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For those of you not "in the know" (basically everyone outside my immediate family), today is an auspicious day. My 21st wedding anniversary. My marriage can finally drink legally. What kind of gift is appropriate for that milestone? Traditional gifts for a 21st anniversary, I learned, are brass and nickel, symbols of strength, endurance and longevity. That's sort of sweet, isn't it? Makes it feel like this marriage is a fortress. Which, in a way, I suppose it has been. It...
Sometimes I wonder whether Teri Goudie was a figment of my imagination. Surely, no one individual could embody so much love, energy and life. She was the stuff that tall tales are made of: Supermom of five, Professional Guru, Adventure Enthusiast, an absolutely tireless Seeker of Light. Do I make her sound intimidating? She wasn't. Warm and caring, Teri was a woman who simply loved her family, her work, her faith, her friends. She was buoyed up by a boundless energy that...
Today is my husband's birthday (love you, hon!). He is a year older than me, but looks younger by virtue of his hair somehow remaining as golden as it was on our wedding day, whereas mine gets regularly shellacked with dye. It's rather annoying. My weight goes up and down (mostly up, honestly), my hair started graying before we even met, and yet my Sensible Husband has not changed one bit after almost 18 years of marriage. He hasn't even lost a single (non-gray) hair on his...
Everybody knew her. She was an icon, a mainstay, a beloved figure zipping down the street in her sleek little car with the personalized license plate, "BEEJ." You'd see her chatting with her friends at Mani-Pedi. You recognized her from the checkout line in Kramer's. You may have even spoken with her, briefly and cheerfully. When she departed, you'd smile, and your step acquired a little spring, just because of this brief interaction. She was BJ Chimenti, a longtime resident...
Remember the old cliché about insanity - doing something over and over again, but expecting a different outcome? That's, frankly, kind of the way I've been behaving for the past year. Same stuff, different day, so to speak. To my distress, I've become accustomed to the monotony, my capacity for surprise dulled into complacency and cynicism. Nothing new happens. Notre Dame had an undefeated season, only to get crushed in their final game. Again. Someone with a name that...
T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock once famously stated that he had "measured out (his) life with coffee spoons." In these parlous times, however, I've found myself measuring out my life by limited streaming series. Normally, all I do is read, but it's been difficult lately. At least, it's been difficult to concentrate on the type of fiction I normally read - that is, realistic fiction about everyday people in everyday settings having everyday problems. Honestly, that kind of wri...
It seemed like 2020 just couldn't stop dishing out nasty surprises, so this summer I went rogue and took a 1,400-hundred mile road trip to Arizona with the kids and the dog. I'd not driven across country since I was maybe 12, but there I was, toting teenaged children and a stubborn, 70-pound (shedding!) Basset hound through six different states during a global pandemic. Long car trips were a summer staple for my family in the '70s and early '80s. Airplane rides were strictly f...
You see them everywhere these days. Their names are Max, Tillie, Sadie, Dixie, Leo, Rocky, Pepper. They are joyful, bounding around on lawns, their entire little bodies vibrating with the sheer excitement of being alive. Puppies! Everywhere! They are one of the silver linings of 2020's insane dystopian hell-scape. I'm counting my blessings these days. And puppies are an Absolute Good. There are a few other non-awful things this year. Biking, for one. Biking is THE sport of...
I'm going to be honest: the bloom is off the rose. I'm done with family time. What little attraction shelter-in-place once had for me is now gone. We can say how nice it is to slow things down, but all we're really doing is putting lipstick on a pig. I've pretty much run the gamut here. From the initial elation ("Finally some quality time together!") to my manic board game phase ("See? This is FUN! We're all together and we're having FUN!") to my manic baking phase (enough...
There's a funny meme making its way through social media these days, which reads: "Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined with the plague, he wrote King Lear." This is actually true of several Shakespearean works that were composed while the London theaters were closed. As if I weren't feeling unproductive enough that I'm not teaching myself to knit, brushing up on oil painting or abiding by a strict workout regime during these parlous times. There will come a...
Back in the olden days, when I taught literature, I often began with a broad discussion of what "comedy" and "tragedy" mean. Broadly speaking, classical comedy is a structure; the stories may begin with mayhem, but they end by bringing people together. Song and dance are the most frequent-used symbols of this social harmony. Comedy, strictly speaking, is not necessarily funny; it can be humorous, but that's not what "makes" a comedy a comedy. When we laugh at something on a...
I’ve never actually met two of my best friends, though our friendship has lasted over 40 years. John Irving and Stephen King have been dear companions of mine since 1979. I met each when I was 13, shortly after “Salem’s Lot” and “The World According to Garp” first shocked the literary scene. Each author is thankfully still writing today, and I await each new book like an over-the-hill teenage fangirl. Certainly, I’ve discovered dozens of authors over the years, some of whom...
In a recent community theater production, I portrayed a woman who has an affair. “Becky” loved her husband and son, endured a boring job with good humor and did not suffer in any way. Her husband, Joe, was kind, supportive and handsome. And yet Becky still strayed. This plot device became an issue for some people in the audience when the theater group conducted a post-performance Q and A. “It didn’t work for me,” one man said, “because Becky wasn’t miserable. Why would she...
“Wow, you look warm,” someone comments. This is a frequent occurrence for me. Neither dewy nor glowing, I simply appear uncomfortably hot. Which, in fact, I am. But there’s a lot more than sweat going on; allow me to discuss it. Menopause is, of course, a natural phenomenon, and it’s hardly life-threatening. It can be awful, though, and frankly becomes worse because no one wants to talk about it. We often perceive menopause as embarrassing, a painful acknowledgment of aging,...
I recently read about a study that investigated the relationship of human happiness to random social contact. Scientists found that even momentary social interaction with a stranger increases our well-being. As simple as making eye contact or smiling and nodding - whatever the interaction was - it apparently makes an actual, chemical difference in our brains. This story seems similar to a refrain we've been hearing for a while now: the idea that, for all the technological...
