A fragment of a grocery shopping list… this is probably about 25-30 years old. It’s her handwriting. The address label is her mother’s… also about 25-30 years old. I keep these fragments tucked into a drawer… too insignificant for a page in scrapbook, or it’s own “sleeve” in a photo album, but because her handwriting [...]
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“Do you miss your friend?” “Yeah. We made up a walk together.” He jumped down on the floor, laid on his back, and pulled himself up like a backwards crab and started to walk. My sons are in a classroom where 1st and 2nd graders are together — so the kids get a chance to [...]
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We studied Friday’s cat scan of my son’s broken leg, clipped with a clothes pin to our floor lamp, all weekend. The cat scan reveals that the fracture line in the tibia runs straight down and splits the ankle.When the orthopedist delivered the news Friday, on my birthday, I found myself grasping the examining table, [...]
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Kids do grow up too fast — and something needs to be done about it. It’s stressful. It’s sad. And it’s just downright jarring to my sensibilities to walk into a room to see kids grow long legs and mature faces practically overnight. OK… maybe it was three years, or five years — but it [...]
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The spray-painted black mortarboards that sit atop the faces that carry the sometimes-toothless smiles, sun-kissed cheeks and bare-skinned knees appear, at first, to be a silly parody of the real ceremony happening elsewhere in auditoriums across the country. That would be the real graduation where the participant’s knees are covered with black gowns that carry [...]
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If I was a medieval alchemist, and you came to me with a bagful of sorrow, I’d fry you leaves of sage. You’d eat. I’d wait for the clearing to come. In that space, sage could do its work and allow your sorrow to transform into something else. Something shinny and new. This is your [...]
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I started to enter the times on our family calendar of the three graduations I will attend on June 9th, but I got stuck on the first one – that kindergarten one. He’ll stand at the front of the class, wearing his black cardboard mortarboard, and I’ll remember the intimate lunches we shared of poached [...]
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I sent an email off to my Dad today to share some crushing sad news that makes me just want to throw in the towel, cry uncle, and say, I’ve had enough. His response: Well I guess that just made a gloomy day worse. I am so sorry. I know that doesn’t do much to [...]
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Before I write my column for the newspaper, I give myself a “heads up” that I need an idea. Then, I start the laundry, clean the bathrooms, cook dinner and do yoga while I wait for the inspiration. I expect the idea to come barreling in — hitting me over the head with a ton [...]
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