Columns

When you grow up with an Italian mother, you are familiar with the phrase, “Let’s go in the kitchen and have coffee.”

She was only 18 when rheumatic fever damaged her heart.

The problem with moms is that they’re old from the first day you get one. The moment you lock eyes with your mom, it is clear she is larger than you are, older than you are and smarter than you are (at least for a few years). She doesn’t drool and never sticks her thumb in her eye.

Sometimes I’ll bump into someone who meets my mother and tells me about the exchange.

“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” – George Carlin

While making copies at one of the local Columbus library branches last week, I overheard an intriguing conversation that would be an excellent commencement theme for this year’s high school and college graduates.

Of course, we all know that the lessons we’re taught don’t always come from those who stand before us in our classrooms. Among the many who have taught us something useful — be they our friends or co-workers or others we briefly pass on our life’s journey — perhaps today is the day when we should pay homage to our mothers, who, indeed were our very best teachers.

Earlier this month, the Ohio Supreme Court decided that a person who openly and nonchalantly stole a leaf blower from a garage was not guilty of the crime of burglary, because the thief did not enter the garage by “force, stealth, or deception,” as required in the Ohio Revised Code.

Just when you begin to think that the Biden administration couldn’t possibly do any more damage to the mores and values of our society, they manage to come up with just one more thing that is counterproductive to everything that most of us have been taught — the idea that working, paying one’s bills and keeping a good credit rating are positive things.

AOC and her Green New Deal buddies in the Biden government are not just winning their crusade against fossil fuels.