Letters from Rona / Sort by date

When I was growing up in the days of crinolines and penny loafers, every girl learned three things about breasts. They were not a fitting subject for polite conversation. They drove men wild with desire (hence their prominent display in the kind of magazine not found on anyone's coffee table). They made you a woman, which meant that if you lost a breast to a certain unmentionable disease, you were not a woman anymore. We all heard stories about women who would not show a breast lump to their doctor until cancer had them in a death grip. One woman changed that--former First Lady Betty Ford, who died yesterday at 93. [more]

He was black, I was white. It was 1965 and more than half the states in the union still had laws on the books against inter-racial marriage. Not quite 16, I thought I could rise above the temper of those times. [more]

Every child needs a wise adult friend who knows how to listen--and when to speak up. I learned that a lifetime ago, hanging out in the pokiest of basement apartments with my mother's straight-talking tenant. [more]

The only interactive exhibit at Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta has no touch screen, flashing lights or sound effects. It sits atop a humble wooden desk, as chunky as my grandmother's lace-up oxfords and as solid as her corseted bosom. Its button-size keys demand a firm touch, and its ribbon could use a change. On a manual typewriter like this one, Atlanta's most celebrated daughter composed the 1000-plus pages of Gone With the Wind. When I stopped by one recent Friday morning, the machine had captivated two teenage girls who were pondering the mysteries of this thing called a carriage. A sign on the wall explained how to push it. [more]

My mother never managed to teach me how to roll out pie crust or sew in a zipper, but thanks to her I can spot the bargains at a post-Christmas sale and beat the crowd to the only 80-percent-off sweater in a certain shade of pink---one that shows up in stores about as often as a cockatoo lands in your back yard. She knew just the right place to train me---Filene's legendary basement. [more]

For more than a year I'd been reading news stories on the so-called "bed bug crisis" that had Torontonians pitching their mattresses, bagging their clothes, avoiding their friends and scratching an omnipresent, crazy-making itch. I'd dismissed those reports as hysterical distractions from real urban crises. Then, one week before moving day, my cleaning lady squished a tiny brown bug that had been lurking in our sheets. Out spurted blood. Ours. [more]

When I joined a dance class at my gym, I worried about messing up. At least no one could see me tripping over my feet---no one, that is, except my sisters in klutziness (not a Ginger Rogers in the bunch). Then the other day we attracted an audience: three cleaning ladies who had downed their squeegee bottles to watch us strut our stuff. [more]

Among the unsung rewards of growing older is the confidence to voice my displeasure--emphatically, insistently and sometimes loudly enough to turn heads---when my legitimate needs go ignored by those whose job it is to serve their customers. [more]

I just ran into a 50-something colleague, normally a take-charge sort, who confessed to soul-destroying frazzlement: emotional meltdowns, scrambled thoughts, night sweats that ravaged her sleep. She was tempted to start taking hormones, but had been spooked by another onslaught of scare-mongering headlines. This woman has vanquished severe depression that might come galloping back if she lets herself get run down. "Take the pills!" I said. "I've been on them for 15 years and when I'm not on them, you wouldn't want to know me." [more]

"I just read your article on downsizing," said my friend Karen. "Are you loving that funky loft?" Funny she should ask. Because you see, we're upsizing now. Or, as my husband prefers to put it, "semi-re-upsizing." [more]

It's been 199 years since a now-obscure English novelist, Fanny Burney, endured a harrowing mastectomy, performed in her own bedroom with nothing but a wine cordial to blunt the pain. Nine months passed before she could speak of the surgery to anyone; the thought of it made her ill. Then she summoned the courage to describe---and relive---the whole ordeal in a letter to her sister that captures not only the forgotten suffering of countless generations of women but the power of memoir to console even as it terrifies. What Fanny had to face has more in common with slasher movies than with modern surgery, yet through it all she remained absolutely, unshakeably herself. [more]

My son was in his mid-20s, with a desirable job and a couple of direct reports, when he packed his briefcase for his first business trip and realized as the limo pulled up at our door that something essential might be missing. If he'd been living in his own place and not in the bedroom to ours, I would not have heard the signs of trouble: first much pacing and slamming of drawers, then the sheepish question "Mom, do I need a passport to fly to the U.S.?" [more]