It’s about time to start Christmas shopping, if the store windows are any gauge. Have you enjoyed this blog? Then consider buying my book, Family Recipe: Sweet and saucy stories, essays, and poems about family life, for the people in your life who might also enjoy my stories. The book would […]
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Family Read Aloud Month: Building a Community of Readers in Kansas City
As I wrote recently, reading has always been very important to me. I didn’t know when I wrote my post two weeks ago about my mother reading to me that November is Family Read Aloud Month, nor that the Kansas City Public Library is working with Mayor Sly James on an initiative […]
Continue readingHaunting Book: Turn of Mind, by Alice LaPlante
The last book in my October series of haunting books is Turn of Mind, by Alice LaPlante. I would not have known about this book, except that it was a Stanford Alumni Association Book Salon choice for September 2012. When I learned Turn of Mind was the September selection, I […]
Continue readingHappy Halloween Stories
Many of my posts over the last couple of months have been dark and dreary – about haunting books and family losses. So here are a few family pictures and stories that show the zany side of Halloween. My parents in bunny costumes when they were in high school: And […]
Continue readingHaunting Book: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
I’m turning now from haunting books that deal with violence and man’s inhumanity to man on a global level (The Hunger Games trilogy, The Sandcastle Girls, and Unbroken) to a novel that haunts because of the violence and inhumanity within a family. Gone Girl, a bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn, […]
Continue readingMemories: In Song and Words
We don’t know what will suddenly bring a dormant memory to consciousness. For Proust, it was the taste of madeleines. For me, it was a hymn sung in church. “Whatsoever you do” was the song sung after communion at Mass a couple of weeks ago. “Whatsoever you do to the […]
Continue readingHaunting Book: The Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian
The second of the haunting books in my October series is The Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian. This novel is set in two time periods – the narrator lives in current times, and her grandparents met and fell in love during the Armenian Genocide in World War I. Like all […]
Continue readingMiddlebury College: Teaching Maturity Along with Liberal Arts
I’ve often said that the best thing my parents ever did for me was to send me 3,000 miles away from home. At age 17, I went from home in Washington State to Middlebury College in Vermont. And I grew up very quickly. I hadn’t liked myself very well in […]
Continue readingYou Know Your Children Are Grown When . . .
1. You find a long list of alcoholic beverages in your car in your son’s handwriting, and realize there’s nothing you can (or should) say to him, because he’s thirty years old, and he was on a liquor store run for his grandmother. 2. Your daughter tells you not to […]
Continue readingGrandpa and the Grandchildren’s Gallery
This past weekend we buried my father-in-law. He was the first grandparent my children and their cousins lost. As the family mourned, of course, we told our stories. The four cousins – my son and daughter, and my nephew and niece – were close in age, born between 1978 and […]
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