Letters from Rona / Sort by date

The last time anyone read to me, I might have been leaning on my elbows at a scratched wooden desk, waiting for Mrs. Sawyer to begin another chapter of Beezus and Ramona. A hush descended on 30-odd fractious kids like a snowfall worthy of a Christmas card. At story time Kevin Donahue forgot to call me "Doughnut." I forgot about my struggle with long division. The whole class forgot about who'd been invited to the birthday party of the hour and who'd been left off the list. One question united us all: what sort of mischief would those Quimby sisters make next? [more]

The last time I tasted Ben & Jerry's, it came in a tub from my local supermarket and tasted of a corporate freezer. But once upon a time it was dessert nirvana. And the only place you could buy it was a converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont, where my husband and I launched an ice cream odyssey that continues to this day. [more]

Back in the prime of Father Knows Best, when Betty Crocker ruled the kitchen book shelf and TV ads extolled the health-giving properties of Wonder Bread, I thought the last word in ice cream could be had at Howard Johnson's in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. HoJo's was a thriving chain then, renowned both for the orange roofs of its faux colonial restaurants and for 28 flavours of ice cream served with a special scoop, so that your treat perched precariously atop its cone like an outsize tutu on a pear-shaped ballerina. [more]

I hadn't planned on returning this August to the home town I couldn't wait to leave. It seemed I had more urgent things to do than schlep by plane and bus to Durham, New Hampshire, where a gaggle of far-flung alumni from my high school---many of them strangers to each other and just about all them strangers to me---were convening to honour Eleanor and Frank Milliken, two wise and generous-hearted teachers who gave the best part of their careers to our collective intellectual development. [more]

Once upon a time, in the grip of a fever, I dreamed God spoke to me. Man, what a way with words! Imagine Shakespeare, Donne and all the other great poets from a bygone age, piped through an organ the size of Mount Everest. I awoke in a rapture, groping for a pen. But all I could remember was this: whatever God had said, he said it in iambic pentameter. Yes, the God of my dream was male---a mighty patriarch with a flowing white beard and the poetic chops to get the heavens, the earth and the oceans doing the boogaloo. [more]

Among the kids in my high school it was generally agreed that a certain English teacher made a fitting target for the casual cruelty that so often passes for teenage humour. We made fun of her hair, a frizzy cloud of indeterminate colour. We rolled our eyes at her makeup, a clownish blob of rouge on each thickly powdered cheek and a slash of too-bright lipstick that she seemed to have applied in the dark. We wondered where on earth she got those tubular knit dresses she favoured---and was known to put on backwards, as if she'd been distracted mid-toilette by an insight into Hamlet that she couldn't wait to share with her equally distractible students, dreaming of love, sex and beer. What defied mockery was our teacher's love for her subject and for us. [more]

Once upon a time, many haircuts and compacts ago, I wanted nothing more than beauty. These days what I'm after is wisdom. I don't know of any blow dry for the mind, any light-reflecting product to cover blemishes of the soul. But illuminating thoughts are out there for the taking---as you'll see from these gems I found while reading. While I can't claim they've made me any wiser, they've affirmed my faith in the existence of wisdom. And that's a pretty good start. [more]

I expected to remember Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent who retired this week at 89 after holding presidents to account for close to half a century, as a model for my own old age---scrappy, tenacious and relentlessly committed to her craft. "I think I'll work all my life," she once said. "When you're having fun, why stop having fun?" Why, indeed. [more]

When I first ventured onto Twitter at the urging of more cyber-savvy friends, I thought I'd died and gone to that accursed nether region of hell that is politely known as high school. Then I found some good reasons to stick around. [more]

After my mother died, I found at the bottom of a closet the scuffed, leather walking shoes in which, just the previous summer, she had walked six miles a day. They lay where she had kicked them after an ordinary ramble that turned out to be her last. Dusty laces trailing, they curled against each other like sleeping puppies that might wake at any minute and hurl themselves at the door in an ecstasy of eagerness. They still held the shape of her toes. [more]

Less than two hours from now I will be lying on an instrument of exquisite torture with my quivering legs upraised in a crude approximation of straightness, my arms beating like the wings of a mangled bird and my lower abs screaming for mercy. At the very thought of this posture I can feel the sweat between my thighs (which strain for tightness but never achieve it) and a wicked cramp in my right foot (which is supposed to point but instead flops about like a flag of surrender). I sometimes doubt if I'll ever get the hang of Pilates. But so help me, I persist. [more]

On my way to buy yogurt and cold cuts at Metro, I happened on a celebration of the human urge to connect---several hundred deaf people of all ages, ethnicities and style sensibilities, engaged in a gabfest so consumingly joyous, I couldn't quite suppress a stab of envy. They were investing not just flying fingers but all four limbs in the art of conversation. They punctuated anecdotes with a repertoire of expressions that captured every note on the emotional scale. Each one of these people seemed fully absorbed in the exchange at hand---no looking over a companion's shoulder to check out more promising social options. So I felt free to amble among them and stare in an invisible, contemplative way that felt more respectful than rude. [more]