Letters from Rona / Sort by date

Although I'm not among those who feel personally stricken by the death of Gourmet magazine after 68 years, I've been thinking these last few days about defunct magazines---the many absent friends at my mental newsstand. I was going to celebrate each one, but the first ran away with this post. [more]

Dayle must have been 15 when she opened her mother's copy of Ladies' Home Journal and found a short story called "Paper Flowers." The illustration featured two barefoot, guitar-toting girls---one who looks bold enough to hop a freight, the other more demure, as if she's only toying with rebellion. I wrote the story, which Dayle has remembered with affection for more than 40 years. [more]

My body, two weeks shy of 60, has been acting like a cranky preschooler. It's forever whining, "I don't wanna!" Or "You can't make me!" If I dare to press the point, my body lets loose with "I hate you!" All because I've asked it nicely to do what other well fed, lovingly tended, meticulously exercised bodies (including, until recently, my own) are doing without protest. [more]

The temperature called for my gray cashmere sweat pants, when I'd been hoping for a at least a few more days in pink linen capris. Worse luck, the cashmere sweats had been ravaged by moths that had nibbled and chewed from hemline to butt, not sparing the crotch. I craved a little lift to redeem the day's disappointment. Lo and behold, it appeared on a telephone pole that was swathed in the usual urban collage of posters for everything from yard sales to Japanese lessons. The headline said, "Not just another lost cat poster." [more]

William Safire, the formidably prolific author, columnist and self-described language maven who died this week in his eightieth year, was in the end a man of his word. Nearly five years ago he called his final-Op-Ed column for the New York Times "Never retire." When I first read that column one weekday morning in January, I had just begun what most people would call my retirement. But I scorned that word. [more]

In just a few weeks my sister Joyce will arrive in Toronto to promote her new novel Labor Day. This is big news for a number of reasons. She's the only person left from my family of origin. She'll arrive just in time for my birthday. She lives in California, too far away for weekend visits. And the last time she came to my city, 14 years ago this fall, we had a bitter fight that led to a years-long silence. [more]

There aren't many places left where a person can spend $39.95 and feel royally pampered without consuming any butter fat or alcohol. Turns out one of those places is three blocks away from my office. It doesn't have a name, just banners shouting, in stocky red letters, "Bargain Book Blowout!" Today I felt compelled to check it out. [more]

For days now I've been hearing a familiar old song in my head. Pounding guitar, three young voices in harmony. They're letting it rip---the hope, the exuberance, the conviction that a new age of equality was about to transform their nation and the world. A woman's voice soars above the others. "It's the hammer of justice, it's the bell of freedom!" sings Mary Travers, band mate of Peter and Paul. On Wednesday she died of leukemia, age 72. [more]

If I could be buried in P?re Lachaise Cemetery, where my husband and I once spent a drizzly afternoon communing with the famous dead of Paris, then I might find a certain allure in the prospect of my own demise. P?re Lachaise isn't one of those groomed cemeteries, every flower bed primped like a model for the runway. It's a wild, romantic place that cries out to be explored while listening to a nocturne by Chopin. [more]

It's hard to believe, as I look at my mensch of a son---husband, father, giver of extravagant gifts and practically a teetotaler---that I once thought he was coasting toward alcoholism. As the daughter of an alcoholic father, I'd noticed a thing or two that stoked my worst fear: another drunk in the family. been an Feeling cursed, I called my friend Val. [more]

On the edge of my bathtub sits a novel I'd been longing to read, by an author whose last book I pressed on everyone I know. I trusted that her latest would carry me away to a fictional world so complete, so believable in every detail that I could lose myself there and return to everyday life both refreshed and expanded by my journey down Story Road. But here I am on page 172---more than halfway along---and the book still hasn't gripped me. [more]

Hardly a week goes by when I don't hear about someone I know---perhaps a whole swath of people---being packaged, let go, laid off, terminated or otherwise shunted aside in what's presented as a cost-cutting move but may in fact be an excuse to clear the decks of those who are deemed to have served their purpose. So it's time I boned up on the etiquette of these situations. [more]