Letters from Rona / Time and change / Sort by date

While scanning a dark movie theatre in search of my husband's face, I spotted the bright chrome glint of the cane that he was waving in my direction like a banner. A cane, we have lately discovered, has uses undreamed-of by those who have no call for one. It can flick light switches, press elevator buttons and open California shutters. In saucy hands it can tickle a spouse's bum. [more]

When I was a child, my memory was like a kid's closet---I could pretty much eyeball the works. Now it's a crazy jumble of milestones that no one else alive remembers (the time, to the minute, of my sister's birth in 1953) and stuff you'd think no reasonable person could remember (jingles for defunct cleaning products). [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]

It's been years since I last thought of Eleanor and Frank Milliken, who taught generations of students at my small-town high school quite a lot about their respective subjects---science in her case, Latin in his---and even more about life. [more]

I fled Middlebury College after one miserable year, convinced that I would never belong. I vowed to put the place behind me, like an ex-husband cut from a photo. I found another school in another country, where I made a life that suits me like my favourite jeans. But decades after I left Middlebury, I've realized it wasn't so bad after all. I see possibilities I couldn't--or wouldn't--see in my headstrong teens. [more]

I get peevish about crowds, mud, stinky toilets and bad food, so I've never regretted missing out on the Woodstock festival. While half a million celebrants were camping out on Yasgur's farm and getting their souls free, I was in staid Toronto, where I'd spent the summer cleaning houses inhabited by student riff-raff like me. Come to think of it, I got the stinky toilets. But I knew I'd missed something momentous. [more]

Have you ever cringed at some annoying habit of your father's? Have you wished he'd act more like normal people and less like his incorrigible self? Ann Banks has been there. With Father's Day around the corner, she looks back on the first man in her life and sees the gift that escaped her notice then. [more]

My virtual friend Marnie Woodrow is about to turn 40. Sesame Street has already reached that milestone. So who better than Marnie, an accomplished fiction writer and fan of the show from its earliest days, to reflect on how Big Bird, Elmo and the gang could expand the world of a child? [more]

We had just settled into our airy retreat at a Sarasota B&B (think antiques, hardwood and a prime view of sailboats skimming the bay) when I realized it had happened again. I had arrived somewhere lovely minus something essential. My favourite jeans, which fit me like no other jeans on earth. [more]

I try to live within my shrinking means, I really do. No more but-I-love-it purchases for me! Yet whenever I make a date with Lisa, my good intentions desert me. "Do I really need this?" cuts no ice with Lisa. Ditto "I can get it cheaper down the street" or "I think I'll just wait for the sale." Lisa is my dentist, a woman of standards. I never guessed I would log so many hours in her chair. [more]

I'm about two weeks younger than Bruce Springsteen, whose leaping, limbo-ing performance at last night's Superbowl made me almost proud to be closing in on 60. My knees aren't up to such moves, but I have it on good authority that I too am a role model for almost-sexagenarians. Which prompts me to ask: can I be a role model and still have my portraits Photoshopped, as normal female vanity requires? [more]

On October 18, 1979, when I was starting out at Flare magazine, I dictated the letter that gave a young journalist named Antonia Zerbisias her first magazine assignment. I had high hopes for Antonia, who'd just sent us one of those rare pitch letters that have editors asking, "Why has no one else discovered this writer and how fast can I connect her with my readers?" [more]