When people ask where I’m originally from, I usually say “the Chicago area.” Or sometimes “a small town near Chicago,” which is a little more accurate. And even though I’ve spent most of my life living on the outskirts of major cities, I consider myself a small-town girl at heart. That’s why last Friday felt so good. It was a gloomy, rainy morning, and I was getting ready to head out to the doctor’s office for a routine check-up when I got a text from [...]
“The last two holiday traditions I’ll ever give up,” I told my son, “are cooking a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving, and baking Christmas cookies.” I made the comment as my son and I were talking on the phone, a few days before Thanksgiving, about our holiday plans. I had mentioned that we knew a lot of people who, instead of cooking a traditional turkey dinner, had “alternate plans.” Some were still going with a turkey dinner, but were purchasing either a ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat-up option [...]
The most poignant and powerful speech I have ever listened to was one I heard more than a decade ago, and to this day, I still remember every word of it. Of course, there were only eleven words. I’ve written about this before, but it is more relevant today than ever, and I think it warrants revisiting. It took place near the end of a weeklong “Inspirational Speakers” workshop I attended – along with about a hundred other people. At the end of the week, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]