a promise that should not have been made. Sometimes unintended consequences and bad outcomes are the result. Sometimes that feeds fear and foments hatred. Sometimes in our overzealous need to keep ourselves safe, someone promises a wall when what we really need is a bridge.

                             -—stay curious! (and make thoughtful promises)


    
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Bottles, Bags, and Straws! Oh My!

12/18/2018

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    Pushing the bags aside, Ixchel gathered branches and sticks. Some of the sticks were long and some were short. She carried the sticks and branches home, then tied them together.
    “What are you doing?” A neighbor asked.
    “Making a loom,” Ixchel answered.
    Her mother smiled. “But, Ixchel,” she said, “we don’t have any extra thread.”
    “I know, Mama,” she answered. “I won’t take any.”
                             from Rainbow Weaver (Tejedora del Arcoiris)
​                                               story by Linda Elovitz Marshall
                                                  i
llustrations by Elisa Chavarri 
         (written in Spanish and English and translated by Eida de la Vaga)
                            Children’s Book Press/Lee & Low Books, 2016

                   Bags, and Bottles, and Straws! Oh My!

    I like to play a game when I go to the grocery store. I try to get what I need without buying plastic. Today I thought I’d win, but no such luck. I mostly stayed in the produce department, except for a couple of canned goods and eggs, so I thought I had it made. Can you believe it? The cauliflower is now cut up into florets and packaged in plastic. My other choice was an organic head. Both were the same price, and the organic head of cauliflower was wrapped in plastic. I caved to convenience and bought the bagged florets. 
    Milk used to come in bottles. We paid a deposit on them when we bought milk, then got credit when we returned the (unbroken) bottles. They went through a strerilization process and were refilled and sold again. I think it’s called a closed system. Pop (soda) worked the same way.
    Peanut butter, mayonnaise, shampoo…all packaged and sold in glass bottles or jars. So when plastic containers hit the market in the 1970s and 80s, we broke and cleaned up a lot less, but filled up trashcans and landfills a lot faster.
    And what about water bottles? Water has been purchased in single-serving bottles since the mid-1950s, but really became popular in the 1990s. Plastic bottles take about 400 years to decompose naturally. I found an interesting and disturbing article in a recent Forbes Magazine. https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/07/26/million-plastic-bottles-minute-91-not-recycled/#7b5db818292c 
Some highlights:
  • Globally, humans buy one million plastic bottles per minute. The US share works out to about 200 billion per year.
  • 91% of all plastic is not recycled, even though it is easy to do so. (think side of the road, trashcans)
  • By 2050, the world’s oceans will contain more plastic by weight than fish; and it takes a lot of plastic to weigh as much as a fish. (In 2050, my grandkids will be younger than I am now.)
  • The energy equivalent of nearly 17 million barrels of oil are required to produce PET, the plastic used for single-use bottles. https://phys.org/news/2009-03-energy-bottle.html#jCp
    And what about those single-use plastic grocery bags? Worldwide, a trillion single-use plastic bags are used each year, nearly 2 million each minute.
    The amount of energy required to make 12 plastic shopping bags could drive a car for a mile. http://www.earthpolicy.org/images/uploads/press_room/Plastic_Bags.pdf 
But the news is not all bad.
Here’s good news from earth-policy.org
  • At least 16 African countries have announced bans on certain types of plastic bags.
  • Many European countries tax plastic bags or ban free distribution.
  • Over 150 U.S. cities and counties ban or require fees for plastic bags, including Washington DC. 
  • But, the plastics industry has spent millions of dollars to challenge plastic bag ordinances.
As recently as this past weekend, Chile announced it will ban the commercial use of plastic bags.
    But I can not leave the subject without mentioning plastic straws. I first became aware there even was a problem with straws only a couple of years ago. A friend of mine spoke up in a restaurant and asked *not* to be brought a straw. How odd, I thought. Then I started really thinking and looking and learning. 
    According to the National Park Service, 500 million plastic straws are used every day in the US. That’s enough to circle the Earth twice! Every day! (But, really, they mostly end up in the ocean.)
    So what do we do?
Here are a few thoughts:
    Try one new way to reduce the amount of plastic in your life.
        Use reusable grocery bags.
        Stop buying bottled water. Or buy less.
        Bring your own coffee mug to the coffee shop.
        Ask for no straws. It only feels awkward the first few times,
    really.

        Shop in bulk when you can, to avoid extra packaging.
        Buy clothes at a consignment shop or a thrift store. People get  
    rid of some really 
good stuff.
        Consider shopping at Mayan Hands, the organization from
    Guatemala I spoke of in the quote at the beginning of this post.

    https://www.mayanhands.org/collections/recycled-and-eco-friendly
        Spread the word. We really are suffocating Mother Nature. No
    one can breathe through plastic.
 

         -—stay curious! (and reduce, reuse, repair [that one’s mine!],
                                                                     and recycle!

I just finished reading Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver. It is about two families living in the same place 200 years apart. I felt like I was looking through a lens to the future when I was in the 1800, and then, I felt like the past was super-imposed on the now when I came back to the present time. Besides all that, it was Barbara Kingsolver at her best. Enjoy!      
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Who’s Afraid of the Dark?

12/11/2018

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You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you. That’s why the dark is always close by.

The dark peeks around the corner and waits behind the door, and you can see the dark up in the sky almost every night, gazing down at you as you gaze up at the stars.
                                                                 from The Dark
                                                   written by Lemony Snicket
                                                      illustrated by Jon Klassen
                                              Little Brown and Company, 2013

    This time of year, the dark really is all around. Here in northern Ohio, daylight hours are short. This week only a little over 9 hours, and on the wane as we approach the Winter Solstice on December 21. 
    Not too surprising, then, that festivals and feasts around this time of year revolve around light. Christmas lights immediately come to mind. Neighborhoods and public places are ablaze, some with restraint, and some with reckless abandon. A few streets away from me, a whole block of neighbors have their displays set to a radio station. You can tune in as you drive by, your heater on and windows closed. Each house is an extravagantly lit. Stars balance on rooftops, reindeer prance across lawns, and glass icicles drip from eaves and dormers. City police post temporary signs warning drivers not to stop. It would create a traffic jam on the small side street. 
    My Chanukah menorah holds eight candles all in a row (plus one that serves to light each of the others, sharing and increasing the glow). I light one on the first night of the holiday and one more each night until the whole cheerful row lights up the room. Once in a while one curious cat or another gets too close and singes a whisker or two. That doesn’t happen very often, though. 
    No one I know has shared their Kwanzaa celebration with me. I learned a little about it when I was working. I know the candles in the Kinara symbolize different principles of a good life including creativity, unity, and faith. Kwanzaa is a cultural, not religious, holiday. It begins the day after Christmas and ends on January 1.
    The Scandinavian Feast of Juul is a preChristian holiday in honor of Thor, god of the sun. A log was lit, the fire a symbol of warmth and the certainty that the sun would return. Yule logs are probably a carryover. 
    Then there’s the whole contrast of light and darkness. Remember when you could tell the good guys from the bad guys in the old westerns? Their hats gave them away. Hollywood color-coded their motives and our fears.
    Maybe it's not the dark we are really afraid of. Maybe we really have a more general fear of the unknown, what we can’t see or understand. 
    Lazlo, the main character in today’s quote, was not afraid of the dark. He went head-on to meet it on its own terms and discovered it wasn’t so scary after all. He is courageous, not foolhardy. Brave, with a drop of skepticism. Practical, with a touch of wonder.     
    Like a good journalist or detective or public investigator, he lights up dark corners with knowledge, facts, and experience. He carries a flashlight into the dark.
    What he discovers will not be scary. 
                                                 -—stay curious! (and unafraid)  


    


  
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It’s All About Potential

12/4/2018

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    “We want Julius to grow up to as extraordinary as you. So we must tell him constantly how beautiful he is and how much we love him.”
                                      . . .     
    “We want Julius to grow up to be as clever as you. So we must sing to him his numbers and letters whenever possible.”
                                              from Julius, Baby of the World    
                                      written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes
                                                       Greenwillow Books, 1990

    Back when I was having my babies, the world seemed simpler. Most tiny clothes for newborns were yellow or green. Why would you outfit a nursery in pink only to discover nine months later, that it should have been done up in blue? Now it’s okay for boys to have pink and girls to have blue, sorta. Anyway we’re moving in that direction, I think. But all those years ago, it was pretty chancy to buy blue or pink before the baby arrived.

    Then sonograms became routine and took the guesswork out of many aspects of pregnancy. But really, maybe we’ll get back to how our society may (or may not) have discovered a sliding gender scale another time. 
    Right now, I’m trying to sort out my feelings about He Jiankui’s  bombshell announcement that he successfully helped make the first gene-edited baby.
    I learned about DNA in high school. Francis Crick and James Watson based their discovery of the double helix on work done by Rosalind Franklin, one of their colleagues whose x-ray images revealed the shape of the helix. And in 1962, Crick and Watson along with Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how DNA transfers information from cell to cell. And what of Rosalind Franklin and her work? Well, she was a woman in a man’s world in the 1950s.
    In 1990, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy joined with the international community to identify the estimated 30,000 genes in human DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and to figure out the sequences of their chemical bases. They wanted a map of the complete set of DNA in the human body. This concerted, public effort was the Human Genome Project. 
    In April 2003, researchers celebrated their successful completion, under budget and more than two years ahead of schedule. According to the NIH, the information is used to treat, cure, or even prevent diseases and afflictions. Genes for as many as 1,800 diseases have been discovered so far. https://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/ViewFactSheet.aspx?csid=45 
    Last Tuesday, the day before it began, (11/27/18) He Jiankui revealed the results of his experiment to the organizers of The Second  International Summit  on Human Genome Editing.    
    One girl in a set of twin girls, He said, were born last month with the ability to resist possible future infection with HIV, the AIDS virus. To me, just identifying, locating, and working on something so impossibly small and delicate is beyond amazing.  

    The announcement from China of a genetically modified baby rocked, shocked, stupefied, stunned, and astonished the medical and scientific communities.  
    The purpose of the Summit was to discuss everything from the physiological and scientific workings of genes to the ethics and morality of what it means to be human. 

    While on the surface He's experiment might seem like a good idea, a step forward in the eradication of a deadly disease, what is still unknown is what happens to that gene and the ones communicating with it during its lifespan? No one knows. For now, I’m content to take control of my health through exercise and nutritious food (when I can identify it as such). And trust the scientists will figure out the ethics. I’m pretty ecstatic that they all were mostly horrified. 
    The first time I saw each of my baby daughters, I looked into their eyes for a long moment. I wished them happiness, good health, and the determination to reach their potentials. I also did not want them to be fat, but that wish started way before they were born.
    Just as Julius’s parents nurture him to help him reach his best self, Mother Nature is also at work in determining how we all turn out. I know that. AIDS is a deadly disease, I know that, too. In a contest of wills, though, human against Nature, it is usually (maybe even necessarily) Mother Nature that wins. 
                                                    -—stay curious! (and lean in)


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         I'm a children's writer and poet intent on observing the world and nurturing those I find in my small space .

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