Five years later, and the loss of my Mom still cuts me at my inner core…when I think about her being gone, my body clenches up, my gut hurts and my soul aches. I miss her so much. And the thought of my last week with her brings me back to a painful place.
Remember When We Didn’t Have The World at our Finger Tips?
As I often do these days, I catch myself reflecting on “life when I was young” compared to that of my sons and young relatives. And as we sat at dinner one night, with my niece and nephew busily on their iPhones…researching basically any and every topic that was brought up during dinner (“Who was that British guy in that spy movie?”…”What was the name of that song in that commercial…?”), I couldn’t help think of my family’s prized Golden Book Encyclopedia set. Remember those?
Imagine, everything from A to B in a single encyclopedia.
Was the world that simple then? Or were we?
You know your life is busy when your dinner preparation consists of taking out a frost-covered package of frozen salmon wedged deep in your freezer…cracking it open, and placing the two perfectly rectangular frozen chunks (frozen together, of course) on a baking pan. I actually admit I did this last week, and let me tell you a little something about rectangular salmon… Continue reading
This year, I once again spent a good deal of time writing a special verse for my family’s annual Christmas card. I also selected a number of recent photos of my college-age kids to share as part of the card. Sending Christmas cards is a tradition that my mom first exposed me to when I was very young; I routinely sent relatives a hand-written card…not expecting anything in return, just to connect with them and wish them well. My mom had thought it was particularly important as most of my relatives lived on the other side of the US from our family. I fear this tradition is coming to an end, however. As with many things in my life, I feel like I am plodding along in a dinosaur fashion by actually sending out physical cards. Have Christmas cards now become obsoleted, too?
What happens when your child grows up – but is still in college – and brings home the perfect spouse? And you wonder…is this type of serious commitment good or bad at such a young age? Today’s technology-centric world even complicates this question further, as I recently found out…when I met the perfect daughter-in-law… Continue reading
Yesterday I put on my most powerful reading glasses and pushed my face up right next to the bathroom mirror, really close… I do this infrequently just to get a reality check on what is going on at close-range. Normally, I stand at a much safer distance – at least a few feet from the mirror – and wear a less powerful pair of glasses.
What’s the difference, you say? Continue reading
Thought I’d post a story that I wrote in honor of Veterans Day…but really, the message is important no matter what day it is…
This story was published in the San Jose Mercury News many years ago…
I had saved a letter that was over 40 years old; it was from a soldier during the Vietnam War, sent to me (a young student)…the letter was dated Dec 15, 1969…
Staff Sgt. Fred Laning had written to me in response to a letter that I had sent to “any Vietnam soldier” as part of an elementary school project. His reply had said he was in a Vietnam hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, recovering from malaria, and that he would soon be going back to the field. At that time, he had another 10 months left prior to his scheduled discharge from the Army…
Page 1 of my 40+ year old letter from Vietnam…
Read the story at this link or click on “more” for the complete text: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_24470570/commentary-soldiers-voice-from-vietnam?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com
The other day I made a photo album as a gift for a special friend. She has been a friend of mine for over 30 years; we met as next-door college dorm neighbors. I had a lot of photos to choose from, many were taken pre-digital era, of course…so had I not had the photos I could have still dug out the negatives and made prints (well, assuming there are places in the world where you can still make prints from negatives, I suppose). I think about the young people today, with their total reliance on their smart phones for photos…what will they have when they get older and want to look back at their youth? Continue reading
When I was younger I had perfect vision. Over the past few years, however, my eyes have declined…significantly…and I often wonder if in God’s infinite wisdom he planned on that…as your body becomes less than perfect as you age…as the wrinkles come and the grey hairs (and those other annoying hairs!) start to sprout…maybe poor vision is God’s way of being kind and cutting your self-esteem some slack… Continue reading
The other day my 21-year-old son was in the kitchen, and when I came downstairs an awful stench hit my nose. As I rounded the corner, he was throwing something sealed in a plastic bag into the garbage. He had the most disgusted look on his face. He almost shouted to me, “This is the worst smell I’ve ever experienced in my life, rotted Kale…nothing could be worse.”
So are all the parents out there laughing??? Oh, the smells of parenthood…WE all know that there are a LOT of things that can be worse than the smells of weeks old Kale… Continue reading
Obsoleted Soccer Mom 