I ran across a mention of Judy Blume, and found some strange things through the various Wikipedia pages.
Her maiden name is Sussman; Michael Sussman is probably not closely related, but he has certainly been in the news a lot lately.
There were 118 plane crash deaths in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, within two months in 1951-1952 (three crashes), and her dentist father helped to identify the remains.
Elizabeth is apparently close enough to New York City that the World Trade Center towers were visible, and is on the flight path to the Newark airport.
The first of these crashes involved smoke coming out of an engine before takeoff, and more white smoke in the air, which became an obvious fire. When Biden's jet was blowing lots of white smoke out of one engine while it was on the ground last year, and then took off right away, people were saying that was totally normal, and nothing to worry about at all.
The 1951 plane narrowly missed a high school, and ended up by the river.
The second of these crashes narrowly missed Blume's high school, less than an hour after school was dismissed for the day, and killed former Secretary of War Robert Patterson. From Blume's graduation date, it appears she was a freshman at the time.
The third crash narrowly missed an orphanage, and did hit an apartment building.
Blume based her 2015 novel "In the Unlikely Event" in that time period and setting.
The Wikipedia page for Elizabeth has what seems like a long list of notable people who are from there for a city of that size, including Mickey Spillane.
Blume's second husband was a physicist.
She wrote books that were controversial at the time, but that paved the way for the school library culture wars of today.
I tried at one point to read her adult novel "Wifey" (a New York Times bestseller), but gave up within twenty pages. I rarely abandon a fiction book mid-story.
This song is haunting, although not directly applicable to my personal experience.
There's an interesting semi-parallel in Revelation 7:17 and 8:1:
"...and God shall wipe all tears from their eyes. And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour."
Some years back there were some public comments from famous authors about the Susan in the Narnia books not being present for the Final Battle and what followed. It was framed as bigotry against women and people of average morals.
Neil Gaiman's came in the form of a short story, "The Problem of Susan," which from an excerpt I found is apparently quite vile.
Gaiman has fallen out of public favor as allegations against him have begun to surface.
Two other authors were J. K. Rowling, who ought to know better, and Phillip Pullman, who also writes vile stories, I've been told.
Pastor Douglas Wilson has a lucid, sensitive, and rather long rebuttal to the Problem of Susan; link below.
My own, lesser contribution here, is that C. S. Lewis was a fan of George MacDonald, and MacDonald wrote some vivid portrayals of spiritual devolution. In The Princess and Curdie, Curdie was given the ability to discern which beast a person's moral character was descending into by holding their hand. In ...
