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Readers write: Metalsmithing careers, egg cream adventure, and more

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
See what readers had to say in our July 29 issue of the weekly magazine.
  • By Monitor readers

Metalsmithing careers

“Reviving a skill and a town that got left behind,” the article on metalsmithing by Joan Gaylord in the July 8 & 15 Weekly edition, was excellent and rang close to home. 

My son has been a busy farrier for many years, shoeing horses in a 200-mile area in southeastern Missouri.

Why We Wrote This

Letters to the editor for the July 29, 2019 weekly magazine.

His wife, who is creative and artistic, decided several years ago to pursue her interest in blacksmithing. 

This past year she won a folk art scholarship (the first given in Missouri to a woman in this field, I am told) to hone her professional skills with a well-known blacksmith in their area. She started making small gift items like bookends, which she sells at weekend country markets. She is now quite busy filling orders for custom metal products. 

You never know what you’ll read and learn in each issue of the Monitor. My wife, born and raised in the Bronx on New York egg creams, had a flashback to her childhood after reading Robert Klose’s July 1 essay “My kingdom for an egg cream.” 

Thanks to all you dedicated Monitor writers and staff for each enlightening issue!

John C. Thompson
Chesterfield, Missouri

Egg cream adventure

Robert Klose’s Home Forum essay on egg creams reminded me that, living in Kansas, I had never heard of egg creams either. 

Recently I was watching old episodes of “The West Wing.” In one of them the character President Bartlet is sipping on something when another character, Toby Ziegler, happens by and asks what the drink is. Bartlet says that it’s an egg cream, and wonders why he hadn’t heard of this amazing invention sooner.

Toby kindly replies with exactly the description that Mr. Klose includes in the column. That’s when I had to try one, so I did. They are all correct. Egg creams are amazing and delicious and habit forming.

Elizabeth E. Stevens
Manhattan, Kansas

Understanding why

I have loved, subscribed to, and read the Monitor for many decades. The refresh of the Weekly is terrific. Thank you, and I appreciate the addition of “Why we wrote this.” It gives purpose to the article, and we all want to know “why.”

Sally Carlson 
Cypress, Texas

Positive thinking

The June 10 Home Forum essay “Why my mother counted only her ‘beauties’” by Deborah Mead was so inspiring! It has lit up all my endeavors with strength and humor.

Jacqueline Cohen 
London

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Mark Sappenfield
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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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