One of the disadvantages I’ve found in getting older is not sleeping as well as I did in my youth. Ever since childhood, I’ve had trouble sleeping during times of stress, but now I hardly ever sleep for eight hours straight. Most nights I wake up once, but some nights […]
Continue readingTag Archives: mother
On Pillboxes and Parents
One of the things I found as I went through my parents’ memorabilia recently was a little white pillbox made of stone. I had a matching blue pillbox already on my dresser. It wasn’t until I saw the white one that I remembered—my mother gave me the blue version many […]
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Not Wild About Wild Asparagus
The house we moved into when I was six and a half, in October 1962, was at the end of a block-long street. Next to us on the east was a vacant lot. That lot remained vacant until well after I no longer lived with my parents, though at some […]
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A Story I’ve Rarely Told: The A Minus Incident
I’ve mentioned before that I was one of several valedictorians of my high-school class. The six of us all had 4.0 GPAs. A 4.0 was as high as one could get in our high school—all A grades (A+, A, A-) counted as 4 points. There were no deviations for pluses […]
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On Birthdays and Memory
Sixty years ago today was my first birthday. I was too young to remember it, but there is a fuzzy photograph of me in a high chair with a cake bearing one candle in front of me. I was the oldest grandchild on my mother’s side of the family, so […]
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My Grandmother’s Jell-O
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 […]
Continue readingTHE PAPER CHASE and Other Chases
This Saturday, March 4, 2017, marks the 40th anniversary of the first date my husband and I ever went on. We’d planned another date in early January 1977. That date had been to see The Paper Chase, a movie about first-year students at Harvard Law School. We were first-year students […]
Continue readingAvoca Blankets: Evoking the Generations
In the summer of 2001, a few months before September 11, my daughter and I took a trip to Ireland. The trip was sponsored by her all-girls Catholic school. About ten mother/daughter pairs went, along with two teachers. The school had arranged several such trips over the years, but due […]
Continue readingHair Salons
I’ve always been uncomfortable in hair salons—or “beauty parlors,” as we called them when I was a little girl. My first recollection of being in a beauty parlor was when I was still a toddler visiting my grandparents in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I don’t remember when it was—whether it was […]
Continue readingOn Strings and Things
I’ve written before about what a picky eater I was. Cooked carrots were my worst nemesis, but I also hated all foods with strings. You’d be surprised how many foods have strings. Bananas, for one. Kids are supposed to like bananas, and I did like the taste. But before a […]
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