What's Next?

I see Nancy often, because we've been like sisters for years. As only children, we adopted each other's parents, and eventually each other's children, in-laws, and friends. But neither of us had seen our friend Marlene since we graduated from high school. Last summer I had an opportunity to see Marlene again after all these years, and it turned out she had retired from her career as a reading specialist. Nancy and I are still teaching, but among the three schedules, we finally figured out a weekend, a location, and a place for us to meet. This weekend, at the Kenwood Inn in St. Augustine, we held our own reunion, and in three days time we worked our way through the most important parts of the past thirty-some years.                                                            Yes, that's me at the piano. We are all three widows, an...

Wednesday night I drove to my daughter's home in Savannah with a heavy heart and a few tears. I had told myself no tears, but this task called for tears, for soul searching, for heartbreak, and for grief. We'd already been through the first stages of grief for Dixie, the elderly canine member of our family. Tonight she would actually leave us, and life would be changed forever. Dixie came to live with my husband and me in March 1998, when she was an 8-week-old puppy. Because of his chronic illness, my husband could no longer work outside the home, so Herbie--who for the previous decade had claimed he never wanted another dog--decided he needed a dog. In spite of my weak protests, he chose a puppy from the Humane Society, a part Australian Shepherd, part Golden Retriever sweetheart. She was honey-colored, with darker brown hair on her back, a slight merle on her right ear, and a light blond underbelly. In her later years, her muzzle turned white, giving her a distinguished e...

Each time I read another piece about why Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, was fired, my blood pressure rises. It is perfectly clear that she was fired because her second-in-command, Dean Baquet, wanted her job and knew how to play politics well enough to get it. Abramson may have inquired about her salary, which was somewhat less than her male predecessors, but that was not enough to get her fired. Abramson is 60 years old--right in my range. Like me, she grew up in the 1950s Betty Crocker culture where women wore housedresses and heels to clean and were always there when the kids came home from school. Husband and father came home to a martini and slippers while Betty got dinner on the table. But as Jill and I were coming of age, that culture shifted. Suddenly, on top of the Vietnam protests, we had a growing feminist movement that pushed women to get an education, get "the pill," and go to work in the same offices that had long been filled with WWII ...

Only one more year. At this time next year I will be making my final leap into retirement, and I have to say that right now, I can hardly wait. I may feel differently in 12 months, but right now, my world is rosy. What will I do? May be I'll be able to write this blog more often than every three or four or six months. That's a primary goal. I want to write this blog, a newspaper column, a magazine column, a book, and a decent Christmas letter! I want to write words for my grandchildren. And that's the next thing I want to do: spend a lot of time with my three grandchildren. I may be asking for a larger cookie than I can chew, but I want to be sure that they know me--and love me--as they grow. Lily will be in elementary school, Garrett will be in pre-school, and for the first year or two, Max will be at home, so I can continue to teach him the great joy of reading. As evidenced by my freshman college students, so many youngsters grow up today with no sense of hist...

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. Are you hearing The Byrds? If your music leans to the sixties, you're hearing Roger McGuin. Usually I am, but I got hit with some cognitive dissonance  today when I went to a funeral and was reminded that the meaningful words of this song come not from The Byrds, but from Ecclesiastes, found in the Old Testament of the Bible. Ecclesiastes is one of the books that was originally written as poetry, and as a result, the words often sound like the lyrics of our lives. Looking back over the words I heard today, I felt a little bit of despair. No, a lot of despair. While I was not close to the woman who died, I found myself reliving, in the sacred words with which families mourn, the deaths of my husband, my parents, and close friends and family who have gone before me. Tears streamed down my face, giving away my feelings and telling those nearby that yes, once again, I had gone to a funeral without tissues. ...