Small Change

It adds up...

Feb 18, 2025

This week’s edition is all about little things (kids, coins)…in this great big overwhelming world, it’s easy to ignore them, but they really do matter!!

This is a photo of the bowl of change on my desk. Someday I will get to the bank with this bounty, and use the money to buy…I don’t know…maybe TWO coffees at Starbucks?

BOOK: PENNY CANDY by JEAN KERR

This delightful little book of funny essays is one I escape into when life is depressing. Jean Kerr also wrote Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and was the wife of long time New York Times theatre critic Walter Kerr. The Kerrs had six children, and many of Jean’s best stories are about their family life. What’s extra special to me is that the family lived just five minutes away from my Grandma Berrigan in Larchmont, NY…so it conjures up happy personal memories too!

MUSIC: LITTLE THINGS by ADRIÁN BERENGUER

Sweet song-without-words from a Spanish composer who specializes in music for movies and video games…

MOVIE TRAILER: SMALL CHANGE (François Truffaut)

I often wonder, in the event of untimely death, if people, on some primal level, realize that their time is short? In the instance of French genius filmmaker François Truffaut, he made 20 amazing movies in less than 20 years, before his death from a brain tumor at age 52. This is one of my favorite Truffauts. He had a wonderful knack for stories about children, which he told unsentimentally (but with great affection). Small Change is a series of vignettes about young residents of a French town…I encourage you to find and watch the whole terrific film!

Here, a loving teacher talks to his class about one of the students who had been abused at home…

SONG: PENNIES FROM HEAVEN

With the specter of the penny’s imminent demise (does it really cost THAT much more than it’s worth to produce?) I was thinking of this, one of my mom Joanie’s go-to puttering-around-the-house songs (I was going to write “Joanie’s go-to cleaning the house songs” but it’s a sin to tell a lie—she rarely cleaned!)

ESSAY: SMALL CHANGE by MALCOLM GLADWELL

Leave it to Gladwell to offer a counter-argument! In this essay he suggests that social media engagement alone does NOT lead to grand societal change (sadly, we have to do the work, guys)…

TED TALK ON PROCRASTINATION (FUN)

I discovered this gem while I was—you guessed it—procrastinating about writing this week’s newsletter. Very funny (and very true) analysis of the procrastinator’s monkey mind!!