Category: Columns
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Something Inside Me
When I tell you this story about an event in my life, just remember, I may be the teller of the story and it deals with something that happened to me but this story is really about them and especially about you. I was eight years old. There were many things that I knew at…
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Where to Go from Here Depends on Accepting Where We Are Now
Finally, Donald Trump is gone. Joe Biden will be our new President, and a woman, a black woman will be our VP. While there is cause for celebration, there is also cause for concern, as well. Yes, the game show host and his clown show have been evicted but not before that parting shot, the…
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“They Were Locked In, We Were Locked Out”: A Story of Lockdown and Homelessness in Harvard Square
It was 22 March 2020. There were about 12 of us living in the shelter. Saturday morning was our last day there. We had no place to go. It would be my first day outside with nothing open, no restrooms, no place to sit and have a hot cup of tea, it really was hard…
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Believing in Second Chances: How One Program is Diversifying the Current Landscape of Education
Written 3/16/2020, published today A program that transforms the negative impacts of criminal punishment, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), provides incarcerated individuals higher education opportunities that culminate into degrees from Bard College. As Max Kenner, the executive director of BPI, describes it, the crisis of mass incarceration is the central part of the story of…
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The Business of Fancy Dancing by Sherman Alexie: A Movie Review
“I’ve had sex with one Indian woman, 112 white boys, sixteen Black men, seven Asian men, three dudes of ambiguous ethnic identity, one really homely guy, and zero Native American men.” — Seymour Polatkin, poet. I just finished watching “The Business of Fancy Dancing” again and I feel as if this is one of the…
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Abby DeRigo Named Executive Director of the Homeless Empowerment Project and Spare Change News
The board of the Homeless Empowerment Project and Spare Change News has chosen Abby DeRigo, a recent graduate of Suffolk University, to lead the organization as it adapts to the conditions of the coronavirus pandemic and moves forward into the new normal. “The pandemic obviously changed everything that I had been thinking about. Now things…
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The Changes Come So Fast
My wife, Mary Esther, and I celebrated our wedding anniversary on June 22. We were married in 2002 and the time has just whipped by. So many different things have happened; it’s all good but sometimes there are hard surprises. Mary Esther has scoliosis, stenosis and various other things wrong with her spine. She had…
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With Spare Change News closed, a local fund awards one SCN vendor-writer a way to pay rent
Governor Baker’s March 23 emergency order for all non-essential businesses to close impacted Spare Change News and its vendors like myself significantly. Spare Change News closed its doors for 11 weeks and reopened Friday, June 12. Over the past three months, I sold older back issues to the public in my Coolidge Corner, Brookline spot.…
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Covid-19 and cages on Boston’s Methadone Mile
Just before all hell broke loose in Minnesota and Kentucky, I happened upon a story shared by a friend and done by Turtle Boy Daily News that said homeless people on Methadone Mile were being locked into a cage. I saw the pictures, but I still couldn’t believe it. Even knowing that I was at…