By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

The first person I thought of when I heard that John Wooden had died was not Bill Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or any of the hundreds of great players who learned most of what they know about basketball and life from the Hoosier-born coaching legend.

The person who came to mind never even played competitive sports. She’s an executive director of a non-profit organization that helps poor, inner-city children and women reach for and usually attain an unreachable star.

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

Marriage is like major league baseball for me: I’ve never played the game, but I have closely observed hundreds of them and listened at length to the players, which gives me some expertise.

What I have learned in decades of watching marriages materialize, run into rough patches (or whole interstates), fall apart or survive is that each union is unique and riddled with mystery. Woe to anyone who tries to judge a marriage or predict its outcome based on percentages, itemized criteria or common wisdom.

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

One night not long ago, as I settled into clean sheets in my comfy bed, I wondered, “How many nights have I done just this, laid my head upon a pillow and surrendered the day?” Someday, I thought, I will have to do the math. And then I fell asleep and forgot all about it.

A few days later, my Aunt Linda forwarded an e-mail with a nifty link that instantly calculates your days (and nights) on Earth. All you do is click on the year, month and numeric day you were born.

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

There is this assumption that people make at a single point about women who get to their 40s or 50s and never marry, that it must be because they’re gay. It’s just, usually, that they don’t get nominated for the Supreme Court and have everybody talking about them, so nobody really cares.

Stephanie Salter

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.

— David Mikkelson, cofounder, Snopes.com

After the third or fourth time around, you recognize them by their subject line.

Oh, yeah, that’s the one about “Queen Nancy” Pelosi’s jet plane power grab. And that’s the one about Jane Fonda being honored at the White House by President Obama. There’s the one about Target refusing to fund charities for military vets because the discounter is “a French company.”

And who can forget the one with the color photos of the cushy jail “in Cook County, Ill.” that was built compliments of, again, Barack Obama?

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