July 6, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

It’s the little things that anchor, especially in this fakakta world, and since I am using the descriptive Yiddish work for messed up, I will bend to the wisdom of my Jewish friends with whom I gratefully grew up in Spring Valley, N.Y.

Across Karnell Street from us was Molly Weissman, who escaped pogroms from a world of czars and those already planning terrible things. Molly, though, was a balancer. She saw good, she saw not so good, and she arrived at this conclusion: Look at the little things, they mean the most on any given day whether it is good or not so good.

In my life, her sense of balance might mean having tea on a whim, pouring boiling water over the bag and then using the string to wrap the leaves and extract the essence. My late Mom always did that.

It might mean, if the day were tough, recalling my grandfather’s overseas cap, the foldable military hat that his Navy brother gave him. He would wear it in the yard and then toss it on a hook. That meant we were going to sit down and eat.

And it might mean the looked forward to routine of meeting someone not so ordinary and having an hour or two of conversation which, because of chemistry, would take both of us all over the map of thought, feelings and other shared things.

So, in this fakakta world, especially in this precipice moment, you can enter calmer waters or even make port just by recalling the little things.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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