"Give Time," the letter suggested. "Time is the ideal gift.”

Would that we could give time, not the magazine, but the real thing, all wrapped up and held together by a shiny red bow. Happy birthday, Dad. These  are the days of your life. Open the package and you're young again…

One more week and the ride will be over. I can feel it slowing down, hear the music easing to a halt. I'm trying hard not to anticipate the end, to savor the moment and luxuriate in now. But tomorrow is in the shadows, in the shrinking days, in the orange-red of the mountain ash, in the still, August nights, and in my children who are so eager for the ride to end…

The story ran in The Patriot Ledger last Monday and it's been on my mind since. I thought about it when I went to visit my cousin who has three young children but works more than 30 hours a week, nights and weekends, because she has to if she's to make ends meet. She doesn't see her husband much because he's working 12-hour days. But that's the way it is. She doesn't complain. She doesn't have time to…

The writing is tacky. There are too many "My darlings," and exclamation marks and phrases like "there were no longer words or thoughts, only a union beyond mind, beyond time, beyond the world." But that's not what's wrong with "Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind…”

The path is familiar. I have been walking it for nine summers now. I know where the roots of trees protrude, where rocks jut, where poison ivy hides, where blueberries and raspberries nestle, where puddles form when it rains, where tiny yellow birds perch, where the brush is so thick that the path seems to disappear, where the broadest view of the Atlantic is…

He won't recognize himself. Neither will she. That's the tragedy. No one has ever videotaped a day in his life. She has never been tape recorded on the phone, in a crowd, talking to someone at work. Neither one knows how nasty they sound, act, behave, ARE. So they go on undermining friends, castigating co- workers, talking about people they pretend to like, all the while with a smile on their lips, as if other people's intimacies, insecurities, secrets, and problems are fodder for public entertainment. If they could see themselves…

I thought I would feel terrible. I thought I would cry. That's what I used to do when my son had a birthday.

When he turned one, I wanted him to be six months again so he would be content to lie in my arms. And when he turned two, I wanted him to be one so I could watch, for a second time, his first steps. Most of his life I've been like this, wishing time…

The soon to be 21-year-old came home from school last weekend and mentioned - solely to induce guilt, I know - how the mother of one of his roommates had suddenly appeared at their doorstep one day, like some angel of mercy, her arms laden with bags and bags of groceries. "She even made us meatballs," he said.

My guilt was instantaneous. Groceries and meatballs…

Since October, I have been watching two leaves…