It’s taken me 10 years and three grandchildren to finally get it. A man leaves his parents and his wife becomes his focus. Sons grow up, meet girls, get married and voila, a couple is formed. And like it or not, when this happens the rules change…
Read MoreI flew to California the day before her birthday. It was a big birthday, her 16th. And I was sad leaving her.
"I already miss you," I moaned when I kissed her goodbye. Lucy looked at me and smiled, cocked one eyebrow and said, "Save it for Farley," which is Lucy teasing, Lucy pretending to like Farley (a favorite teacher) more than she likes me. It's a game she invented, something she says when she wants to get a rise out of me, her words a joke.
Read MoreIt made him sad, leaving before the ending. Not just the ending of “Lost,” a television drama he was hooked on. It made him sad to leave us, too, his family.But he knew there was more. “I think they are all in Purgatory,” he said a few weeks after “Lost” premiered. The popular weekly series, which aired on Wednesday nights…
Read MoreI keep looking at them. They arrived in a 12-by-16-inch manila envelope, addressed to my husband. So, technically they are not mine.
“I hope 73 brings you joy and happiness!” Megan, who is 11 and our son’s oldest child, wrote on a card she made for her grandfather. “For your birthday,” she continued, “I made you 73 paper cranes. Each one represents one year of your life.” My husband spreads them out on the couch. They are colorful things…
Read MoreIt’s something I think of every Christmas and I don’t know why. I am sitting on the couch in my in-laws’ living room. I don’t remember the couch, though I should. I sat on it dozens of times. I am sitting on the end, in the corner, close to the dining room. My sister-in-law, Janet, is sitting on a chair to the left of me.
Read MoreMy family teases me about how much I love Davis Farmland. I visited for the first time in 2009 and…
Read MoreI wasn't there. Only the parents had tickets. Schools aren't big enough to accommodate all the grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends who would like to be present at an eighth-grade graduation. So we get pictures and…
Read More'Tell me, Dad. Please, tell me about you." That's what I would say to my father if I could sit with him at his kitchen table one more time. I spent so many hours…
Read More'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…
Read MoreThey stopped speaking to each other decades ago, two cousins who lived within walking distance of one another, cousins who had been good friends, who had a shared history, who'd spent holidays and weekends and countless family celebrations together, who always got along until one of them couldn't forgive what the other insists…
Read MoreI took it out on him, the person I love most. We do this sometimes. It was over the silliest thing: wreath hangers that went missing.
"Did you move those wreath hangers that were in Julie's room?" he asked, poking his head into my office. "I thought I left them there." I should have stopped what I was doing right then. Got up from my chair and helped him. If a friend had lost something, if a stranger had knocked on my door and said, "I had wreath hangers tied to the Christmas tree I have on my roof and they must have come undone because they're not there now," I would have put on my shoes, grabbed my coat, and joined him in his search…
Read MoreEvery day that someone you love is not in a hospital is a good day. That's it, plain and simple. Nothing else matters. I know this. I've been taught this again and again. And yet, I am constantly forgetting, sweating the small stuff and making mountains out of molehills. A few weeks ago…
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreAh, for the good old days — just a few short years ago — when the grandkids were one, two, and three. Christmas shopping was a breeze! I couldn't make a bad choice. Everything I picked out and brought home was perfect.
"Mom, I love the matching dresses!" one daughter gushed. “I love the Frosty hat and mittens," said the other.
I love the toys! I love the books! I love everything! That’s all I heard.
I was in Grandparent Heaven. I bought a Fisher-Price zoo, a farm, even the Christmas manger. I bought extra little people. I bought a tea set and a tractor. I bought…
Read MoreMy Uncle Frank died last week. He was 82, but he looked 70. He had thick gray hair and not a wrinkle on his face and he stood straight and he smelled good and he was solid and sturdy, inside and out, and I felt that strength every time I hugged him. I believed, I hoped, he would live forever. Decades ago, when he was in his 40s, doctors gave him six months to live. They told my Aunt Lorraine and she told her children and me. But she never told him.
Read More"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?' "
Read More'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!"
Read MoreI always wanted a sister or a brother or both or somebody.
I never liked being an only child.
My mother used to tell me that I was enough. But I knew I wasn't. Her sister had six kids. She had just me. She wanted babies and I wanted siblings. There were times we both thought we would get our dream. But it didn't happen.
Read MoreA few days ago, six of us were eating and talking about Rob Portman, the US senator from Ohio who had just announced that after a lifetime of opposing gay marriage, he had changed his mind.
His son had come out, and he had given gay marriage more thought, and I was dissing him for this, not for his change of opinion but for seeing the light only because his son, not someone else's, was gay.
And that's when my friend and teacher John O'Neil made me see the light. "It takes a face to change a heart," he said quietly.
Read MoreThe pictures are ordinary. There's Lucy in front of Cinderella's castle. There's Lucy on the Dumbo ride. There's Lucy standing next to Prince Charming.
These are shots that everyone takes. "Stop. Look at me. Say 'cheese!' "
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