It wasn’t all bad
■■ A Pennsylvania police officer’s quick help saved a 9-day-old baby’s life. Joe and Jody Schleicher saw their daughter Olivia acting fussy and drove her to the hospital. Stopped at a traffic light, Jody saw that Olivia wasn’t breathing. Seeing a police car nearby, Joe got officer Kristin Mitrisin’s attention and they pulled over in a parking lot, where Mitrisin immediately began doing chest compressions. Baby Olivia is now awaiting heart surgery. “I’m a mother of two children, so I would hope someone could help me,” Mitrisin said.
■■ A year ago, Josh Swain from Tucson started a Facebook chat with nine fellow Josh Swains. “We fight, whoever wins gets to keep the name,” Swain wrote. Swain chose a random coordinate and set the date for the duel exactly a year out. Swain meant it to be a joke, but the event gained attention and morphed into a fight for anyone named
Josh. So this April, hundreds of people gathered in Lincoln, Neb., for a poolnoodle duel in what was dubbed “Josh Fight” until 4-yearold Joshua Vinson Jr., from Lincoln, was the last one standing. “I think everybody needed something like this,” Swain said.
■■ Last April, Kyra Peralte from Montclair, N.J., kept a journal about her struggles during the pandemic. Then, she sent the notebook in the mail to a stranger whom she met at a Zoom conference—and thus the traveling diary was born. Now several black-and-white composition notebooks are circling the globe, with pandemic stories penned by more than 100 women from all walks of life. Each woman who receives it has three days to fill the pages with drawings, writings, confessions, or musings before sending it off to the next writer. “The Traveling Diary is making sisters out of strangers,” Peralte said.