From the Caregiver's HAErt — Danita LaShelle Jones

“What are you doing?” the pastor stammered as he stared at me in disbelief. I’d entered the open door of his office, diligently going over the run sheet for the church’s two worship services that day. After realizing he hadn’t responded with something related to church, I finally registered what…

Eleven words per second. The very thought sounds impossible, yet John Moschitta Jr., currently the fastest-talking man on the planet (after the late Steve Woodmore), can do exactly that. While most people wouldn’t necessarily know Moschitta by name, it wouldn’t take long for a kid of the late…

The houses seem so small. That’s always my first thought when I’m on a plane. Usually, if I’m flying out of my hometown, the flight path always takes us over several neighborhoods as we ascend to 30,000 feet. If I’m lucky and snag a coveted window seat, I can look…

“But I’ve been gone for hours!” the central character will say. “You’ve been gone a few minutes,” another character might reply. And no matter how much the protagonist tries to convince the other person, clocks and settings prove that they weren’t gone for more than a minute. What movie am…

“Too bad there isn’t a children’s day!” one of my children declared. We had just wrapped up a great Father’s Day breakfast, where we had inadvertently referred to the fantastic Mother’s Day breakfast I had received a month earlier. “You do get a children’s day,” I quipped. “It’s called Christmas…

The music had ceased, and the platform guests were gone, but the audience remained in their seats, slightly stunned at what had just transpired. I stood in the door of the backstage area, still wearing my headset, chuckling at the crowd’s reaction. The featured day of this annual conference (whose…

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, kick!” At the time, I didn’t know her name, but track star Sandra Farmer-Patrick appeared in one of my favorite commercials in the early 1990s. In this commercial for running shoes, while a montage of Farmer-Patrick…

The massive natatorium buzzed with the chatter of children in their swim classes. As a mom of two of those kids in two separate classes, I sat on the bleachers with a good book while my two oldest children, ages 5 and 8, sat on the side of the pool,…

“What?” the woman exclaimed a little too loudly. Her proximity to me made the shrillness of her voice even more unappealing. I shrugged and smiled as I braced myself for what I knew would come next. The massive barbecue was in full swing, and after several minutes of being in…

There we were, down to the last few turns of one of the most intense games I’d ever played. My formidable opponent? My unbeatable mother. I’d spent years trying to win against her, but there I was, mere points away from doing something I never thought I could do: beat…

It was billed as “The Rumble in the Jungle.” The heavyweight champion of the world, George Foreman, would face off with Muhammad Ali. During the press conferences leading up to the historic boxing match, held in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1974, Ali, known for…

“Then you know who we have to call,” a character might ominously say while surveying the preliminary damage. “Who?” another nameless character may ask. The first character will then stare just off-screen as we cut to our protagonist, cluelessly milling around in their regular life seconds before their phone rings.