Random Connect Points:
Reba's Stories

(Writer's note: I wrote this review in 2019 shortly after the book came out. The podcast mentioned below is still online and is as relevant today as it was when the interview was done in 2019. This book is a must-read for anyone who thinks they might have an understanding of this complex story). Rarely does a book appeal to all my “reading” senses – well written, important message, compelling story and human connections. “Grace Will Lead Us Home” about the shootings at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church is one of them. J ennifer Berry Hawes  wrote the book while a reporter for the Post and Courier and witnessed first-hand many of the details surrounding this tragedy. Currently she writes for ProPublica. When I read writing by an author whose work really grabs me, I like to mark up the pages and go back and read those favorite lines over and over. This book is dog-eared with turned-down pages, numerous bookmarks and notes scribbled in the margins. For anyone who thinks they...

I’m not usually one to pick memoirs by sports icons. Musicians, journalists, writers or politicians, yes. But not often sports heroes.  I admit, I just don’t know that much about women’s basketball. And I sure don’t have personal experience with a full-on commitment to any type of athletic endeavor. But " Uncommon Favo r" by Dawn Staley quickly hooked me because it’s about far more than basketball. The book is organized around 12 life lessons as a primer on leadership by example, caring about people over process, perseverance, family, acceptance … and yes, there’s even a heartwarming dog story thrown in. As a Columbia resident, Carolina alum and fan, I knew of Dawn Staley as a hometown hero. But this book gave me a fuller picture of her Philly roots, Olympic glory, pro basketball days, national championships, family ties, and early coaching career. This was 100 percent an audiobook for me. Listening to Dawn tell her story felt like I was cruising around town with her si...

Summer means the return of my Blink Book Review series . In the summer of 2022, I vowed to get off my screens and back to books. My accountability was writing short book reviews that can be read in a blink (thus the name Blink Book Reviews). I’m back at it again this year with the added impetus of participating in a friend’s family summer reading challenge. “Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days that Changed America's Politics Forever” by Chris Wallace caught my eye on the sale table at one of my favorite local bookstores because of the year in the title. I was born in 1960 the day after this presidential election. I never really thought much about that fact until I picked up this book and read the dust cover description. That short snippet pulled me in to learn more about the countdown to the Nixon/Kennedy election. As a self-avowed political nerd, I was intrigued to learn more about the face-off between the surly policy wonk that Nixon was perceived...

If it’s summer, that means it’s time to gear up for summer reading. Remember those summer reading clubs from childhood? In my family, we would go to the Cooper Branch Library to sign up the first day school was out. We’d get a fancy paper brochure where we’d painstakingly keep up with all the books we’d read over the summer. While I don’t really remember the prizes we got, I do remember the deep feeling of satisfaction from knowing I’d met a goal … and enjoyed doing it! My adult version of summer reading the past several years grew from a 2022 commitment to get off the screen and back to books for the summer. My accountability was a series of short book reviews I called “Blink Book Reviews” – so short they could be read in a blink (that means 300-ish or less words). Blink Book Review Rules I have only a few rules for myself. 1 – During the summer, I don’t finish books I’m not enjoying. Thus all the reviews are positive. 2 – I try to mix up genres a bit, but you’ll find a l...

‘Tis the season for graduations, new jobs and life transitions. It’s also the season for my annual updated “20 lessons” list. A number of years ago, I started a list of professional life lessons for a presentation to a group of college seniors. Since then, I like to revisit and update this list annually as a way to reflect on the past year. Recently, I’ve helped several folks fine tune their resumes and cover letters for “second career” job changes. Over the past year, I’ve approached this with a “let’s figure this out together” perspective instead of a “I have all the answers” perspective. The reason? I don’t have all the answers (see item #2 below). That’s a great lesson for me to remember for life in general and the perfect addition to the top of this year’s list. It’s been interesting to see how the style of resume writing has kind of come full circle back to the simple format used when I first graduated from college. Today, AI and Applicant Tracking S...

At my age, there's not much that can gin up a full blown case of FOMO anymore. But when I recently realized I was the only one of my "DC supper club" girls who didn't happen to be planning to be in the same place over a pretty spring week-end, FOMO kicked in big time.  This supper club started as a crew of Mississippians by birth, college or marriage (that would be me). We formed a supper club in the late 1980s while living in DC as young marrieds. By the mid-90s, we had scattered to new places to start families and grow careers.  But in spite of the distance over the years, we all grew our own unique individual friendships and, at the same time, created a really special group connection that's spanned four decades. Between us, the years have brought 15 children ranging from 24 to 40, 10 weddings, six grandchildren, numerous job changes, group travel, health challenges, football weekends, family upheavals, aging parents, and a years-long text thread t...

Every Tuesday night when I take my place around the table at our weekly Sip N Strum gathering, I’m reminded why this is my sacred time each week. For nine years, we’ve been doing more than just learning to play the ukulele. We’ve been building a community, establishing friendships, sharing talents and just plain having fun (not to mention occasionally sipping a fireball)! Eight years ago today, I wrote a post on my Random Connect Points blog about my experience playing with this crew on stage at Tin Roof in Columbia . How funny that I stumbled on that post today while doing some maintenance work on my blog. What fun it was to re-read my early musings about playing music as a middle-aged wanna-be musician without any natural talent, rhythm or skill. That post led me to search further back in my archives to dust off the one chronicling the first performance of my fledgling music “career.”  It described the initial surge of apprehension, awe and excitement I felt in playing music wit...

It’s National Word Nerd Day, the perfect excuse to call out fluffy, pet peeve words that are a writer’s equivalent of drunk party crashers. These drunk party guests are the overblown words that show up too often in news releases, on websites and in articles adding no substance to the writing. Examples of these trite and overused words include unique, revolutionary, innovative, groundbreaking, unprecedented – you see them so often they just become white noise. These fluffy words are like obnoxious party crashers, stumbling in drunk and decked out in bedazzled outfits. They hijack conversations with indulgent, overblown language, causing others to tune them out. In doing so, the drunk crashers completely miss the point of the gathering—to engage in meaningful connections. The same thing happens when a writer overuses these fluffy words. The reader tunes out and misses the connection the writer is trying to make.  There are good practical reasons to stay away from these words: • The...