At least we weren’t home when it happened. Of course, that’s both the good news and the bad news. It’s bad news because we had to cancel most of the week-long trip we had planned. We were out of town, on our way to visit our daughter and celebrate her birthday with her, when we got the phone call telling us a tree had fallen on our house, tearing a hole in the roof. We did a U-turn on the interstate, returned our rental car, [...]
I just woke up from two unsettling dreams, the kind that made me think, after I popped awake, “Oh, thank God that was just a dream.” One of them was a variation of the standard “last day of school and l’m not ready for the big test” dream, although it was more complicated and intense than that. The other dream was a lot scarier. A Japanese Mafia-type man was forcing me to write propaganda, and threatening to kill my family if I didn’t cooperate. He [...]
I’ve just crossed a few things off my bucket list, one of which was to actually watch the movie, The Bucket List. I watched it on the plane coming home from Hawaii. A Hawaiian vacation has been on my husband’s and my bucket list for a long time, and we finally planned and booked it this year. So that was the major item we just crossed off our list. Our top priority in Hawaii was visiting Pearl Harbor and the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. It feels [...]
I was at a Georgia Writers Museum event a few nights ago, but that’s not what this story is about. It’s not about the yellow Ferrari, either, although that’s what started it all. What it’s really about is the people – small-town families, big-city couples, people of different ages, stages, and stations in life. And it’s about, as Blanche DuBois famously stated in A Streetcar Named Desire, “the kindness of strangers.” The Writers Museum event had ended, and almost everyone had left, when a couple [...]
“Wasn’t it just yesterday that it was our kids playing soccer?” That was my question to my sister whose kids are about the same ages as mine, and she texted back, “I was just thinking the same thing.” What brought up this exchange were some photos I had sent of my almost-five-year-old granddaughter during her soccer game last Monday. This is her second season in soccer, and she’s loving it. So when our son suggested we come to Minnesota sometime to watch one of her [...]
I attended an event yesterday called “Dual Visions: Art Through Different Eyes.” It’s an annual show sponsored by the Artisans Village, an art gallery and studio in the city where I live. Preparation for the event starts months ahead of time, when photographers bring in their best photos, and other artists – painters, mainly – come in to select a photo and then recreate it. The artwork is then displayed, with photos and paintings next to each other. The result is always breathtaking. Several friends [...]
There’s a fine line between cautious and paranoid, and I’m not sure which side of the line I’m on. Case in point: The phone rang a little while ago. When I answered it, the caller identified herself as being from an official and important-sounding government healthcare organization, and said she was updating my Medicare records. At that point I said, “No, thank you,” and hung up. I could hear her saying something as I was putting the phone down, but she got cut off before [...]