It’s a new year but not a clean slate.

Ringing in this new year is different. The enormity of why it is different occurs to me as I try to start afresh, as I do each and every January 1st.

In the past, there were no ties that couldn’t be left behind to begin anew.

I love fresh starts. I love the Jewish New Year. I love the start of a new school year with brand new pencil cases and notebooks without a doodle yet to be drawn. …

My daughter’s friend posted this picture of her daughter watching Kamala Harris on Saturday night. Stella is almost two.

It brought me back to my own life. I tell clients and customers that every person you are selling to needs to see a mirror of themself and a window into that which they aspire to be. Stella will not have the barriers my generation did in terms of what is possible for us.

When I arrived back in New York City in 1975, fresh from the University of Nebraska hinterlands, my dad summoned me to his New York apartment, where…

I Surmise: Lessons Learned.

I have a country house in what I call “Deliverance.” There is a development not far from me in Dover Plains, New York, that is called Sherman Hill Estates, and there is a Lee’s Lane, Grant’s Road and Confederate Road as well. People in the stores don’t wear masks, nor do my fellow shoppers, and when I ask them to pull them up, they show hostility in return. Lately, more and more signs have gone up for Trump. I mean, a lot of them in every yard. Every morning, Bay, my dog, and I get in…

Today my friend Cathy Montez died of COVID-19, which she believed she’d contracted at a spin class in Miami. She was a close friend. She was a good friend, an authentic friend, in that she wasn’t one to hide what she thought about what I did that pleased or displeased her. I know that what I saw in her was representative of who she truly was, which is so unique in today’s world. This meant I could turn to her when I wanted true input without the far-too-common barrier of women not always offering an unfiltered point of view. …

I wrote this on election day in 2016. I read it yesterday to see where my head was back then and I was stunned by the part about the girls in the nail salon. I had forgotten…

Our country is not only illiterate (which I hadn’t understood four years ago), but is also now filled with false facts, not to be confused with fake news.

I hope this election will be different.

Here is what I wrote. See if it resonates now for you. CM

November 8, 2016

It’s Election Day, and here is a picture of me voting in…

Aaron Sorkin’s Revival of Hartsfield Landing from The West Wing

Less than five minutes into the remake of the Hartsfield Landing episode from Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, now streaming on HBO Max, as a guitar played a soulful rendition of the theme song, I started weeping. Weeping is different from crying. It’s softer, sadder, without rage, which has been a part of my everyday feelings for the last four years. I wasn’t crying at seeing the old gang, who haven’t aged at all. It wasn’t because I’m so very frightened for what happens just 500 hours from now, which…

I Surmise: Letter to My Daughter on the Eve of the Election

My dearest daughter, Sarah,

I write this to you with the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings going on in the background. A woman has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States of America to take the place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a justice who worked so fucking hard to give everyone equal rights in our country and who will now be replaced by a woman who will do what she can to take those rights away. How could this have happened?

I found this picture…

There is always a tipping point — that moment in time when everything changes and you “know” deep down inside that the trajectory of something has changed, and the train wreck that you thought couldn’t be stopped, can, in fact, be stopped.

Remember Howard Dean? Remember when he unexpectedly lost in Iowa, and he went on the television the night of the primary and screamed into the cameras and sent dogs and cats scurrying under couches, and Americans thought, “No way, Jose, is that guy going to get my vote. He’s not stable”? That was the end of Howard Dean…