Grandparenting
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Rose Madeline Mula: If You Can’t Stand the Heat
Rose Madeline Mula Writes: “It was with considerable trepidation, therefore, that I entered the kitchen of my hostess, the legendary actress, Joan Fontaine, one long-ago Thanksgiving morning, to offer my assistance. Acting was not Miss Fontaine’s only talent. Not by a long shot. She was also a hole-in-one golfer, a prize-winning fisherwoman, a hot air…
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An Undocumented Childhood by Rose Madeline Mula
Rose Mula Writes: Some people never leave home without their American Express card; I never leave home without a camera. Digitized pictures of the twenty-five countries and forty-plus states of America that I’ve visited since my first tour of exotic New Hampshire constantly flash on my computer monitors and digital frames throughout my home, helping…
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Julia Sneden Wrote: Love Your Library
Julia Sneden Wrote: My mind’s eye can still see the face of the Children’s Librarian, although I have long since forgotten her name. We will be wise to continue to back up our knowledge of history and literature and art and science with hard copy. She kept up with my reading level, suggesting writers and…
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Julia Sneden Wrote: If The Shoe Fits … You Can Bet It’s Not Fashionable
Julia Sneden Wrote: My mother was a mini Imelda Marcos. She kept upwards of 40 pairs of shoes well into her 80’s, and was crushed when she had to give up high heels following a heart attack at the age of 89. Her sole criterion in buying shoes was style, not comfort, and she was…
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Joan L.Cannon Wrote: A Family Inheritance: More Than ‘Things’ … Emblems of Our Lives
Joan Cannon wrote: As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it’s psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material. Perhaps the most obvious example is a…
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Julia Sneden Wrote: Old Dogs, New Tricks
Julia Sneden wrote: At the age of 37, I started a new career as a kindergarten teacher. My first day on the job, the lead teacher, who was in her 70’s and scared me every bit as much as she scared the children, watched me writing a note. “You’ll have to change the way you…
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Joan Cannon Writes: Finding the Right Excuse; Committing Words to Paper Because …
Joan Cannon Writes: Think of the poets and novelists and playwrights whose words sink into the consciousness of thousands and even millions and remain there, as emblems, guides, beacons of hope or warnings of disasters, and the excuse (as if one is needed) presents itself. Maybe there’s information or a revelation for some unknown viewer…
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Joan Cannon Asked: What is a Book Club? An Old-Fashioned Book Report? A Program Given By an Author? What Is the Accepted Practice?
Joan L. Cannnon wrote: A year or so ago, I was invited to attend a tea given by the combined membership of all the book clubs in the town where I now live. A presentation was scheduled for the proprietor of the much-loved local independent book store cum gift shop. She is a legend in…
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Eccentric Enthusiasts from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
A witness to her planting method for Lilium giganteum (now called Cardiocrinum giganteum) bulbs once deemed [Gertrude] Jekyll a sorceress. On that day, having dug a sizable hole and added some leaf mold and sand, the famed gardener also tossed in a freshly killed rabbit. Then she counseled, “Now, always seat the bulbs clockwise,” a…
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Friendship
We do both enjoy travel and have taken many trips together. I prefer a fixed itinerary. Not Sally, of course. She abhors being tied to a particular schedule. And while I much prefer to fly to a destination more than a few hundred miles away, Sally would rather drive — again, the schedule phobia, and…
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Whether and When Seniors Should Receive Swine Flu Vaccine
People 65 and older are the least likely to be infected with 2009 H1N1 flu, but, if they become infected, they are more likely than people in some other groups to develop serious complications from their illness. That is why people 65 years and older are prioritized for treatment with antiviral drugs this season if…
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Obama’s War: A Frontline Rough Cut Preview
“We’ve been following one battalion there. Shortly before they began their current operation in Helmand province, one Marine wrote a letter to his grandmother. Lance Corporal Charles Sharp wrote that soon he’d be fighting in a mission his grandchildren would learn about in history class. Well, just days after he mailed that letter, Sharp died…
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From Polanski to Big Love; Hollywood’s Twisted View of Child Sex Abuse
“When it comes to child sex abuse, the world is divided into two groups: the adults who are taking action to end this scourge, and the adults who protect the abusers. Sadly, many of the power players of Hollywood — with all of its money, power, and access to the media – fall into the…
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Shopping, A Halloween Countdown Calendar
“Open the paper gates of the cemetery and step into a darkly droll world of stylish and sinister characters strolling the moonlit grounds of a graveyard. For each day in October, open a die-cut window and read a story about this macabre cast of the recently deceased.”
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Baghdad ER – Revisited
“The nature of the combat in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) in 2006 and 2007 made working at the CSH a fairly dangerous endeavor. Historically, a CSH was a relatively safe place to serve, but this tour was different. We had our first casualty after being in Baghdad for just a few days.”
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The Use of Mobile Devices by Motorists
The National Safety Council, a national nonprofit that focuses on traffic and workplace safety and emergency preparedness, now calls for a ban on the use of all cell phones and other messaging devices while driving.
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Madeleine Albright’s Pins on Exhibit
“The goat is the gift of an admiral at Annapolis, who sent it to her after he read accounts that the brutal Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic had apparently named one of his goats after the then U.N. ambassador. In 1994, when reports circulated in the Iraqi press calling Albright a serpent, she decided to…
