Somewhere in the assembly process, God forgot my neck. Crew necks fit like turtle necks, and turtle necks come up to my chin. God failed to give me a button nose, too. It’s more like a proboscis. A perfect word, prrrrrrrrobosssssssscis. Long, unwieldy, and uncouth.

The idea of driving a station wagon horrified me. But there I was, behind the wheel of a four-door mom-mobile replete with two car seats carefully fastened in the passenger row.

Perhaps at a party or maybe during a walk in the park. “So what do you do?” And suddenly, I’m at a loss for words.

In the northern hills of San Diego lies Rancho Bernardo, a master-planned community dating back to 1962. Signs bearing aspirationally-named subdivisions like Playmor and Fairway Vistas welcome its residents with subliminal possibility. As I drove my Project-19 route through this carefully manicured community, I wondered... whose dreams had faded enough to need a humble box of groceries laid upon their doorstep?

Not a “t” failed to be crossed nor an “i” dotted in the remarkable life of my mother, Carolyn Eleanor Taffel. No doubt this reflection is replete with grammatical inefficiencies and would have been far more concise and elegant were she here to write it.

Recent political events fuel my desire to understand the cultural divide that threatens to destabilize our country indelibly. And so I turned to Charles Murray’s prophetic 2012 book, Coming Apart, which suggests that our current political climate was ignited, in significant part, by a growing cultural disconnect between the “cognitive elite” and the rest of the country.

As college early action and early decision envelopes arrive, my hardworking and earnest seniors will meet one of three fates: acceptance, deferral or the dreaded denial. I find this incredibly painful to watch because often the results do not positively correlate with their effort, nor the mythos of the “perfect candidate”.