The article in your magazine on “Understanding Pain” by Thaddeus Golas is going to save me the cost of a lot of tranquilizers.
I have been running around like a chicken with its head cut off — frantically trying to cut the umbilical cords to my nine young adult children.
It’s hard to think of any “tie” holding people closer together than this cord.
The answer given in the magazine is, in substance, for me, “Cutting this cord is going away in an agreeable fashion.”
This message comes through clear to me.
I feel enriched by having read this article. I like your magazine.
I first came upon your wonderful publication in a health food store in Pasadena, California. My road has since led me north to Oregon, east to Montana, and now to northern Indiana. Along the way I’ve left little psychic markers by way of gift subscriptions to THE SUN. This is my sixth or seventh gift subscription, I guess. I don’t know what kind of response you’ve gotten to raising your rates, but I would guess the majority of your readers feel as I do, that the price is trivial compared to the quality of THE SUN. The important thing is that THE SUN continues, and that each issue delight and enrich our lives. With that in mind please enter another gift subscription to another loved one of mine. Keep up the excellent work.
Melinda Pleshe, with her husband, Levi, runs Levity Distributors in North Hollywood, California, which distributes many fine magazines, including THE SUN.
— Ed.
An Open Letter To Mr. Wyman Jones, Director, Los Angeles Public Libraries:
I would like to tell my little story to you as a joke with a good punch line.
About two months ago, I was in the Vanover Branch of the L.A. Public libraries to attend a puppet show with my five-year-old. Also in attendance was my four-month-old baby. The baby was nursing.
A digression about nursing. It is now publicly known that nursing a baby is the best way to give him love, security, and excellent nourishment. It is accepted by large numbers of people all over the world, even in modern scientific America. Even Princess Diana of England knows it’s good to nurse a baby.
So, the baby was nursing. I have nursed two babies now. Everywhere. The bank, the grocery store, the car, at home, the beach, restaurants. Lots of people do it. And no one has ever asked me not to nurse or given me bad looks. So, there I was nursing the baby. The children’s librarian approached me, and asked me not to nurse. “Not in front of the children!”
I thought she was kidding, so I said, “Are you serious?” Sure enough, she was serious. She thought the children shouldn’t see me nurse the baby.
I was astounded, and at the time I considered writing to your personnel department to congratulate you on hiring a person for children’s librarian who is so out of touch with children as to think they shouldn’t see a mother nurse her baby. But I let it slide.
But then today I was in the same library again with my hungry baby. So I nursed him again. Oh, sinful person I! I was again approached by a librarian and asked not to nurse “in front of the children!” I said the children neither noticed nor were they offended and that if she was the one who was offended, she should say so.
(We’re building up to that punch line I promised.)
“Well,” she said, “we just feel that it’s something that should be done privately . . . and besides,” she blustered, “there’s no eating allowed in the library!”
I’d like a year’s subscription to THE SUN. Here’s the $$$, do your stuff. Amazing what you can get for a little money in an affluent society, isn’t it? So far you guys are my favorite small magazine, basically for your lack of cant and pretension and your affirmation of the joyful in life. Long live the printed word.
How much I liked your editor’s note in Issue 80 of July 1982! What I like about your approach is that it takes away a lot of anger and lets us begin to see problems more clearly. That’s uncomfortable for a lot of people (including myself) who are used to thinking in terms of Right or Left. But in the long run, it’s a lot more useful for humanity.
Keep it up.