The holiday season is upon us, meaning chances are good you may have more family and social get-togethers coming up. But whether you dread holiday parties and figuring out what to chat about with everyone from young to old, left or right, happy or sad, […]
I didn’t know if we could jam 10 helium balloons into my little Mazda but we did, along with all the other makings of an 86th birthday celebration for my mother. We drove up to the entrance of the Inn where my mother had a […]
“In my own worst seasons, I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window.” – Barbara Kingsolver, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, essayist […]
Are you the person you were a year ago? Did you mean to be different? It’s actually strange to think of who we were one year ago and in what ways we may or may not have changed, either by happenstance or by design. I […]
You wouldn’t know this, but you instantly dropped my cortisol level in the way you cheerfully raised your hand, broke into a wide-open smile as if you were spontaneously glad to see me, and said hello. Thank you for that. Something shifted in me, and […]
It’s hard to think too far ahead into the future without feeling a certain amount of despair about humanity’s prospects but then someone like 29-year-old Boyan Slat comes along and makes environmental repair feel totally possible. How can it not when this young Dutch inventor […]
Leo Bird knows what it’s like to walk into a cafeteria and be faced with what might seem like a mild dilemma: where to sit. Except it’s not mild, not mild at all. Leo, the college student son of one of my longtime/lifetime friends, was […]
I committed my first cruelty at the innocent age of 4. And I knew it. We were a team almost from the get go, Amy and me. In the 4-kid ABBA rhyme scheme that was our family pattern, we were the tight middle core — […]
I was in a situation I couldn’t see my way out of short of calling in the ski patrol, however you do that. The problem: the bottom of the mountain was very different from the top. What had been manageable down below on my amateur […]
Part I She held herself like a queen, not in a haughty way, just in full possession of her silly 17-year-old self. Only 4 years older than Velvet myself but nonetheless the teacher of her in my Drama 3/4 class, it took a few weeks […]
Gary comes in with a box, carrying it carefully, like there’s something precious inside, a baby. His care always catches my heart. We peer into the box together; it’s from his mother….a container of pasta salad made of little multicolored spirals with olives I think, […]
Be cool. 