I may have lost my mind — at least temporarily — but haven’t yet lost the ability to meet a Mind’s I deadline! And you all should know that for any writer with any deadline, professional death lies just beyond such a miss.

So it’s not just the temporary loss, which seems to me now to be a reality and not just a possibility with my own mind, but the threat of a permanent sure thing…

Try on my own recent experiences in the “messing with one’s head” department for your personal sizing-up: How about spending four hours alone in an elevator stuck between floors in a tall building with a temporary electric outage, but without a cellphone, so no way even to let anyone know about your plight? Or how about giving a credit card to a restaurant server and finding out not too many days later that he’d returned the card, but kept all the info on it — and used it? A lot!! Or being isolated for days when it was determined that a dining companion at another very recent time had soon after been diagnosed with COVID-19?

When a string of such nasties would affect my mother — bless her soul and her memory — she would say “Everything happens to me and Dick Tracy!” So I hope you have long enough, strong enough memories yourselves to appreciate her comment, because even with a major, permanent memory loss, I’d remember Dick Tracy and the many problems he had for so many years, and how he solved all of them for public reading enjoyment on what were then called the “funny pages” of the newspapers of my childhood. His problems were only “funny” because they weren’t real. Mine, most unfortunately, are certainly that…

Now: It wouldn’t be right, only terribly self-indulgent for today, if I didn’t say something about our country’s most recent antisemitic experience, right here in our own neighborhood. It would be unforgivable for me to recount my own most recent disturbing incidents without commenting on the sadness of what’s happening to all of us Jews — here, and throughout what used to be a more accepting — at least in public — American population. So to all of you who read this (and I thank you for that!) I ask you to join with me in using all our best efforts to stop this now-increasing plague of hatred that’s polluting our beloved country’s very atmosphere. Let’s all work together, always remembering that, as Jews, we have been charged — not to complete such a difficult task, but only to contribute our best efforts toward completion. And let us pray now…from our words to God’s ears…

Harriet Gross can be reached at harrietgross1@gmail.com.