I wrote recently about my 8th-grade graduation in June 1999 and my parents’ absence for that event. Their absence, and in particular my mother’s inability to drive me places, caused me further consternation that summer. I had decided to enroll in a summer school class on typing at the high […]
I wrote recently about my daughter’s 8th-grade graduation in 1999. After I wrote that post, I realized my own 8th-grade graduation was thirty years earlier—in late May or early June 1969. That’s fifty years ago—hard to believe it is half a century in the past. No lightning struck our house […]
I was perhaps programmed from early childhood to work for Hallmark Cards, which I did for 27 years. When I was growing up, my mother made a big deal of celebrating birthdays. She sent cards on every holiday and on innumerable birthdays of relatives and friends. She mailed several greeting […]
I never knew my great-grandmother Cecelia Ryan Strachan, my maternal grandmother’s mother. In fact, Cecelia died before my mother was born, so my mother never knew this grandmother either. But I can piece together some facts about Cecelia’s life, from family stories and from Sacramento newspaper articles and histories. That’s […]
In my birth family, Santa Claus brought presents to children through their high school years, but that was it. Because I was the oldest kid in the family, the parameters around childhood experiences developed as I grew up. I’m not sure when the End of Santa rule was determined—if Santa […]
This year I’ve posted several times about my husband’s and my courtship forty years ago. (See here and here and here.) Yesterday, November 26, 2017, was our fortieth wedding anniversary. As we did the year we were married, we celebrated throughout the Thanksgiving weekend. This Thursday we hosted my husband’s […]
My husband and I didn’t take too many summer vacations at my parents’ home when our kids were growing up. We saved our visits for every third Christmas. In addition, my parents visited us once or twice a year in Kansas City, and we sent our kids out to Washington […]
As a child, I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother, my Nanny Winnie. My mother, brother, and I even lived with my grandparents for a few months when I was small. So I know Nanny Winnie cooked for me a lot. But I don’t remember any signature […]
Here’s a (sort of) Christmas story I’ve never posted before. I wrote it for a writers’ group holiday party a few years ago. I hope you enjoy it. On Heffalumps, Hookers, and Humor The winter when I was four, I wasn’t supposed to know how to read, but I did. […]
I’ve mentioned spending summers with my grandparents in Pacific Grove, California. It seemed like I spent several idyllic summers there, but there really weren’t that many. Only twice did my brother and I spend long vacations with our grandparents. In 1963 we spent a month there, but our mother was […]
