Author name: Debby Shehane

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”- or so the saying goes. We imitate what we like. Often, especially as adolescents, we copy what others do- even when they do stupid things- because we want to be included. Hence the classic comment from exasperated mothers, “Well, if Billy Bob jumped off a cliff would you do it, too?” The expected response to this rhetorical question is “no,” but most of the time, the true answer is “yes.” “Yes, I will

I write a lot about being satisfied with imperfection, which is not to say that I am content with mediocrity. It’s just that trying hard doesn’t always yield satisfactory results . Many years ago, I read a children’s book by Tomi dePaolo entitled, The Clown of God. I don’t remember the text, but I’ve always taken the title personally. I may painstakingly plan, but there is no guarantee I will not look like a buffoon in the end. Last week,

If life is a tapestry, we can only see the back side of it. I experienced the back side the other day when I took my young Australian shepherd to be groomed for the first time. I’d put it off again and again, reasoning with myself that it was an unnecessary expense and that I could do it myself,” until I finally quit lying. The truth is that I’m 71, and I can no longer kneel by the bathtub and

When I read the last item on my vacation prep list: “Spray the roses before you go,” I looked outside and said to myself, “Oh, we’re past Japanese beetle season, they’ll be ok for a week.” Then we drove off and had a marvelous time away, enjoying ocean breezes, playing board games, visiting family. When I returned to the home place, I was relieved. Everything seemed to be as I left it: the buildings were still standing and the humans

Dedicated to Dr. Joe D’Amico, the best veterinarian I’ve ever known. I haven’t seen them in a long time, but somewhere in my parents’ house is a box of old home movies, films which were loaded on reels and mounted on a Bell and Howell projector that played them with a clacking sound. I recently discovered that the clacking sound was made by something called the “Geneva mechanism,” so called because it was also found in Swiss watches.  A more

I have this friend I love a lot. She nags me about writing. “You’re so funny; you need to write more,” she says. “You need to write every day. Just sit down and do it.” She keeps at me in spite of my protests that I do write almost every day. But what I write is a lot of letters, which don’t count. She wants more for me. Good friends are like that. So here I am, writing a little

I was awake before the 6:00 a.m. alarm went off, but I was in no rush to get up. After all, the Y pool didn’t open until 7:00, and I live 15 minutes away. So, as long as I could resist the call of nature, I lingered in bed and then went to let the dogs out. As I approached the kitchen, my olfactory sense detected that smell, the one I associated with dogs straining, hunched over in the grass. For