Sometimes after a big event, I take a while to put it into focus.

It’s like the old days before digital cameras. Back then, if you wanted to see the photos you shot on vacation, you had to take the film someplace to get it developed and go back later to pick up the prints. Then you had to sort them fast before anybody saw them, so you could trash the ones that made you look bad. [Read more…]

There are some things you can do, and some things you can’t.

Maybe you know that. I hope you do. It’s one of life’s lessons that I keep trying to learn.

I’ve had a lot of good teachers in my time, but no one has taught me more than my three children. I was in my 20s when they were born, yet I often felt I was growing up with them. [Read more…]

Eulogies, though well-intentioned, are highly overrated, a belated kind of praise my mother used to call “a day late and a dollar short.”

I’d much prefer my roses (or my thorns) while I’m living. Why do we wait until it’s too late to say what’s in our heart? [Read more…]

(NOTE: I’m taking this week off for vacation. The following column is an often-requested repeat.)

In the drugstore, when I got lost looking for shampoo and ended up on the “Back to School” aisle, I saw a mother with three young children picking out school supplies.

The girl wanted everything pink. The boy wanted anything “Spider-Man.” The baby wanted something to chew on. And the mother wanted a break. [Read more…]

Happiness means different things to different people.

Take my brother. Blind all his life and crippled by cerebral palsy, Joe lives alone with plenty of time to think about things he doesn’t have and to miss all the people he has loved and lost.

There are times, yes, when he does exactly that. Who doesn’t?

But Saturday night, he was as happy as happy ever gets for one simple reason: Football. [Read more…]

She was the last survivor of my grandparents’ children, the next-to-youngest of 12.

Two of the three boys died in early childhood. The oldest boy and his nine sisters lived fairly long and rather colorful lives, remaining close, more or less, for as long as they could.

I remember Aunt Polly well, as I do all my mother’s sisters, mostly because of Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ table. We gathered, not every Sunday, but often, those who could make it, driving in from near or far, here or there. [Read more…]

Trains. Can somebody tell me, please? What exactly is it about them? My grandchildren simply cannot seem to get their fill.

Randy is 3. By day, he spends hours building wooden tracks for a series of small cars that are connected by magnets and go no farther than his room.

By night, he falls fast asleep in a Thomas the Tank Engine bed. [Read more…]

Sometimes we sing together, my husband and I. Thanks, no; you do not want to hear us.

We aren’t by any standards what you’d call good. But we have found somehow between us a two-part harmony that is entirely, absolutely, our own.

What we lack in talent, we make up with good intentions. That is to say, we mean what we sing. What else is marriage for? [Read more…]

Last night I went swimming in the moonlight. I do that every chance I get. I’ve swum at night in rivers and lakes and once in the ocean, though that time I kept thinking about sharks, and I can’t say it was much fun.

Night swimming is a different sort of pleasure from swimming by day. If you can’t see what’s in front of you, or behind or below, if you don’t know what might be lurking out of sight, it requires a substantial act of faith.

Even in a swimming pool in your own backyard. Who knows what could be hiding in there? [Read more…]

I’m waiting for a phone call. If it comes while I’m writing this, I will instantly stop writing, drop my laptop like a flaming Tater Tot, and run to get the phone.

Some people might take that personally, getting dropped for a phone call. It’s almost like being put on hold by someone who hears a “call waiting” beep and says to you, “Hold on, I’ll be right back.” [Read more…]