Hugh got his driver’s license yesterday! Third time’s a charm. I will spare you the details of the long, tedious wait next to the litter-filled scrubby hillside behind a grocery store, which is where cars line up for the test drive. The wait is usually an hour, so bring entertainment. I will also spare you [...]
The term pro forma (Latin “as a matter of form”) is a term applied to practices or documents that are done as a pure formality, or seek to satisfy the minimum requirements or to conform to a convention or doctrine. I hate filling out forms. Therefore, I am quite bad at it. Back before our school [...]
Hugh has a folder labeled MORE CRAP. This might seem like an unlikely file for a carefree 16-year-old who, after all, is not paying a mortgage, balancing a family budget, handling home repairs, or cooking meals. However, it turns out that junior year is a time of huge stress, by American kid standards. A blizzard of mail has been arriving [...]
Hugh, the reluctant angel, in a long-ago church pageant. A semi-rural family in our congregation brought real sheep for the nativity scene. What all the kids remember most vividly is that the sheep were wearing Pampers – or Depends. The old oak-pewed candlelit church was beautiful, looking its most English at Christmastime. My mom took this [...]
See the headline? That’s August in Philadelphia. It’s the way you’ll hear weather described on the radio and by people in the grocery store. Around here, folks pronounce “humid” not with an aspirated H at the beginning, but as if there’s no H at all. This is also true of the way my middle son’s name is pronounced. [...]
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 [...]
