Their images come to me by day and by night. I'll look in the mirror and see not me in the deep plum dress that I will wear at my daughter's wedding, but my own mother in the teal blue dress that she wore at mine. Sometimes I see the three of them: my mother, my aunt and my mother-in-law. My own holy trinity. They were the three women who loved me and mothered me and were there for me, one or the other, or all of them together, for too short a while a very long time ago…

The promise was made when the old woman was sick and it was repeated as she grew sicker. "Don't worry about your cat. I'll take care of him," the younger woman told her.

And the promise was kept. The cat was fed and let out and brought in and stroked, and if not exactly loved, definitely liked a lot.

When the old woman was hospitalized…

When my son phones from England, where he now lives, he always says, "What's up?" So I give him the latest family news. I tell him about one sister's impending wedding. "We ordered the tuxes. You need to send your measurements. I don't have my dress yet." I fill him in on the basics.

Then we talk about his other sister. "Tell her to break a leg this weekend…

We watched an old Bette Davis movie Saturday night, "The Letter," about a wealthy woman who shot and killed her lover, then convinced her lawyer to conceal a piece of evidence that would have made a jury convict her.

The movie was in black and white…

I wake up early to write because there are no distractions at 5 a.m. No telephones ringing, no radio from another room, no one making demands.

There's just the dark, the silence and me.

Throughout December, night lingers, day breaking late, school buses already on the road, traffic a steady whoosh by the time it's light enough to see outdoors…

Whenever there's a headline like "World crushes U.S. kids in math, science," and headlines like this are perennials these day, there's an immediate rush to condemn public schools and public school teachers for all that our children are not…

The room was different. I remember it as bigger, though it probably wasn't. How big can a hospital room be? I remember the day was cold, but that's easy because it was February. I remember Caryn sitting up in bed, smiling, putting on her robe and the two of us walking down to the nursery to look through the glass at her new baby…

Here we are in sunny Scottsdale, not quite as sunny as it usually is and definitely not as warm, El Nino wreaking havoc with weather here, too. But it is lovely nonetheless, a little sun, intermittent blue sky, flowers blooming, birds singing, mountains of red rock everywhere you look…

I wonder: If we all wore name tags with photos of ourselves as children, would we hate each other so much?

If we carried a video and before we could kill or be killed, we got to say, "Time out. Watch this," and we showed our enemy just 10 minutes of our lives and he showed us 10 minutes of his, would we still be…

His name is Charlie Wiseman and he plays piano in a small bar in Norfolk. His name's not on the door or in lights or anywhere except on his card, which he'll give you if you ask.

He plays Friday and Saturday nights and he plays other places other nights and glasses clink and patrons laugh and there is conversation and men tell jokes while he makes the piano..

It was an ordinary February day, not sunny and mild, a prelude to spring. Not the kind of day where you can smell the earth and feel its softness under the hard ground.

It was gray and raw and barren, the trees like stick figures drawn by a child, everything dull and muted and smudged. It was hat and scarf weather, but even these couldn't keep you warm. It was a day to endure, not to enjoy…