Virginia Buckingham

I found it! The key to uniting our fractured country! Can you guess what it is? If you correctly answered “trivia nights”, then you must be one of the millions of people all over the country who enjoy the challenge of answering questions about obscure or unimportant things. In fact, pull in to any burg in any state, whether it votes blue or red, and you surely can find a pub or a hall devoted to this brain-tickling entertainment on any given evening. More on that in a moment. I’m old enough to remember when the board game Trivial Pursuit was originally introduced and took the country’s family game nights by storm. After some research, I can now answer this trivia question: What game were the creators of Trivial Pursuit playing when they lost a piece and decided to create their own g...

I’m on the lookout for small miracles these days. Or maybe they are on the lookout for me.  Whichever it is, I’m grateful to keep coming across them. A small miracle discovered on a recent beach walk CURRENT PHOTO / VIRGINIA BUCKINGHAM For instance, did you know that if you cut branches of a forsythia bush in winter, and put them in a vase of water, they bloom? I didn’t either until last year when a friend showed up at my house with a handful of barren sticks. She did the same this year, as other friends were handing me tulips. I smiled because now I was in on the secret. Last week, I walked into the kitchen and was greeted by a burst of little yellow flowers next to the sink. A February miracle. The gathering my forsythia-bearing friend attended was the first of what I’m ca...

Here’s a radical idea to put into practice this Valentine’s Day: Love your neighbor. Last week, I was newly reminded how far we have strayed from this basic concept, 180 degrees to be exact. Today, “disdain your neighbor” is not only the more common, but actually the preferred, approach to living in a community, a state, this country. First, I don’t mean love your actual neighbor, hopefully you already do, or at least like them a lot. I mean neighbor in the larger collective sense. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and author summed up the “disdain your neighbor” era we’re in with a phenomenal The Atlantic piece entitled “Chicken Littles Are Ruining America.” Distilled to its core message, the piece basically argues that we are collectively in a negativity spiral that f...

A short but long month, February. Spring is teasingly close in days — 40 as of this publication. But we who are wise to her flirtations know the countdown to spring’s arrival is meant only to assuage our despair with a flicker of hope, like a squirrel climbing on a birdfeeder and shaking free a few kernels of corn. Yes, February has found me reaching for the tortured metaphor along with an afternoon hot cup of tea. I’ve despaired less this winter; remedies of fires, candles and the company of birds and books lightening the heavy blanket of early darkness. The trick will be to keep these habits up even as the skies brighten minute by slow minute past 5 p.m. February and March stretch on before us (no, Ginny, not like an open road, you’re better than that). New habits may help ...

I stumbled across the ABC special “Pretty Baby” the other night and came away with a profound respect for the actress Brooke Shields and an unexpected reinforcing of a lesson it can take a long time to learn: the past doesn’t have to be prologue — the most important factors in determining your future are ultimately your own choices. (If you missed it, the special has been streaming on Hulu since April.) It’s probably more fair to say I have a renewed respect for Shields. I’ve been a fan since she admitted struggling with postpartum depression two decades ago. Infamously, she got publicly berated then by that numbskull Tom Cruise for taking antidepressants. Her epic slapback in an op-ed published in the New York Times is seared in my memory. The “Pretty Baby” documentary finds Shield...