the beauty of an ordinary life
An actual family dinner conversation: SON: [to MOM] “So, why’d you move all that stuff and mess up the big room?” MOM: “I need more space for my art and sewing and things. Maybe I’ll have people over, teach a class; who knows? I might even teach you to sew, so you can sew a…
“I know you said you don’t want any of this, but I think you’ll actually want one thing,” he said, dropping some folded papers on the kitchen table.
It was a letter, five pages in long-hand, from my mother to my father, a few months before they married. When we had gathered the belongings from my mother’s garage years ago, the letter must have slipped from a box into an adjacent pile.
Now here we are at summer’s sun-stand, the long solstice (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) of June, fruit of a cycle born six months ago at the onset of winter. It’s still an anything-can-happen era with a why-the-hell-not vibe. It’s the time to ask, again: If not now, then when?
In the back of her closet, behind the clothes, next to the dresser, were two shoe boxes, each of which held a pair of peau de soie-wrapped stilettos, one pair cream, the other bright kelly green, both size 7 AAAA. I’m certain about the cream colored pair, which were her wedding shoes. I’m less sure…
I am wearing a set of devices that I affectionately, without a trace of affection, call SPANX for teeth. If you are a man then this reference is possibly lost on you, though I suspect if you are one of the regulars here then you are the sort of man who has a woman friend…
It is Labor Day weekend, summer’s last hurrah. It’s the weekend many parents, mostly mothers, heave a sigh of relief. We made it. As Motherlode’s KJ Dell’Antonia wrote back in June, the 104 days of summer vacation are a nightmare for working parents, particularly those with no extended family willing or able to help. It’s…
From the moment we master basic locomotive skills, we humans begin to pursue our independence and separate from our parents. It is as natural and ordinary and miraculous a process as any other in the animal kingdom – which is not to say that it is easy, for either child or parent. No matter how…
What began with The Shining, released on Memorial Day weekend, ended, a week after Labor Day, with Ordinary People. In between were Caddyshack, The Blue Lagoon, Airplane!, Brubaker, Urban Cowboy and He Knows You’re Alone. It was the summer of Luke and Laura, of Funkytown, Magic and Sailing. The United States led a 65-country boycott…
