Popular articles by Rona / Sort by date

I once thought I wanted to be a ballerina. What I really craved was the beauty of every woman who moves with assurance and grace, never mind a less-than-perfect body. An eccentric, small-town ballet teacher pointed the way. [more]

I once owned a man's silk paisley scarf in burgundy, cream and navy blue. It was the kind of thing that looks expected on a silver-haired guy in pin-stripes, but playful on a 30-something woman in jeans and a T-shirt. I wore that scarf so often that it smelled of my favourite scent and felt like an extension of my skin. One day I wore it to a movie. Halfway home, I realized that I'd left it on the seat. I rushed back but no one had seen a paisley scarf. Something plummeted inside when I knew for sure that I had lost it. [more]

For the better part of three decades, I've been shrugging off milestone birthdays. Forty: eclipsed by my mother's death two weeks earlier. Fifty: an excuse to squeeze a girlfriends' lunch between meetings. Then I turned 60---the boundary between thinking I have forever to do my growing up and accepting the fact that I don't. [more]

It started years ago as a multi-tasking move. With one brisk daily walk to work, I could turn my commute into a fitness program. No more jostling for space on crowded subway cars, no more sprints to the gym between meetings. Come to think of it, maybe I wouldn't need the gym at all (no more annual fees). What a plan! [more]

Way back before anyone I knew had died, I cringed at the very thought of funerals. I pictured dark rooms, fussy floral arrangements, ministers droning pieties about people they'd never even met. I've since discovered that a funeral can be rich in potential---for creativity, for celebration, for a deepened connection with the world. And I've developed a few rough working principles about the elements of life's most underrated ritual. [more]

Adults belittlingly call it "puppy love." But there's nothing trivial about the tenderness of children's first longings for each other, or the anguish of their first heartbreaks. That's what I learned from the five-year-old boy who named his doll Rona after me. [more]

At the bottom of my purse lies a battered leather case containing a fistful of cards from people with corner-office titles: Executive Producer of This, Senior Vice-President of That, Grand Poo-Bah of Whatever. My favourite card puts them all to shame. It belongs to a much older woman who announces her well-earned role in life with one authoritative word: "Advice." [more]

At 12 I dreamed of winning the National Spelling Bee, but I went down to ignominious defeat in my Grade 6 class. I cried all the way home and later told the sad tale on my first date with my husband. Then I got a chance to appear on Broadway as an audience volunteer in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Good-bye, orthographic angst! [more]

I was heading home from a Christmas party, sated on champagne and smoked salmon, when the car radio broke the news: 14 young women killed at l'Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal by a gunman shouting, "You're all a bunch of feminists!" While I was deciding which earrings to wear with my new silk suit, they had been separated from their male classmates and mowed down just because they were bright, ambitious women intent on careers in engineering. [more]

My mother died nearly 13 years ago, but for a fleeting second recently I could have sworn I saw her striding by---a gray-haired woman in a chiffon scarf, a billowing black raincoat and her signature touch, a broad-brimmed hat worn at just the right angle. It was my own reflection, proof that after a lifetime of doing things my way (which once included going bare-headed in heat waves and blizzards), I'm not all that different from my mother. [more]

This story, written when I was 15, was published in Ladies' Home Journal in October, 1965, where it kept company with "What Americans Expect from Robert Kennedy." A mortifying sidebar identified me as a "prodigy" who "sang in seven languages at a year and a half and, at three, composed what her mother...calls 'shapely little narratives.' The story was later cited in the annual Best Short Stories anthology edited by Martha Foley. [more]

My friends and I used to seethe when grizzled tradesmen called us "dear" and our husbands "Mr. So-and-so." We vowed our kids' generation would banish sexism once and for all. Too bad we didn't take a stand against ageism. Now that we're old enough to pay for attentive service, we're getting "dears," "sweeties" and "young ladies" from people young enough to be our children. This kind of faux endearment has a name: elderspeak. And the time to stop it is now. [more]