Letters from Rona / Between friends / Sort by date

I'd been meaning to call her for weeks, if not months. Perhaps she'd been meaning to call me, too. It had been more than 35 years since we talked on the phone every day with that craving for connection known only to teenage best friends. In those days I could tie up the family phone for hours--or until my parents finally lost patience--because nothing mattered more than consoling Anne through her latest crisis of the heart. As adult women, we mostly connected through Facebook. Then Facebook informed me that her marriage was over. [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]

I didn't admit to an attack of nerves the week before my school reunion. But there had to be a reason why I lay awake night after night, my brain on high alert. [more]

Once upon a time, when Expo 67 was welcoming the world and Sergeant Pepper topped the charts, I willingly answered to a nickname. This would amaze everyone who's been met with a frosty stare for addressing me as anything other than Rona. To be honest, I'm amazed myself, but only because I'd forgotten that a high school friend used to call me...oh, do I dare tell you? [more]

"I love the word 'affair'," said a friend who's had many more illicit escapades than I will ever know. She had just made her way, with a walker and great deliberation, to the favourite armchair where she sat draped in white terrycloth. She looked through me as if to the scene of some long-ago tryst. Then she looked straight at me with a smile that was equal parts mischief and maternal concern. "You should have an affair," she announced. [more]

Sometime in her 50s my mother happened on a dusty box of Tampax that she'd tucked under the bathroom sink God knows when and thought to herself with no small degree of puzzlement, "Hmm, it's been eons since I had any call for one of those." If there's a gene for a menopause from heaven, the kind that tiptoes in unnoticed, she didn't pass it on to me. Yet in midlife I too lost a part of my psychic self while thinking of more important things. I used to be one of those people who are always fretting over some imagined illness or other. I figured I was stuck with the hypochondria habit that had dogged my steps like a persistent panhandler with a fake hard-luck story. Then one day I turned around and it had vanished. [more]

I've come to think the art of living, especially in old age, depends on rewarding the people who can meet your accelerating needs. It's often possible to bully or needle others into helping you out, but at a huge personal cost. Who wants to spend time with a whiner who can't stop lamenting her loneliness? [more]

Early on in my friendship with Sarah, she advised me not to phone her. I was perfectly welcome to ring; I just shouldn't expect a voice-to-voice conversation. Susannah doesn't like to be caught off guard. She wants to know what's on someone's mind before she frames her reply. She loves the freedom e-mail gives her to be funny and warm when she's in the mood connection. No one writes a more expressive e-mail message than Sarah. But as she told me at our first girlfriends' dinner, she is simply "not a phone person." [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]

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]

When I was a teenage misfit in a small New Hampshire town with no purveyors of guitars, French magazines or rawhide sandals like the ones worn by Biblical shepherds, I would save my allowance for escapes to the centre of all things hip and freewheeling. With my soul mate Anne, I would ride the dawn bus to Boston and jump on the subway for Harvard Square. [more]

Last month I shared what life and loss have taught me about the writing of condolence notes. That post already ranks with the most popular I've written since this site began. So here I am with an open file folder of the letters that sustained me after my mother's death. I still reread my favourites. What makes them so consoling? See for yourself. [more]