Still in Love with Dollhouse after All These Years

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Still in Love with Dollhouse after All These Years

All the things I've wanted. Saved for. Had to have. Bought. Loved in my life. Then, one day, abandoned. That's what happens with things. Ginny dolls. Cabbage Patch dolls. Elsa and Anna. All history now, passion turned to indifference, generation after generation after generation.

My first real purchase? I was 12. It was summer. I'd baby-sat for an entire week, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, three kids. I'd earned…

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Learning to Look a Little Deeper to Discover a True Treasure

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Learning to Look a Little Deeper to Discover a True Treasure

'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…

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From My Best Friend, for My Mother, a 'Dorothy' Tree

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From My Best Friend, for My Mother, a 'Dorothy' Tree

I 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…

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If only there were a way to bottle a child's pure glee

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If only there were a way to bottle a child's pure glee

I am looking at my grandson Adam's picture as I write this. His mother snapped it with her iPhone, an old iPhone so the picture is pixelated and a little out of focus. Still, you can see the joy in his face, a child's joy; unmasked is the word, I think. But it's the wrong word because Adam is only 11 and has nothing yet to hide…

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Making Paragon Park memories for the future

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Making Paragon Park memories for the future

My father took pictures of everything. I have dozens of black-and-white prints labeled "European Campaign — General Eisenhower 1942-1945," and hundreds of slides he took later, after the war, after I was born, which he showed for years in our parlor on a big white sheet, until one day when he bought a real screen. He gave me his photos long before he died. I scanned them into my computer and it's where they live now, at my fingertips, pictures of people and places long, long gone. But just a few clicks, and they fill up my screen.

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Rewinding to a friendship a lifetime ago

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I can't attend his funeral. I'll be out of town, 3,000 miles away. It doesn't matter, I suppose. The truth is, I hardly knew him.

And yet I knew him once. We were children together. We lived in the same Randolph neighborhood, went to the same church, waited at the same bus stop every morning and sat under the same roof, though not always in the same classroom, for four long years, because the years are long when you're 7 and 8 and 9 and 10.

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In music and lyrics, a link from her childhood to theirs

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"Tammy" was the favorite song of my best friend, Rosemary, and me. But after singing it at the Policeman's Ball in 1957, I set it aside for over 40 years. Then one night, it reappeared out of the blue when I couldn't get my granddaughter to sleep.

They fall asleep to "Tammy." It's their lullaby of choice.

"Want me to sing you a song?" I ask whenever they are mine for a night and every one of them, every time, says, "Yes, Mimi. Will you sing 'Tammy?' "

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On first school day, a flood of memories

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'It's one of those days you talk about when they are babies. . . . "She will be in 1st grade when he is in 4th.' "

This is what my daughter Julie wrote on her Facebook page last week under the pictures of her children, Adam and Charlotte, posing in their front yard on the first day of school.

Facebook was full of pictures of big and little kids shyly grinning and of moms and dads writing "Look who's excited to start her first day of school!" and "Yes, that is a tie!" and "Where does it go? Feeling old!"

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Oh, to be a kid once again in the summer

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Oh, to be a kid once again in the summer

Kids have no lists. No calendars. No scraps of paper with scribbled ­reminders to pay bills, get dental floss. No baby sitters to call. No appointments to keep. No shopping to do, no places to go and things to buy. Spreadsheets? Quicken? "Where's the coupon for ­Jiffy Lube?" and "Has anyone seen the laundry receipt?" "Thank you for contacting me, but I'm away on vacation and will not be checking my e-mail. If you need immediate assistance, please contact. . . All these things are in the future.

Childhood is a paper boat borne along by a lazy breeze on a summer day.

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Once Again, The Best Tree Ever

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n the beginning, the trees were rag-tag things, missing more limbs than they had. Even Charlie Brown wouldn't have bothered with them.

But my father always did. He'd come home on a December night, a man with a mission, dragging in a long, skinny sapling, branches awry, half its needles frozen, the other half gone. "It's ugly," my mother and I would say. "It's a work in progress," he'd announce, then go get…

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Silver baby fork and spoon set more than just utensils

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All I did was pull open a kitchen drawer to get a butter knife.

I'd been reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, enjoying the early morning quiet. The crumbs in the divider must have been there for weeks. But I hadn't noticed them before. Now they were all I could see.

So I abandoned the paper, dumped all the silverware in the sink, got out the Comet, and began scrubbing.

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Seeing the young person in the old

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Seeing the young person in the old

“Once upon a time, I was a little girl just like you,'' I tell my 3-year-old granddaughter.

And she squinches up her nose and shakes her head and says, ``No, you weren't.''

I show her pictures of me when I was 2 and 5 and 8. I say, ``See. I had hair just like yours.'' I show her my fourth-grade school picture. ``Look. Here I am.'' I call my childhood friend Rosemary and say, ``Rose? Talk to Charlotte. Tell her how old we were when we met.'' And Rose tells her that we were 7 and in second grade.

But Charlotte remains unconvinced.

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No point in wishing life away

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No point in wishing life away

Where did June go? And May? And why does February plod and March stall, while spring and summer fly by? It's July Fourth - the quintessential summer holiday - and I still have winter coats hanging in the front hall closet. I haven't planted any annuals yet. Or weeded my garden. My window boxes are empty. There's not a single flower on my deck. My marigolds are seeds in packages. The lawn furniture remains in the shed. And I haven't even begun to make a summer reading list.

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