Inside my house, it is still Halloween. A giant bat hangs over the sliding glass door. Scary Man, laden with chains, shrieks in the hall. The kitchen witch cackles whenever a dish is clanked or someone bumps into her.
Outside my house, Halloween was over weeks before it arrived. Christmas pushed it aside in the middle of October, wreaths and Santas and holiday deals dwarfing pumpkins and ghouls and candy corn. There was Christmas music…
Read MoreYou can't make up these things. It was last month. A weekday. I was meeting Rosanne Thomas for lunch to talk about her new book, "Excuse Me — The Survival Guide to Modern Business Etiquette," because Thomas teaches manners in these mannerless times, and, God knows, a course in civility and kindness and an awareness of others are things our culture could use a dose of right now…
Read More'Why don't we talk on the phone anymore?" Anne and I say to each other when we do talk. When we're sitting across a table from each other playing cribbage and chatting about life and books and movies we've loved and places we've been. Across a table from each other, we never stop talking.
But we don't pick up the phone…
Read MoreThey insulate me from the world. They keep me away from network TV and the barrage of bad news, which is incessant. They make me pay attention to what is happening right in front of me because they are in front of me, children singing a song, reciting a poem, telling me about a book I have to read or a movie I have to watch…
Read More'You plant black-eyed peas, that's what you git," my daughter's friend says in an Oklahoma drawl she exaggerates whenever she wants to make a point. I laughed when I first heard this phrase some 20 years ago, but it's a saying our family quickly adopted.
I found myself thinking these words while listening to my granddaughter Lucy belt out the score from "Gypsy" on our drive home from seeing…
Read MoreThey stopped speaking to each other decades ago, two cousins who lived within walking distance of one another, cousins who had been good friends, who had a shared history, who'd spent holidays and weekends and countless family celebrations together, who always got along until one of them couldn't forgive what the other insists…
Read MoreYou'd think, having lived a long life, that I would know some things. And I do. I know facts. Lots of them. But not nearly enough. And I understand so few of the "why's" behind what I know.
For example: I have been reading about the Second World War since I was a child, both fact and fiction, and still I don't understand the reasons for all that happened. Last month, I read yet another book, "The Holocaust — A New History," by British historian Laurence Rees…
Read MoreI never called her Carmela. She was always Mrs. Denneno to me. "Hi, Mrs. Denneno?" "How are you, Mrs. Denneno?" "What's new?" "How are the kids?" These are the questions you ask people you know, but don't really know…
Read MoreMy favorite holiday isn't a holiday. Yet. But give it time. August is the only month in which there is no national celebration, no reason to pause or give thanks or remember. And shouldn't there be? Isn't August, even by definition, grand and majestic and impressive? Doesn't it deserve to be honored? Plus, don't we love holidays, especially the ones…
Read MoreToday it's eyeshadow I can't find. Clarins. Four shades of gray in a small, gold compact, my go-to-for-the-moment favorite. This eye shadow lives in my makeup bag, with all the other paints and potions I keep falling for.
Except it's not there now…
Read MoreMy daughter met a man at Chicago's O'Hare Airport last week who gave her a Virgin Mary medal. And perspective. "Sometimes there are miracles," he told her.
She met George because of a flight delay. She'd had too many flight delays. This one was three-plus hours, which meant she wouldn't be arriving home in Boston until after 1 a.m. She was not a happy camper…
Read MoreMy father is the reason I said yes to an e-mail asking whether I wanted a review copy of "Love Letters from World War II." But I didn't think this at the time.
The book's cover is what I thought drew me: photographs of a man and a woman looking like characters in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, lean and beautiful, and of a time, both staring outward but looking inward, too, separate, facing away from…
Read MoreCheryl Opper began when her only child started high school. It was November 2003, and she was 46 and wondering what she was going to do with the rest of her life. Thumbing through the pages of Family Circle magazine, she found her answer.
A woman in California had started a program to help children
Read MoreMy Aunt Lorraine was in her 50s when she and her husband decided to take a road trip across the country. It was a long time ago and I don't remember their exact route, but when she returned home I asked, "Of all the places you've been, what was your favorite?" And she said, over coffee at her kitchen table, "Stoughton. There's no place…
Read MoreI was there when it arrived — Kismet? Coincidence? — visiting my old best friend, whom I hadn't seen in years. She had ordered it before she knew I was coming, a "Dorothy" tree she called it, homage to my mother, whose name was Dorothy.
My visit was all impulse. I met Rosemary in second grade. Throughout grade school we were inseparable. Then, little by little, we grew apart…
Read MoreMy 13-year-old grandson cannot read cursive. I didn't know this until about a month ago. I was showing him something in my journal, and he couldn't make out a word. "They don't teach cursive anymore," he informed me.
I was flabbergasted…
Read MoreThey aren't wrapped yet. They're lying side-by-side on the dining room table in no particular order, stiff-spined, some with glossy covers, some matte, some thick with pages, some slim, some traditional paperbacks, some the mass-market kind, all of them with that new book smell.
For weeks I'd been thinking about what to get my grandson, Adam, for his 13th birthday. Anything sports…
Read MoreEaster has so many things going for it. Not just the resurrection and the promise of eternal life, though that's hard to beat. Death not an end, but a beginning? We don't die, we evolve? Who doesn't want to believe this? "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia."
All on its own, this promise, this certainty that we are not merely…
Read MoreThere’s a difference between ignorance and intent. This is what I want to say up front, that sometimes people use words they shouldn't because they don't know any better. When old words like "Indian" and "midget" get replaced by new words like "Native American" and "little person," it takes time for people…
Read MoreGerry Gottschalk once said: "Nobody just sits down and plays. You have to earn what you have. You have to experiment.” You would think that he never had to try. That he just sat down at a piano one day and, presto, out poured the notes. That he played the way most of us walk, without having to think about it…
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