Life Stories

“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

When I was thirteen, we moved to a rural neighborhood where the front yards were small forests and the driveways a mile long. If I went for a walk, I always had a posse of friendly dogs following me. They didn’t know where I was going; they just wanted to share the adventure. We’d wind our way through tick and snake filled woods and explore the Cahaba River, watching water ripple over rocks. At one point, I even had a

I’ve had a hard time adjusting to Midwest living. People up here have laughed at me for twenty years because I’ve never acclimated to the cold. The problem is they are satisfied with an anemic version of heat —any temperature higher than 800 practically gives them the vapors, and where I’m from, that’s fall weather. The first winter I lived through in Cincinnati was rough.  Snow was deep on the ground by Thanksgiving, and none of us had winter boots.

Last summer, when I visited the beach, I decided to venture into the ocean and experience the waves after years of wading along the shore. It was a mental aberration, a failure to acknowledge my current physical status: bad feet, hips and knees, poor balance and atrophied muscles. Instead, deceptive memory took me back to a more youthful, capable self. A self who didn’t make grunting noises when she got out of bed. “How hard can it be,” I thought,

My freshly mowed lawn looked like a bald head fringed with straggly green hairs, and I spent two hours pulling, poisoning, and whacking weeds. I quit when the weed-trimmer ran out of cord, and hobbled inside, collapsing on the couch, naively hoping to take a nap. But of course, tout de suite, bored grandchildren arrived with a request. They wanted to explore the under-stair storage space. Although there is nothing special about that spot, the entrance is covered by bookcases

Last month we celebrated Chinese New Year: 2017, the year of the rooster. Needless to say, with my Irish/Italian heritage, it was a first for me. St. Patrick’s Day —sure. Columbus Day—sometimes. But Chinese New Year! Blame it on my affection for Asian cuisine, my lovely daughter-in-law, and a desperate need for color during a hard, dreary winter month. Chinese recipes are notorious for including a list of esoteric ingredients as long as your arm, and the prep time is e-tern-al: chopping,