If you were to suddenly appear this weekend at the numerous barbecues or pool parties, without any knowledge of our nation's history, it might be hard to understand the real meaning of Memorial Day.

My graduate course in crisis management was the 2012 Republican presidential primaries as a senior advisory and national media surrogate for Newt Gingrich. I survived. And I've got advice for Barack Obama.

This week, my mother called around 10 one morning to chat for a minute and catch up. During our conversation, I realized that she was still in her bed, waiting for an aide to help into a wheelchair. My mom said, in passing, that she was trying to be patient, as there were quite a few other people in the long-term care facility where she is living who need help, and that it doesn't help to be impatient.

Humans have long reached toward heaven. I don't know whether this desire represents an attempt to get away from the ground, an attempt to associate with God or an attempt to peer over the balcony and look at all the little people below. But the desire to go higher and higher has long shaped the skylines of our cities.

I heard the news of the Boston Marathon bombings just a few minutes after I had undergone a biopsy. An annual OB exam had revealed an enlarged uterus. The scan that followed a few hours later showed a polyp, and a biopsy was performed the same day.

My sister Kathy texted the news of Boston Marathon bombing not long after it happened. We've run (walked) four marathons together, and each of us has completed five. We understand the months of training involved in running a marathon (26.2 miles from start to finish). It's not only physical training but also mental.

When Margaret Thatcher was elected England's first female prime minister of England in the spring of 1979, I was 12 years old and my father had been a congressman for less than four months.

It's confession time -- I'm in love. It's been a long time in coming and snuck up on me a bit, and it seems to be growing even deeper, so I've decided that it must be more than puppy love. It's Bunny love.

Just last week, I was commiserating with other moms of middle-school teenage girls about the lack of appealing clothing available to teenage girls and the appalling state of girl teenage fashion today.

Imagine you are a 16-year-old girl, waking up in another person's house, unclothed and unable to find your underwear or earrings after a night of drinking. Unsure of what happened, you go home and go on, but in the days that follow, you see on social media photos of yourself drunk and unresponsive.

As a corporate budgeter, I learned decades ago that only a few people can look at an organization's money, corporation's money or someone else's money and spend it as if it were their own money -- i.e., very deliberately, based on the priorities and values of the organization.

The recent political entanglements over the budget have focused more on political maneuverings and who is right about what statement, rather than what the policies mean to average, everyday Americans.

"First you win the argument -- then you win the vote," is the now well-known quote from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. President Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who understood and used that strategy.

The finger pointing and the blame game of Washington gets old, but a messy representative democracy is better than an efficient dictatorship.

Stories are important not as simple entertainment, but also as education and indoctrination. What we believe happened in the past and the stories we highlight shade our present and influence our future. The best stories not only have a moral, where good triumphs over evil, but engage us intellectually and also emotionally.

It seems the Republican Party news is getting worse. This past fall, we suffered the defeat of our nominee for president.

The New York Times mobile app sent me a breaking news update Wednesday morning: "U.S. Economy Unexpectedly Contracted in Fourth Quarter." Based on high government third-quarter spending and government policies and politics occurring during the fourth quarter, the slowdown should come as no surprise.

Fascinating. President Obama mentioned our Constitution in the first paragraph of his inaugural address, but in the same paragraph quoted from the Declaration of Independence, noting that we "articulated in a declaration" the following words.

Last week, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed cited the need to use hard and soft politics in governing the city. "We are making hard decisions again and again that allow us to show compassion," the Democrat told a luncheon held by the Atlanta Press Club. "Because you can't help other people if you're broke yourself."

My undergraduate studies took place at Presbyterian College, a liberal arts school of about 1,000 students in Clinton, S.C. The town was so small that you had to leave it to find a McDonald's or go to a movie.