Opinion Archive

Resilient seems to be the most fitting word to describe the senior athletes who will walk across the stage at graduation Saturday inside the Bay Center in Pensacola.

It’s fitting because it took a lot of resilience mixed in with mental toughness and a willingness to adapt to get through a senior season that was anything but normal.

In the days before mass-marketing, big box retailing and internet sales, people had to create their own solutions to the wants and needs of daily life.

The results were based on the materials at hand and were often imaginative, but sometimes bordering on the absurd.

Helen Keller wrote, “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.”

Blind for most of her life, Keller’s fame as an author and human rights activist shows that she chose not to wallow in self-pity. I must confess, I have wallowed in the past, only recently in fact.

As I’m writing this on Tuesday, it is Navarre Press’s 21st anniversary May 25, 2021.

It is difficult to believe it has been that long, especially since our community is working on some of the same issues we were facing 20 years ago.

A Navarre Press reader was shopping at a dollar store recently. Her purchase was put in a bag along with a flier letting her know the store is hiring.

Everyone is hiring these days, it seems.

If there was anyone who took last year’s shutdown of the sports world in stride because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was Michael Sandle.

He just went with the flow, staying level-headed, always believing that things would get back to a degree of normalcy and that he would get to play baseball again.

Before my oldest two children went to college, I made each of them a book.

I filled a three-ring binder with letters from close friends and family members, as well as advice on all of the things that you don’t know you don’t know until you get far from home.

It is a fact of life that not everything is as it appears; expectations are often dashed by disappointment.

What sparked this cheery thought? I had carefully studied a small basket of apples in my kitchen to select a perfect orb of crunchy deliciousness.