I imagine the fluorescent lights of Fort Lauderdale international airport buzzing quietly overhead as my mother stands in the customs hall, waiting, waiting. 

Back home, in my kitchen, I check the flight tracker app again. It shows that Spirit Airlines Flight 237 from Medellín, Colombia, landed 37 minutes ago. I refresh again; the motion has become almost automatic. No text message yet.

I picture my mother in the customs hall, silver hair pinned neatly back, clutching her navy blue American passport. Her shoulders squared, her smile ready. Having lived most of her life in the United States, she shouldn’t have to feel nervous about coming home.

Why We Wrote This

For some long-established immigrants, like our essayist's mother, the storm of current events means travel can bring trepidation and belonging feels fragile.

“Just checking if Mom made it through customs?” I text my dad, aiming for a casual tone. He calls back instead.

“Nothing yet,” he says gently. “Probably nothing.”

I glance at the clock, pacing my kitchen. “But you know how it’s been lately,” he adds.

I never imagined that I would be standing in my kitchen, nervous about my mother’s return flight – not because of the plane, but because of what could happen afterward.

Each morning, my news feed carries stories that weigh on my mind: individuals detained despite being U.S. citizens, Native Americans questioned about their right to be in their own country, children who are American citizens being deported alongside relatives who were here without authorization.

These stories stay with me, not because they are the norm, but because they suggest that mistakes, though rare, can happen. And when something goes wrong, it often unfolds in those bright, hectic spaces like customs halls, where everyone feels slightly out of place.

Once, my mother was detained at an airport for carrying cash hidden beneath her clothing, a common practice in Colombia to guard against theft while traveling.

“They made me strip down to my underwear,” she said at the time, matter-of-factly. “They counted every bill twice.”

It was a reminder that even ordinary precautions could be misunderstood under scrutiny. Not maliciously, perhaps, but just through the imperfect lens of fast-moving, high-pressure procedures.

Thanks to years of experience, my mother knows how to travel. She arrived in the U.S. when she was 12 years old and is a dual citizen of the United States and Colombia. Over the decades, she built a life from the ground up: earning a master’s degree, buying a home, raising a family.

Now retired, she divides her time between south Florida and Colombia. In Colombia, her modest pension stretches further. She visits aunts, cousins, and old friends, walking streets once lined with childhood memories of struggle, now viewed through the lens of gratitude.

Last week, cleaning out a pantry shelf, I found a hidden gelatina, a pumpkin-spiced marshmallow from a mountain village near Medellín. The sight made me smile: a small, sweet link to our family’s traditions. 

Though our traditions span two countries, my mother’s roots remain firmly planted here, in the States. Each return flight brings her back not just to home, but to a life woven deeply into this country’s fabric.

Each time my mother’s plane touches down, my mind races a familiar route. How long does customs usually take? Would she know how to explain things quickly if asked? Would the agents recognize without hesitation what I know – that she belongs here as much as anyone else?

Finally, my phone buzzes. “All clear,” her message reads.

Relief spreads through me. Tonight, my mother will sleep in her own bed, in her own home, the one she earned, the one she nurtured for decades.

Every time she travels, we go through this small, private ritual of worry. 

The waiting reminds me how fragile belonging can feel, even when it has been lived, worked for, and loved for a lifetime.

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My mother is resilient. She is vigilant. She is American.

And each time she walks through the airport doors, smiling and free, I understand how much strength it takes to come home – and how much gratitude fills that moment when she does.

I imagine the fluorescent lights of Fort Lauderdale international airport buzzing quietly overhead as my mother stands in the customs hall, waiting, waiting. 

Back home, in my kitchen, I check the flight tracker app again. It shows that Spirit Airlines Flight 237 from Medellín, Colombia, landed 37 minutes ago. I refresh again; the motion has become almost automatic. No text message yet.

I picture my mother in the customs hall, silver hair pinned neatly back, clutching her navy blue American passport. Her shoulders squared, her smile ready. Having lived most of her life in the United States, she shouldn’t have to feel nervous about coming home.

Why We Wrote This

For some long-established immigrants, like our essayist's mother, the storm of current events means travel can bring trepidation and belonging feels fragile.

“Just checking if Mom made it through customs?” I text my dad, aiming for a casual tone. He calls back instead.

“Nothing yet,” he says gently. “Probably nothing.”

I glance at the clock, pacing my kitchen. “But you know how it’s been lately,” he adds.

I never imagined that I would be standing in my kitchen, nervous about my mother’s return flight – not because of the plane, but because of what could happen afterward.

Each morning, my news feed carries stories that weigh on my mind: individuals detained despite being U.S. citizens, Native Americans questioned about their right to be in their own country, children who are American citizens being deported alongside relatives who were here without authorization.

These stories stay with me, not because they are the norm, but because they suggest that mistakes, though rare, can happen. And when something goes wrong, it often unfolds in those bright, hectic spaces like customs halls, where everyone feels slightly out of place.

Once, my mother was detained at an airport for carrying cash hidden beneath her clothing, a common practice in Colombia to guard against theft while traveling.

“They made me strip down to my underwear,” she said at the time, matter-of-factly. “They counted every bill twice.”

It was a reminder that even ordinary precautions could be misunderstood under scrutiny. Not maliciously, perhaps, but just through the imperfect lens of fast-moving, high-pressure procedures.

Thanks to years of experience, my mother knows how to travel. She arrived in the U.S. when she was 12 years old and is a dual citizen of the United States and Colombia. Over the decades, she built a life from the ground up: earning a master’s degree, buying a home, raising a family.

Now retired, she divides her time between south Florida and Colombia. In Colombia, her modest pension stretches further. She visits aunts, cousins, and old friends, walking streets once lined with childhood memories of struggle, now viewed through the lens of gratitude.

Last week, cleaning out a pantry shelf, I found a hidden gelatina, a pumpkin-spiced marshmallow from a mountain village near Medellín. The sight made me smile: a small, sweet link to our family’s traditions. 

Though our traditions span two countries, my mother’s roots remain firmly planted here, in the States. Each return flight brings her back not just to home, but to a life woven deeply into this country’s fabric.

Each time my mother’s plane touches down, my mind races a familiar route. How long does customs usually take? Would she know how to explain things quickly if asked? Would the agents recognize without hesitation what I know – that she belongs here as much as anyone else?

Finally, my phone buzzes. “All clear,” her message reads.

Relief spreads through me. Tonight, my mother will sleep in her own bed, in her own home, the one she earned, the one she nurtured for decades.

Every time she travels, we go through this small, private ritual of worry. 

The waiting reminds me how fragile belonging can feel, even when it has been lived, worked for, and loved for a lifetime.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

My mother is resilient. She is vigilant. She is American.

And each time she walks through the airport doors, smiling and free, I understand how much strength it takes to come home – and how much gratitude fills that moment when she does.

Hollywood has always been overly fond of depicting the lives of creative artists as deeply troubled. Geniuses, apparently, must be shown to suffer for their art.

One artist, however, who definitely did live such a life was Lorenz Hart, the subject of the mostly marvelous new Richard Linklater movie “Blue Moon,” starring Ethan Hawke. It opens with a quote from the great cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, who said that Hart was “the saddest man I ever knew.”

Known affectionately as “Larry,” Hart was one half of the Broadway musical theater dream team of (Richard) Rodgers and Hart. He was responsible for some of the most pungent and expressive showbiz lyrics of all time, including not only “Blue Moon,” but also such classics as “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and “Isn’t It Romantic?”

Why We Wrote This

Director Richard Linklater offers a poignant portrait of legendary lyricist Larry Hart in his new film “Blue Moon.”

Together Rodgers and Hart collaborated on more than two dozen musicals. But Hart’s alcoholism and emotional disruptions eventually undid the partnership. Rodgers moved on, collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein II on a string of colossal hits, starting with “Oklahoma!” that eclipsed even his work with Hart. Eight months after “Oklahoma!” opened, Hart died, in his late 40s.

“Blue Moon,” scripted by Robert Kaplow – who also wrote the novel “Me and Orson Welles,” which was turned into a vastly underrated Linklater movie of the same name – takes place almost entirely in one night. The March 31, 1943, premiere of “Oklahoma!” has just let out and its cast and creators are heading to a celebration at Sardi’s, the famed theater district hangout. Hart, who attended the premiere, left for the party before the final act. He is already ensconced on a barstool as the celebrants, including Rodgers and Hammerstein, file in. He masks his boozy bitterness with an all-too-transparent bonhomie. He knows “Oklahoma!” will be a big hit – bigger than any he had with Rodgers, played superlatively well here, with a complex blend of deep affection and diffidence, by Andrew Scott.

Hart even admires the show, in a way, as a perfect piece of kitsch. But he can’t abide its all-American sunniness. His deep-down cynicism is roiled by a lyric like “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” He even objects to the exclamation mark in the musical’s title. What gives the movie much of its poignancy and power is Hart’s realization, and ours, that the asperity and regret showcased in his famous lyrics are no longer in fashion. He knows his time has passed.

Hawke is not the first actor I would have thought of to play Hart, who sported a glossy comb-over and measured under 5 feet tall. I can’t say I entirely bought the transformation – despite some unobtrusive camera placements and subtle facial prosthetics – but Hawke gives it his all. He and Linklater have worked together on nine movies, including the great “Before” trilogy, and their creative simpatico is obvious. Hawke’s Hart talks almost nonstop in “Blue Moon,” and yet I never tired of listening to his patter. What he says, so often at odds with how he feels, issues from a hurt place.

His psychological contradictions play out in full force. Although discreetly gay, he is rapturously in love with one of the partygoers, Elizabeth Weiland, played by the extraordinary Margaret Qualley. He has been corresponding with her, a Yalie socialite, and she, ambitious but kindly, indulges his affections. At first she comes across as flighty, but a scene between her and Hart in a cloakroom near the end bares their romantic souls. We can see how both of these people, in their separate ways, are caught up in a forlorn, unattainable love. Hart disparages “Oklahoma!” in the movie for being nostalgic about a world that never existed. But the yearning in many of his best lyrics is for an unrequited ardor that is equally beyond reach.

“Blue Moon” may essentially take place inside a single room, but it rarely feels stagy. It captures the connivance and conviviality of theater people – the way they come together, if only for a night, with a spiritedness that is both forced and entirely genuine. A success like “Oklahoma!” makes them feel anointed.

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It is in this giddy maelstrom that Hart, at long last, seems most at home – and most alone.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Blue Moon” is rated R for language and sexual references.

Bent over a desk strewn with paints and brushes in her second-floor studio, Shustina Hanna works on an iconostasis known as the Royal Gates from St. George’s Church. The ornate screen of icons is the second one from St. George’s Church, in western Ukraine, that she and her colleagues have been painstakingly restoring while war continues in the country. The wooden church was included on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2013.

This afternoon, Ms. Hanna is attending to a fragment of a frame, applying paint, layer by layer, to a piece of glass on one side before flipping the screen over. She estimates that restoring this iconostasis, whose provenance dates to the 17th century, will take her a year.

Ms. Hanna studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv and has been a conservator at the National Research and Restoration Center of Ukraine for two decades. Her work on the iconostasis is “a way to preserve a piece of our identity,” she says. “The Russians understand this, which is why they destroy everything they cannot appropriate.”

Russia has targeted culturally significant places, including museums and heritage sites, either through bombings or looting. As the war drags on, Ms. Hanna and other conservators feel a heightened urgency. “We clearly understand what we are fighting for,” she says.

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This article was supported by Women on the Ground: Reporting From Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines, an initiative of the International Women’s Media Foundation, in partnership with The Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Dzvinka Pinchuk contributed reporting.

Kang-Chun Cheng Kang-Chun Cheng Kang-Chun Cheng Kang-Chun Cheng Kang-Chun Cheng

For more visual storytelling that captures communities, traditions, and cultures around the globe, visit The World in Pictures.

“Mr. Scorsese” is a career-spanning overview of Martin Scorsese, broadly considered to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. The five-part docuseries, directed by Rebecca Miller, begins with an exploration of his childhood in the Italian American tenements of New York. Then, the series goes behind the camera, following the director through his days as a student at New York University in the 1960s to the making of 2023’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” 

Through archival footage and interviews with close family and friends, “Mr. Scorsese” probes the innermost thoughts of the Oscar-winning filmmaker – who holds the record for most Academy Award nominations for a living director – and his efforts to use art to grapple with life’s toughest challenges and questions.

The Monitor recently spoke with Ms. Miller via Zoom. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why We Wrote This

The docuseries “Mr. Scorsese” probes the innermost thoughts of the Oscar-winning filmmaker and his efforts to use art to grapple with life’s toughest challenges and questions.

Why did you want to make this film portrait of Martin Scorsese now?

I was really curious how his spiritual journey went with a fascination with violence in some of [his] films. How did that go together in one personality? … I had a feeling his Catholicism was somehow sewn into his work in a way that I didn’t completely understand.

What did working on this docuseries teach you about the tension between his Catholic faith and the violent scenes and themes that he explores?

He talks a lot about an obligation to tap into a truth about human beings. And that’s his North Star. … His dear friend [screenwriter] Jay Cocks talks about the way that he’s able to focus on a character like Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull” who is, in fact, quite a violent character without a lot of redeeming features, but he’s able to love him. Sort of like, “loving the least of these” [from Matthew 25:40].

In Episode 2, director Spike Lee says Mr. Scorsese is “a filmmaker who’s after the truth.” What do you think the truth is to Mr. Scorsese?

He’s asking these questions, which are the essential big questions that all religions really ask: What are we, and what is good and evil? The one thing I have noticed about him is that he is very honest with himself as a person, and that is really striking. [It] enables him to look really clear-eyed at the characters that he portrays and give them back to us so that we can see ourselves, for better or worse, in the films.

Storytelling in Christian traditions often emphasizes healing and redemption. Do you think his films try to contribute to our understanding of those qualities?

He approaches these things differently. For example, in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” his motivation was very simply to get to know Jesus better, and to explore the iconography, but through the idea of the man. In “Silence” [set in Japan during a period of Christian persecution], he’s really trying to heal what being a Christian is. ... He’s looking at being a human being on the deepest level.

Brigitte Lacombe/Apple TV+

In the docuseries, there’s quite a bit of discussion of the “underground man” – isolated, angry young men who can’t find their way in society and react with violent outbursts. How do Mr. Scorsese’s characters help us understand what motivates people who lash out?

Paul Schrader, who wrote “Taxi Driver,” was very inspired by [Fyodor] Dostoevsky’s the Underground Man, and talks about the isolation and the sense, in the character [Travis Bickle], of being on the outskirts, being the wolf looking at the campfire from a distance. ... We talk … about the link of humiliation and violence in “Taxi Driver” and that there seems to be a link between humiliation and violence often in real life as well.

Much of his work explores intense male friendships. In fact, some of his collaborators you interviewed shared how profoundly moved they were by these depictions. As a woman director, how did you come to create a documentary on his life and work?

Well, I was interested in his evolution as an artist, as a man, but also the evolution of his soul as well. I do think that that’s part of the story, too.

Are you talking about Mr. Scorsese’s transformation, almost a creative death, and then a rebirth?

Yes, in a sense. But also as you see how he’s living his life and his relationship to anger, his relationship to family, his peacefulness. ... He talks about how in “Raging Bull,” the sickness of the main character, which is in his violence, has to do with a loss of his soul. So he’s the one who is bringing up the idea of the trials of the soul in a way.

A lot of your own filmography creates portraits of women’s lives. How has Mr. Scorsese helped women gain advancements in the film industry?

He works with a tremendous number of women. [Three-time Oscar winner] Thelma Schoonmaker is one of the greatest editors, I think, ever. She’s an icon. And she really began her career with him [as students at NYU]. In some ways, I guess you could say, they helped create each other. In “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” the editor, producers, and in many of the key positions he uses women. He has many producers, like Margaret Bodde, that he works with long-term and seems to have had, I think, a very positive impact. And not to mention the many actresses that he has worked with and really given them opportunities to create wonderful characters.

Mr. Scorsese’s body of work is so vast. Are there any films you wish you could have explored that you had to leave out?

Once we realized how close his personal life and his art life were through the interviews, we knew what our bullseye was. ... Having said that, we do explore 32 films. I adore some of the documentaries that we did not explore. I adore “Hugo,” which we did not explore. But I don’t think I could have shaped it the way that it is and contained every single film, because then you end up with just a filmography, which is a kind of list. I had to keep true to the character of the film, which was really this dance between the personal and the art, and how the life and the art are continually creating each other.

What do you think Scorsese is trying to capture or reflect in his films about human nature?

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I don’t think there’s one thing. I think it’s a question. And in a way, it’s said in the very beginning of the piece, What are we? Are we inherently good or not? What’s the frontier of the human being? How is it taken over by violence? How is it taken over by peacefulness? He’s asking the questions, and it’s for us to watch and, in a way, I don’t think this is a filmmaker who is offering us moral closure. But I also think that that’s part of why his films are so fresh and relevant now, rather than kind of closing and tying it all up for us. He really doesn’t do that.

“Mr. Scorsese” is streaming on Apple+. It is rated TV-MA, for mature audiences.

The backstory to “It Was Just an Accident,” the extraordinary new movie from the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, is integral to its meaning. Winner of the 2025 Palme d’Or at Cannes – that festival’s highest honor – it’s about the ways revenge and mercy play out among a group of ordinary citizens who suffered the tyrannies of the Islamic Republic.

Panahi himself has famously endured the ongoing wrath of a regime of which he has been openly critical. In 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison, later commuted to house arrest, plus a 20-year ban on filmmaking. He repeatedly circumvented the ban, filming in secret. One of his clandestine movies, the acclaimed 2011 video memoir “This Is Not a Film,” was shot on an iPhone and smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick. 

Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP

“Accident” is his first film since his latest arrest in 2022, when, after almost seven months in detention, he was released after undergoing a hunger strike. No longer subject, at least for now, to a travel ban, he has accompanied his new film to festivals and screenings around the world. But as with his other films, he had to direct it in secret, in part because its lead women violated the law by not wearing hijabs.

Why We Wrote This

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has sacrificed for his art and views, having been sentenced to prison and house arrest. His latest movie, “It Was Just an Accident,” examines significant questions, including if there are limits to forgiveness – or mercy.

Panahi has stated that “Accident” derives in part from anecdotes he heard from fellow prisoners. Because he is first and foremost a storyteller, the movie is framed as a kind of slow-burn thriller. His rage at the brutal system is palpable but not propagandistic. He understands that humanity, and not hatred, ultimately drives his scenario.

Neon/AP

It all begins when Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), a middle-aged man driving at night on a country road, accidentally hits a dog, damaging his car’s engine. With his young daughter and pregnant wife in tow, he finds a local mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who comes to believe that Eghbal is the officer who tortured him in captivity years before. Because Vahid was blindfolded the entire time he was imprisoned, he can’t be absolutely sure that Eghbal, who like his torturer, has a prosthetic leg, is the real culprit. After kidnapping him, Vahid prepares to bury him alive in the desert – despite Eghbal’s furious denials – but relents.

With Eghbal bound and gagged in the van, Vahid that same day seeks out four other former victims of the torturer’s handiwork: Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a feisty wedding photographer; Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), a bride-to-be still wearing her wedding dress; her groom, Ali (Majid Panahi); and the hotheaded Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). They all pile into the van as it makes its rounds through the city streets and the hills above Tehran. Like Vahid, none of them as prisoners ever saw Eghbal’s face. They can’t be certain they have the right man, although Hamid is in favor of disposing of him anyway.

What ensues over the course of a day and night is a kind of black comic roundelay, in which each of the participants voices their full-throated recriminations and doubts. Squabbling in and out of that overcrowded van, they’re like a dysfunctional family wailing their pent-up woes.

Neon/AP

Without being explicit about it, Panahi has crafted a morality play. Is Eghbal really the torturer these people nicknamed Peg Leg? Although the truth finally comes out, the stakes are much the same either way. What are the limits of forgiveness? Of mercy? In seeking revenge, do the members of this cohort risk losing their souls?

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The film’s moral issues don’t come across as tacked on. They arise organically and register as both intensely personal to the filmmaker and much larger in scope. The film even offers up, against all odds – and a truly chilling final moment – a measure of hope. Vahid may bemoan his ruined life, but Panahi, who has suffered for his art, remains undaunted. This film is his Exhibit A.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “It Was Just an Accident” is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, violence, strong language, and smoking.

This morning, I disconnected my landline. For nearly 40 years, I had the same number: 549-6970. I loved how it rolled off the tongue. So easy to remember, almost lyrical. It made me sad to think of it being reassigned to someone else – someone who wouldn’t appreciate it as I did.

I should have cut the cord years ago. It’s been little more than a magnet for junk calls, much like the junk mail filling my post office box. I used to keep it as a backup in case the internet went out. But now, even landlines run on broadband. Even so, I wasn’t ready to let go of my old friend tethered to the wall.

That string of numbers, 549-6970, was a part of my history. It was the phone on which I spent hours talking to friends and family.

Why We Wrote This

Sometimes, there’s wisdom in the “outmoded” ways of life, as our essayist discovered. When she disconnected her landline, she bade goodbye to an era of spontaneous conversations and close connections.

Back in the old days, I’d return home from a trip and race to check the answering machine. Often, it was my mother. “Nothing urgent,” she’d say in her Polish-accented voice, tinged with melancholy, “but call when you get a chance.”

After she lost her ability to speak, I missed those guilt-laden messages.

I also liked that the landline was never associated with any one person. It was simply part of the house, like a stereo system (another part of my life that I’ve replaced with new technology).

Which is why, when the phone rang in my house when I was growing up, if you weren’t the first to answer it, everyone knew your business. “Are you friends with Amy again?” my sister would ask.

If the phone rang and I happened to pick it up, I might end up talking to my mother’s best friend for just a few minutes. She always wanted to know how I was doing. That kind of connection never happens now when we only talk to the people whom we’ve meant to call or who meant to call us. It makes us a little more isolated from each other.

These days, I rarely call anyone. If I do call, I’ve usually texted them first to check if it’s a good time to talk. I don’t even like talking on the phone anymore, except with an old friend from high school with whom I used to gab for hours every day after school. I don’t even like talking to my husband when we’ve been apart for a few days. I feel awkward, and I often want to get off.

When my cell rings, I often feel hijacked by the unexpected interruption. And even though I know I can just decline the call, it still feels intrusive. How dare you demand my attention the minute you want to talk to me when I might be at the movies or shopping?

One of the great things about a landline was that it was meant to stay in one place – unlike my smartphone, which I must carry everywhere like a ball and chain lest I fail to hear the ring.

I could never miss a call coming in on 549-6970. Its shrill, unmistakable jangle could penetrate through any distraction.

And that’s precisely what prompted me to call the phone company today – another piercing, early-morning call from a telemarketer. There I was, dripping wet from the shower, dashing to answer, only to hear the familiar sales pitch from my “best friend,” Cardholder Services. Enough was enough. I called and disconnected my service.

But after I hung up, I felt sad. I realized the landline was more than just a phone for me. It was a symbol of a time when we talked to each other rather than texted, when spontaneous calls turned into hourslong heart-to-hearts.

There was something so wonderfully unplanned about those conversations – someone called, you answered, and the next thing you knew, you were lying on the floor with the cord wrapped around your fingers, laughing or crying or listening to someone on the other end.

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No calendar invite, no “Can you talk now?” preamble. You didn’t need a reason to call. You just did. And that kind of closeness is hard to come by now.

Disconnecting 549-6970 felt like closing a chapter – its dial tone is now just a memory – but a part of me will always be waiting for its loud ring.

This morning, I disconnected my landline. For nearly 40 years, I had the same number: 549-6970. I loved how it rolled off the tongue. So easy to remember, almost lyrical. It made me sad to think of it being reassigned to someone else – someone who wouldn’t appreciate it as I did.

I should have cut the cord years ago. It’s been little more than a magnet for junk calls, much like the junk mail filling my post office box. I used to keep it as a backup in case the internet went out. But now, even landlines run on broadband. Even so, I wasn’t ready to let go of my old friend tethered to the wall.

That string of numbers, 549-6970, was a part of my history. It was the phone on which I spent hours talking to friends and family.

Why We Wrote This

Sometimes, there’s wisdom in the “outmoded” ways of life, as our essayist discovered. When she disconnected her landline, she bade goodbye to an era of spontaneous conversations and close connections.

Back in the old days, I’d return home from a trip and race to check the answering machine. Often, it was my mother. “Nothing urgent,” she’d say in her Polish-accented voice, tinged with melancholy, “but call when you get a chance.”

After she lost her ability to speak, I missed those guilt-laden messages.

I also liked that the landline was never associated with any one person. It was simply part of the house, like a stereo system (another part of my life that I’ve replaced with new technology).

Which is why, when the phone rang in my house when I was growing up, if you weren’t the first to answer it, everyone knew your business. “Are you friends with Amy again?” my sister would ask.

If the phone rang and I happened to pick it up, I might end up talking to my mother’s best friend for just a few minutes. She always wanted to know how I was doing. That kind of connection never happens now when we only talk to the people whom we’ve meant to call or who meant to call us. It makes us a little more isolated from each other.

These days, I rarely call anyone. If I do call, I’ve usually texted them first to check if it’s a good time to talk. I don’t even like talking on the phone anymore, except with an old friend from high school with whom I used to gab for hours every day after school. I don’t even like talking to my husband when we’ve been apart for a few days. I feel awkward, and I often want to get off.

When my cell rings, I often feel hijacked by the unexpected interruption. And even though I know I can just decline the call, it still feels intrusive. How dare you demand my attention the minute you want to talk to me when I might be at the movies or shopping?

One of the great things about a landline was that it was meant to stay in one place – unlike my smartphone, which I must carry everywhere like a ball and chain lest I fail to hear the ring.

I could never miss a call coming in on 549-6970. Its shrill, unmistakable jangle could penetrate through any distraction.

And that’s precisely what prompted me to call the phone company today – another piercing, early-morning call from a telemarketer. There I was, dripping wet from the shower, dashing to answer, only to hear the familiar sales pitch from my “best friend,” Cardholder Services. Enough was enough. I called and disconnected my service.

But after I hung up, I felt sad. I realized the landline was more than just a phone for me. It was a symbol of a time when we talked to each other rather than texted, when spontaneous calls turned into hourslong heart-to-hearts.

There was something so wonderfully unplanned about those conversations – someone called, you answered, and the next thing you knew, you were lying on the floor with the cord wrapped around your fingers, laughing or crying or listening to someone on the other end.

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No calendar invite, no “Can you talk now?” preamble. You didn’t need a reason to call. You just did. And that kind of closeness is hard to come by now.

Disconnecting 549-6970 felt like closing a chapter – its dial tone is now just a memory – but a part of me will always be waiting for its loud ring.

It’s the greatest show on Earth – with a few strings attached.

Inside the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, circus music blares and a horse gallops across the stage. Then a giraffe peeks its head from behind the curtain. Next come the camels.

“Clap along, sing along if you know the songs,” lead puppeteer Ginger Duncan encourages the audience as the rollicking show kicks off one Sunday morning.

Why We Wrote This

It can be hard to dazzle tech-savvy children growing up in the age of animation. A puppet theater founded in 1963 pulls the right strings so that adults marvel at the magic, too.

Though inanimate, marionettes are the stars here at the longest-running live puppet theater in the United States. But the show wouldn’t go on without the puppeteers guiding the animals’ movements from nearly invisible strings overhead. Dressed in red to fade into the background, the puppeteers twist and turn their arms and fingers, bringing the marionettes to life.

Over the course of an hour, roughly 150 marionettes grace the stage, dazzling even the most tech-savvy child growing up in the age of animation. The cabaret-style performance means puppets might pay giggling guests a visit, especially if they’re sitting in the front row.

“It’s really easy to get [kids] to connect,” says Ms. Duncan, who doubles as the theater’s marketing coordinator.

Adults marvel at the magic, too.

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Taryn Kehler, an Orlando, Florida, resident who grew up visiting theme parks, squeals as she bends down to meet Penelope, a shy elephant puppet. “I love my life right now,” she says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

For more visual storytelling that captures communities, traditions, and cultures around the globe, visit The World in Pictures.

I can still see myself, age 8. A warm early summer evening. Stopping in front of a music store because something had caught my eye. Maybe it was the shiny silver keys contrasting with the black ebony wood. But if someone ever chooses to write my biography, and I have any input, I will be able to pinpoint this as the exact moment I fell in love with the clarinet.

It took a year of cajoling, but my parents finally gave in and let me take lessons. Week after week, I made the solo trek down city streets to the music store, where I took half-hour lessons from an older Polish man who wasn’t particularly child-friendly, but he knew the clarinet. That’s all I was looking for.

I recall the early struggle to get that first, clear note out of the instrument. It took about five days. And then the painstaking crawl through those early scales, accompanied by the counterpoint of Mr. Markiewicz’s disapproval, and the metronome shaking of his head as I hit clunker after clunker. But I persisted.

Why We Wrote This

Adult coloring books. Roller skating. Young adult fiction. Revisiting childhood hobbies as an adult can evoke wonder and joy. For our essayist, it also revealed how young love evolves and matures over time.

I got to know other kids who had taken up the clarinet, but one by one, they gave it up. Truth to tell, it’s a notoriously difficult instrument to play well. Something about finicky reeds, breath control, coordinating one’s tongue and fingers, and keeping spit from clogging up the works. Anyone can strike a piano key and generate a note Vladimir Horowitz would be proud of, but getting one plangent tone out of a clarinet is a real triumph.

Scott Wilson

As I said, I persisted. Through elementary school, high school, and college, my clarinet was a sort of companion. There were still the occasional squeaks and squawks, but these were just reminders that relationships need to be constantly cultivated: Once I started paying more attention to the instrument, it sang instead of quacked.

After college, well, things, as they say, intervened. There was a stint in the U.S. Navy, then grad school, a year abroad as an exchange student, then more grad school, my first child, then another child. But as with a first love that one never really forgets, my mind occasionally wandered back, and idealized, the good times I’d had with the clarinet. Such as playing Piece No. 6 by Francesco Geminiani in my method book. Yes, my dear, we were young and starry-eyed, but weren’t those happy days? Whatever happened to us? Where did they go?

I know exactly where they went – into a corner of my closet, where the clarinet reposed for years and years. Until recently. In a fit of nostalgia potent enough to overcome my ennui, I decided to reach out to that long-ago love and ask if she remembered me, the eager boy who had engaged her in many a heartfelt musical conversation. 

Scott Wilson

And so, I reintroduced myself. Opening the case, I gently lifted out each section of the clarinet. Wiped it down with a soft cloth. Replaced the cork tenons. Set the thing together. Checked the bore. Wet the reed. Finally, the moment of truth. I opened my childhood method book to Piece No. 6 by Geminiani and was greeted by a breath-catching rush of nostalgia when I saw Mr. Markiewicz’s pencil marks from all those years ago, including the word “good.”

I had once been good, then. Let’s see what time had wrought. Embracing the mouthpiece, I began. To my great delight, what emanated from the clarinet was a clear middle C that must have been echoed by the angels on high. I continued to play as long as my embouchure would hold out. And, at this writing, I’m still playing. I lost her once and won’t lose her again.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

It’s true, then, what the eminent author Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote: “In love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and ... the art of loving matures with age and experience.”

He must have been a clarinetist.

I can still see myself, age 8. A warm early summer evening. Stopping in front of a music store because something had caught my eye. Maybe it was the shiny silver keys contrasting with the black ebony wood. But if someone ever chooses to write my biography, and I have any input, I will be able to pinpoint this as the exact moment I fell in love with the clarinet.

It took a year of cajoling, but my parents finally gave in and let me take lessons. Week after week, I made the solo trek down city streets to the music store, where I took half-hour lessons from an older Polish man who wasn’t particularly child-friendly, but he knew the clarinet. That’s all I was looking for.

I recall the early struggle to get that first, clear note out of the instrument. It took about five days. And then the painstaking crawl through those early scales, accompanied by the counterpoint of Mr. Markiewicz’s disapproval, and the metronome shaking of his head as I hit clunker after clunker. But I persisted.

Why We Wrote This

Adult coloring books. Roller skating. Young adult fiction. Revisiting childhood hobbies as an adult can evoke wonder and joy. For our essayist, it also revealed how young love evolves and matures over time.

I got to know other kids who had taken up the clarinet, but one by one, they gave it up. Truth to tell, it’s a notoriously difficult instrument to play well. Something about finicky reeds, breath control, coordinating one’s tongue and fingers, and keeping spit from clogging up the works. Anyone can strike a piano key and generate a note Vladimir Horowitz would be proud of, but getting one plangent tone out of a clarinet is a real triumph.

Scott Wilson

As I said, I persisted. Through elementary school, high school, and college, my clarinet was a sort of companion. There were still the occasional squeaks and squawks, but these were just reminders that relationships need to be constantly cultivated: Once I started paying more attention to the instrument, it sang instead of quacked.

After college, well, things, as they say, intervened. There was a stint in the U.S. Navy, then grad school, a year abroad as an exchange student, then more grad school, my first child, then another child. But as with a first love that one never really forgets, my mind occasionally wandered back, and idealized, the good times I’d had with the clarinet. Such as playing Piece No. 6 by Francesco Geminiani in my method book. Yes, my dear, we were young and starry-eyed, but weren’t those happy days? Whatever happened to us? Where did they go?

I know exactly where they went – into a corner of my closet, where the clarinet reposed for years and years. Until recently. In a fit of nostalgia potent enough to overcome my ennui, I decided to reach out to that long-ago love and ask if she remembered me, the eager boy who had engaged her in many a heartfelt musical conversation. 

Scott Wilson

And so, I reintroduced myself. Opening the case, I gently lifted out each section of the clarinet. Wiped it down with a soft cloth. Replaced the cork tenons. Set the thing together. Checked the bore. Wet the reed. Finally, the moment of truth. I opened my childhood method book to Piece No. 6 by Geminiani and was greeted by a breath-catching rush of nostalgia when I saw Mr. Markiewicz’s pencil marks from all those years ago, including the word “good.”

I had once been good, then. Let’s see what time had wrought. Embracing the mouthpiece, I began. To my great delight, what emanated from the clarinet was a clear middle C that must have been echoed by the angels on high. I continued to play as long as my embouchure would hold out. And, at this writing, I’m still playing. I lost her once and won’t lose her again.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

It’s true, then, what the eminent author Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote: “In love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and ... the art of loving matures with age and experience.”

He must have been a clarinetist.

“Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
with them forgive yourself.” – “The Winter’s Tale,” Act 5, Scene 1

Jerry Guenthner was walking through the prison yard at the break of dawn when he heard the voice.

Haven’t you put your mother through enough?

Why We Wrote This

The organization Shakespeare Behind Bars has helped violent offenders rediscover their humanity. In this story, two murderers come to “be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.”

He spun around. Who’d just spoken to him? It was 6:15 a.m., June 6, 1990. There was no one else in the yard at the Kentucky State Reformatory, where he was four years into a 65-year sentence.

It wasn’t an apparition, like Banquo’s ghost or that of Hamlet’s father. He was just having a rare moment, alone in the yard, heading to chow, admiring the traffic of clouds across an open freeway of sky. Then the voice interrupted, unbidden. It was like somebody talking into his mind. Asking a question that lanced through his core.

Haven’t you put your mother through enough?

“He said it again, and then there was no doubt,” Jerry recalls. But he didn’t feel fear. He didn’t feel judged. It felt like a conscious message filled with pure love and truth. A divine call.

Four years incarcerated, he’d become the leader of a crew. A former high school football player, he stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall. The other prisoners had nicknamed him Big G. They feared his reputation. Practically all of Louisville knew what he’d done, given the news coverage: He had killed a cop.

Now, the 24-year-old oversaw the flow of drugs into the penitentiary. He ran a loan-shark operation and controlled his own gambling ring. He was a fearsome fighter, and even the gangs inside showed him respect.

Jerry’s family was middle-class. His mother, Dorothy Guenthner, was an accountant, but her husband, also named Jerry, was a bookie and gambler who wore chunky, diamond-studded rings and looked like “a cross between Pavarotti and Popeye.” Father and son hung out together at a bar that was like a second home to them.

Not even a year out of high school, the younger Jerry was already dealing drugs such as methamphetamine, which people called “crank.” He had styled himself in an Al Capone-style fedora. On the night of Feb. 12, 1986, a friend hooked him up with a man looking to purchase an amount worth $5,600 – a big haul for a night.

The man, John Robert Weiss, drove a sports car with flip-up headlights, and picked him up that night. But Jerry was unable to contact his supplier. The night ended in a parking lot with the men arguing, Jerry’s potential customer saying he had wasted his time. Mr. Weiss, it turned out, was an armed undercover police officer, wearing a wire. The argument escalated.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Two guns were drawn beneath a sickle moon. The first of the policeman’s six bullets blew the fedora off Jerry’s head. The last seared into Jerry’s arm. Three of Jerry’s five shots were on target. The wounded policeman staggered through the snow, calling for backup into his wire. It was a sting operation, so the police team arrived quickly, but the undercover officer would die from his wounds.

At Mr. Weiss’s funeral, his mother, Nimet, was presented with the Stars and Stripes. She cradled it against her heart with both hands. He had been her only child. Months later, she would weep every day in the courtroom during the trial.

After Jerry was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison, his father was stoic: “Head up, chest out. One day at a time, and never let ’em see you sweat,” he told his son.

Jerry began serving his time at the Kentucky State Reformatory, and he became something of an inmate boss. His mother, he knew, struggled to maintain her bearings during family visits. Jerry knew his activities in prison put him at risk of being sent to solitary confinement. He would then be handcuffed and behind glass for all future visits. That would deeply wound her.

These worries were just part of the backdrop of that June morning when he heard the voice – a “road to Damascus” experience, he now calls it. But the fact is, the experience made him change dramatically.

He immediately gave up control of the drug trade and disentangled himself from his gambling operations. Jerry began going to the prison chapel regularly, attending the services of multiple denominations. He felt a kinship with the prodigal son.

The inmate had never thought about abstractions such as redemption, or forgiveness, or finding healing – for both himself and those he’d harmed in numerous ways. Jerry wrestled with guilt and confronted major existential questions: Who am I? How do I want to spend my remaining years before I die? What is my gift to humankind?

In 1996, Jerry was up for parole. He had been a model prisoner for six years. The parole board, however, denied the request. Police officials were adamantly opposed to his release. It would be another 12 years before he could apply again.

When Jerry returned from the hearing, he fell back into some of his old ways and got high.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Finding light in prison performing Shakespeare

In the late 1980s, when Jerry was working out in the Kentucky State Reformatory gym, he noticed an inmate who was “like the strongest person on the entire planet.”

The person was a competitive weightlifter named Sammie Byron. Sammie exemplified the proverbial scrawny kid who bulks up after repeatedly getting bullied at school, which for him included boys sexually assaulting him. At the same time, he was beaten by alcoholic parents at home. Having no one to turn to, Sammie kept a silence that was shrouded in shame.

Sammie, who was finding solace in weightlifting, had also been volatile and violent as he grew older. His first felony as an adult was shooting Wiley, one of the bullies who had sexually assaulted him as a child. Wiley survived.

Then, in 1983, Sammie strangled and killed his lover, Carol Fox. She had been threatening to expose Sammie’s serial cheating to his wife, Barb, with whom he had a son. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. “The first thing I did was ask [Barb] to divorce me, because I didn’t want to imprison my wife and son with me,” Sammie says.

Jerry got to know Sammie better after they both were transferred to Luther Luckett Correctional Complex near La Grange, Kentucky, in the 1990s. Sammie had an easy smile, which creased into his freckled cheeks, conveying his mental fortitude and calm. In a movie, he’d be played by Morgan Freeman. And Sammie never once got into a fight in prison, a rarity – and probably because of his size and extraordinary strength.

They lifted weights together and participated in other athletic events, but weren’t particularly close. But Sammie was a founding member of a program called Shakespeare Behind Bars, and Jerry soon found himself drawn to Sammie’s crew of inmate actors.

They staged the Bard’s plays with the help of Curt Tofteland, then-director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. The actors sometimes wore makeup and, when cast in female roles, used balloons as breasts. Jerry noticed that, like Sammie, the participants were different from most of the other inmates.

“Their light was on,” Jerry says. “They weren’t dark anymore.”

Andy Nelson/The Christian Science Monitor/File

It wasn’t easy to keep your light on in prison. Jerry maintained his faith and avoided trouble. But it could be hard to imagine going on with a life inside walls for decades to come.

At the first production, Jerry became a “Shakespeare groupie,” rapt as he attended all three performances of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” he recalls. But the play was not just the thing. It was the players.

“I was like, ‘I’ve seen these guys do this and have the fun – and goodness in their heart,’” he says. “And so I knew it was opening something in them. And I was like, ‘I got to get me some of that.’”

Sammie sponsored Jerry’s application to join. It was an exclusive group. Unreliable inmates could jeopardize the productions. “Curt’s first question to me was, ‘You don’t get in trouble, do you?’” Jerry chuckles. “I said, ‘Well, not no more.’”

The group opened a new world for Jerry. The men, by design, devise their core values and hold one another accountable in abiding by them. One of these is respect for emotional intimacy.

The director of the program, Mr. Tofteland, does not choose the roles the inmates play. The men themselves make those decisions. And when Jerry joined the group, Sammie was playing the lead role in “Othello.”

In one of his first rehearsals as a member of the group, Jerry witnessed Sammie repeatedly break down in sobs as he tried to perform his lines.

“The death scene of Othello’s wife, Desdemona, paralleled the real-life murder I committed,” Sammie says. “Seeing the look of terror on Desdemona’s face, I came to see the humanity in my victim, Carol. When I saw the disbelief, the fear, the betrayal in Desdemona’s eyes, my rage transformed to life.”

Sammie chose life, even as he performed Othello’s final words:

I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky
deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am.
Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.

Jerry and Sammie became close friends as they continued on as members of Shakespeare Behind Bars. Eventually, the group decided to take on “Hamlet.”

As they were deciding on who to play the titular role, Sammie gave Jerry a nudge.

Andy Nelson/The Christian Science Monitor/File

The question, “To be, or not to be?” in the silence of a prison cell

Jerry’s voice was squeaky for a big guy.

So, Mr. Tofteland gave him a tip: lie on the floor in the visiting room and yell your lines at the ceiling until you learn to use your diaphragm. “I’ve been bellowing ever since!” Jerry says.

At the time, Jerry had a job in the prison laundry. While folding clothes from the industrial-sized dryer, he’d memorize Hamlet’s dialogue. Jerry’s goal was to learn 30 lines per day. Cumulatively, Hamlet speaks more than 1,400 lines of dialogue – the most of any role in Shakespeare’s catalog.

Jerry learned a lot from Mr. Tofteland, in fact. To prepare for each play, the director would ask the group to answer fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human? What do I love? How will I live my life knowing I will die?

Prisons are repositories for shame and guilt, Mr. Tofteland would say. But shame and guilt doesn’t change behavior.

“The only way that you change behavior is to change thinking,” Mr. Tofteland says. “So, what you begin to introduce is a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at the world, a different way of seeing each of themselves in the world.

“You can’t say, ‘Tell us about the time you were raped,’ or ‘Tell us the time that you saw your father murdered,’” he says. “You don’t have language for that. But Shakespeare has language for it. ... So, I can find any event that’s happened in your life. I can find parallel events that happen in Shakespeare’s characters.”

That’s how Jerry came to portray Hamlet not so much as a melancholy mope but as someone consumed by anger. In the play, Claudius murders Hamlet’s father. Jerry could relate to betrayal. An old friend had set up the drug sting by introducing Jerry to the undercover officer.

Shakespeare also pushed Jerry to confront his own existential burdens. “‘To be or not to be,’ that wasn’t just a line, you know? It was a question that I had to ask myself in the silence of the cell. The easy way out is to kill yourself,” he says. “I had a whole lot of time to do, and it’s like, ‘Wouldn’t it just be easy not to be?’”

If Hamlet offered Jerry an outlet for venting frustration at outward forces, a later role challenged him to look inward at his own culpability. In “Richard III,” the physically deformed protagonist murders his brothers and nephews to become king. Hadn’t Jerry also destroyed his relationships with his sister, his mother, and his father in a bid to become a drug kingpin? He was ready to take responsibility for being so selfish, so greedy.

During an ugly cry, tears slaloming down his cheeks and snot bubbling through his nose, he got down on his knees. Jerry felt God’s forgiveness.

He came to view himself in a different way. Jerry says the person who had

been a gangster and drug dealer was a guy with a mask on. He didn’t have to change who he fundamentally was to be a good man. But he did have to quit wearing the mask.

“That light goes back on, and you realize you don’t have to stay that person,” says Jerry. “You can turn your back on that person and go back to always being the person God intended you to be.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“I still grieve for the life that I have taken.”

In 2011, Jerry sat before a parole board again. The hearing was packed with supporters. The prison’s warden, Larry Chandler, had submitted a letter about the positive impact Jerry had had on other incarcerated men. It was the only time he had ever testified on an inmate’s behalf. The board, however, ruled Jerry would have to wait another decade for his next opportunity.

By then, Shakespeare Behind Bars was having an effect far beyond Luther Luckett’s barbed-wire fences. In 2001, the Monitor had been the first newspaper to report on the program. Then, it became the subject of Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller’s 2005 award-winning documentary.

“One of the things that ‘Shakespeare Behind Bars’ the documentary did was bring to light that people can change,” says Mr. Chandler. “Hopefully, people can understand that they can change and find some forgiveness in their heart for the heinous crime that they did, and understand that they’re trying to do good now.”

Sammie, whose story was front and center in the documentary, was paroled from his life sentence in 2014. Prior to his release, Sammie had embarked on his own personal tour of reconciliation. First, with his mother. Then, with his father through a series of letters.

One day at Luther Luckett, Sammie spotted Wiley, the bully who had molested him and whom he’d shot. Wiley was undergoing rehab at the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center and was visiting Luther Luckett to access its library of law books. Sammie went over to him.

“The first thing I did was I apologized for shooting him,” says Sammie. “He says, ‘Uh, you know, Sammie, I kind of deserved that. ... It’s a good thing you were not a very good shot.’ So, we laughed together.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Following Sammie’s release, he worked up the courage to reach out to his ex-wife. Barb, initially skeptical, agreed to meet. They remarried in 2016. “I didn’t marry the same man twice,” she says. “He was a totally different person.” Yes, he was bald, she jokes, but he could now recite chunks of Shakespeare and was willing to be emotionally vulnerable.

“I think the hardest thing was for me to forgive myself,” says Sammie. “I still grieve for the life that I have taken – and I used to hide from that feeling. I never know when it’s going to overwhelm me.”

He remained in regular contact with Jerry, still serving his time in prison. In addition to acting in Shakespeare plays, Jerry fostered dogs as part of the Paws Behind Bars program and acted as a mentor for other inmates. He also earned several associate degrees.

One thing that still nagged him was wishing he could reach out to Nimet Weiss to express remorse for killing her son.

“It always was on my conscience, even after I changed my fact of being the real me, that I had hurt her,” Jerry says. “How can I fix that? How can I even have the audacity to ask her for forgiveness? And what would that even look like?”

Jerry was surprised to find out that a prison psychologist knew Ms. Weiss. Recounting what the psychologist shared with him, Jerry’s voice breaks and his eyes thicken with tears. She had died, but she had let people know that she had forgiven the man who killed her only son.

In 2021, the parole board once again denied Jerry’s request for supervised release. He wondered whether he’d get another chance to live outside prison walls. His father and sister had both died. Would his mother even still be alive?

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

I’ll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.

On a midweek August morning earlier this year, a small audience has gathered in an amphitheater in Louisville’s Central Park, site of the city’s annual Shakespeare festival.

A Shakespearean actor takes the stage, surrounded by a minimalist set for “Twelfth Night,” the final play of the festival’s 2025 season.

The actor is about to deliver the most important soliloquy of his life – but this time, he’s not acting.

Like a number of Shakespearean comedies, Jerry’s story at this moment is culminating in a wedding, and he’s about to say his vows to a woman named Georgie Cain.

Jerry takes a breath and addresses his audience. “Before all the people we love and with all the love I have in me, I stand before you today in awe and wonder,” he bellows. “Five and a half years ago, I never imagined this moment could be realized.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Jerry Jerome Guenthner was released from prison in January 2024. Consistent good behavior and credits for becoming the first person in the Kentucky Department of Corrections to get a bachelor’s degree helped earn his release. He had been behind bars 37 years, 11 months, and 16 days.

Jerry and Georgie “met” early during the pandemic. Georgie, thousands of miles away in Australia, was browsing profiles in a “write a prisoner” program.

She was taken with Jerry’s photo with two huskies he was fostering. They began talking every day; Jerry was smitten by Georgie’s accent. He describes her as kind, loyal, and generous.

“We had the most stable love for each other,” says Georgie, who has just moved into their new home. Jerry now works with Sammie at an organization called The Spot, a center that helps at-risk youth learn life skills and find employment.

It is Sammie who gives Georgie away. (“Do I have to call you ‘Dad’ now?” Jerry later jokes to his dear friend.) Mr. Tofteland, the Shakespeare Behind Bars director, is the officiant. Mr. Rogerson and Ms. Spitzmiller, the documentary filmmakers, are here, too, filming a follow-up documentary titled “Shakespeare Beyond Bars.”

Sitting near Barb, Sammie’s reconciled wife, is Jerry’s grinning mother, Dorothy.

“You saw me, past my time, past the headlines, past the shadows of my past, and something worth loving, something worth waiting for,” Jerry says to Georgie.

The setting of the wedding, a Shakespeare stage, is meaningful to the couple for a number of reasons. Jerry had fallen in love with the words of the Bard after watching his fellow inmates perform “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” nearly 30 years earlier.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

At a later moment, Jerry would recount how performing the role of Caliban in “The Tempest” continues to impact his own self-understanding. In the play, Prospero says of the creature he helped create, “This thing of darkness I / acknowledge mine.”

“I acknowledge that I was this person, you know – I was capable of doing that,” Jerry says of his crime. He still identifies with Caliban, and especially one of his final lines. “At the end, he comes to, at the end of his journey, I promise to ‘be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.’”

“I once identified as a monster – you identified me as a monster – but now, I learned from that character, as I grew, [who] hurt other people,” he says. “Now, I can come out at the other end and be smart enough to know that I need to ‘be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.’ And, so, I think that’s what we’re all doing. And that’s what we learn from our characters.”

It is a moment of grace for the man who killed a police officer.

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The newly married couple gaze at each other, wishing they’d thought to bring tissues to the stage, as Jerry continues his wedding vows.

“You are God’s gift and promise to me,” he says. “A rainbow that shines in the sky of my heart.”

The Cab family’s cluster of beehives is in a small clearing that opens up in the thick mangrove forest of Isla Arena, Mexico. Dressed in a protective suit, the family’s matriarch, Elma Guadalupe Cab Hochín, lifts the lid of one of the hives and explains that, until two years ago, she wasn’t interested in bees. Never mind that her father had been a beekeeper and that the surname Cab, coincidentally, means “bee” in Mayan.

“As a child, I was very afraid of them,” she says. “Once, I was stung and never wanted to accompany my father again.”

Today, she is a passionate beekeeper. That transformation came about after her son Santiago Francisco Tucuch Cab, an agro-ecological technician specializing in beekeeping, was injured in a motorbike accident. He could no longer tend to an experimental apiary project he had started on Isla Arena with the aim of raising bees to help pollinate the surrounding environment and protect the mangroves. “The rest of the family got involved to look after his hives,” Elma says, referring to her husband, Mario Humberto Gómez Martín, and her youngest son, Humberto Emanuel Gómez Cab. 

Why We Wrote This

Mangroves that capture and store carbon dioxide are critical to combating global warming in Mexico. Through pollination, bees ensure the reproduction of mangrove trees.

Santiago, who is still recovering, had also installed a meliponarium – a wooden structure with a roof of dried palm leaves to keep out the sun and rain – in his parents’ backyard. The stingless bee species housed in the meliponarium has been native to the area since pre-Columbian times. “They are part of our identity, and we must continue to raise them so that they don’t disappear,” Elma says to a group of tourists visiting the meliponarium.

Last year, the family’s cooperative, called Honey Kaab, and four small beekeepers from the states of Campeche and Yucatán created the Mangrove Honey Producers Network. It allows the beekeepers to share their knowledge and experiences with conservation, and seeks out marketing channels for mangrove honey, which is slightly saltier than most other varieties. 

Mangroves are critical to combating global warming because they capture and store carbon dioxide. Through pollination, bees ensure the reproduction of mangrove trees, whose ecosystem also acts as a protective barrier for the coastline.

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“We alone will not change the world, but any effort, no matter how small, counts,” Elma says. 

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For more visual storytelling that captures communities, traditions, and cultures around the globe, visit The World in Pictures.

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