“Have you gotten to the part where Beth dies?” my wife innocently asked her younger sister, who, many years ago, was eagerly reading “Little Women.” Her sister, of course, hadn’t and the knowledge of what was coming detracted (to say the least) from her experience of the book. To be clear, my wife didn’t do this to be mean. Rather, she was excited to be able to share the highs and lows of a beloved book.

Years later, the day the last Harry Potter book came out, multiple copies were delivered to the houses on our street and every kid who weren’t away at camp, sat on their front steps devouring the new tome. They were so engrossed that all the adults could have left and they wouldn’t have noticed until they realized they were hungry.

Since the youngest of my neighbors’ three kids wasn’t yet able to read the Potter saga on her own, her parents had been reading the books out loud to her. So my neighbor sternly warned her two sons of dire consequences that would befall them if they (deliberately or inadvertently) revealed what happened in the book before their sister had heard it. To the best of my knowledge, they never revealed any of the book’s secrets before its time.

These stories both came to mind as I tried to think of what I wanted to say about Louisa May Alcott, who was born on November 29 1832 (not in Concord, MA but in Germantown, PA). Alcott is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp issued in 1940 as part of a series depicting 35 “Famous Americans”-a series that included 31 white men, 3 white women, and one Black man (Booker T. Washington).

I can’t add much to the many words that have been spoken and written about Alcott generally or “Little Women” specifically. In fact, I’ve never read it (but I did watch and love both the 1994 and 2019 movie versions; the first with both my daughters; the second with one of them on Christmas Day). I particularly loved the second movie’s focus on the second half of the book, where the girls face difficult choices as they grow into women. As an article on the BBC’s History Extra website notes, “while previous adaptations have interpreted the novel nostalgically, highlighting its portrayal of home and family, Little Women has always been a deeply divided story with more modern themes than it is given credit for. Above all, it is a book about growing up and learning how to love and be loved without losing sight of who we are meant to be.”

What I’ve learned from the movies and from wife and daughters (who have all read Little Women), is the book also is about the power of shared stories, particularly the small moments of grace, insight, and connectedness that often come when we don’t expect them. These can be times of shared experiences – for some reason, at this moment I am remembering the last night of our first family bicycle trip, when I sat at sunset with one of my daughters overlooking a lawn full of garden gnomes. And sometimes, they come via the pleasure of hearing the same music, seeing the same art, being at the same exciting game, or, even welcoming someone into the world of a favorite book, as my wife inadvertently did when she welcomed her sister into the beloved world that Alcott created more than 100 years ago.

“Be something in yourself, let the world know you are alive!” Alcott’s real-life mother supposedly told her. Doing so, it seems to me, involves allowing yourself to experience and then to share those wonderful moments of connection, particularly at this moment in time when it is so hard to make and maintain our connections.

Be well, stay safe, cherish connections, fight for justice and work for peace.