That’s my beautiful niece Logan, age 13, who grabbed every spare minute during the family reunion to read Memoirs of a Geisha. She even sat in the car while everyone else went on a quick shopping trip so she could finish it. Logan highly recommends this book, as does my dad. And speaking of being [...]
Little kids run all the time. It’s their preferred pace. Around age 12, one study said, kids start slowing down. The upside? They help carry stuff! Here are the same two kids, Hugh and his godsister Hollis, along the same shoreline. They used to be so short. Now they’re so tall. There is nothing like time [...]
For today’s Friday News Flash, I considered writing about the 69 year old Spanish woman who moved heaven and earth to conceive at age 66, only to die when her twins were two years old. But as news stories go, that one is just too depressing and screwed-up to even get into. Instead, I picked this amazing and uplifting [...]
Today’s headline is my favorite palindrome. As a Philadelphia-area-resident who has a son who hates bananas, it resonates. One great feature of family reunions is that you find other people with the same likes/dislikes as you. Banana-hating has been found on the 18th chromosome of our DNA. It is expressed most clearly in the forms of my [...]
Hey MOBsters, it’s been so much fun to read your comments on Friday’s post. Thank you for sharing memories and confessions of your mental and physical age. As you know, I’m 51, which puts me right between the two people in this photo. That’s newborn Ian, 6 weeks, and my beloved Grandma Grace, 99. They represented the [...]
Oprah should have sent cameras to my family reunion in Colorado over the 4th of July. The middle generation was re-united with two cousins we have not seen for literally 50 years. Mark and Bob lived with their mom following her divorce from our uncle. When their mother re-married, they were adopted by their stepfather. Although [...]
It’s good to occasionally get away from your regular life and go someplace completely different. It’s even better if a family reunion is going on in a beautiful place, because your brother Tom and his wife Wendy had the excellent good sense to move to Durango, Colorado and invite everyone to come on over. Just [...]
When the boys were little and I had to take them to horrible movies like Pokemon 3, smuggling a book and a flashlight into the theatre was the only thing that saved my sanity. Chris drew the short straw on the Thomas the Tank Engine movie, as I recall. I still remember some of the brilliantly scripted moments [...]
The hydrangea post the other day inspired some readers, here and on Facebook, to throw out their own nominations for what makes someone “old,” if not having a hydrangea bush or two in the yard. Arlene: Decorating with or crocheting doilies Laila: Tending African violets and having crewelwork on the back of your sofa Kathy: Growing camelias [...]
I’m feeling old. Partly because people exactly my age keep turning up dead in their beds (see: Michael Jackson, Billy Mays). Partly because my thumbs hurt a lot and I have to wonder, it is the rheumatiz? But mostly I feel old because I love hydrangeas, and I have lots of them dotting my garden. As any mid-century-American [...]
