A Child’s View of God

This post is a little bit of a departure for me. You can blame my grandchildren for that. Last month we spent a few days in Colorado, first staying with the kids while Christian and Amy had a little adult time in Las Vegas, and later spending some quality time with the whole family.

Zoe is almost three and is in the process of learning to control her bodily functions and to control her parents with her performance or lack of performance. She is also learning to set boundaries

What Are Your Limits?

As a writer of memoir and creative non-fiction, I write about myself and those around me. I wrote in a previous post about the danger of knowing a writer because you might see yourself in print. It was written in a lighthearted voice, but it’s something that has troubled me from the time I started writing. Following is paragraph from my book recounting the conflict I felt about sharing a rather delicate incident with my Dad.

Feeling the Holiday Spirit

Yesterday one of my Facebook friends posted this question: Am I the only one not feeling the holiday spirit? I left a witty, social network kind of reply, but I’ve been thinking about it since then. Am I feeing the holiday spirit? My first question is which holiday are we talking about? My next question is what does the holiday spirit feel like?

My Dad, the Troublemaker

Dad was always a by-the-book kind of guy. As far as I know, he never had so much as a parking ticket, and the worst expletive I ever heard him say was good honk. That’s why I was surprised when he and Mom moved into assisted living and he started causing trouble.

I’m Famous

Yes, in my own little something-short-of-a-large-fish-but-a-little-more-than-a-small-fish-in-a-very-small-pond way, I’m famous. Let me define my pond.

Mom’s Beautiful Curls

Curls have always been important to Mom. She often recounted the childhood heartbreak of having a plain, straight Buster Brown haircut while her sisters had curls and waves. She spent a lot of time and money chasing those elusive curls. With practice and persistence, she developed enough expertise with perm rods and pin curls to produce an acceptable result, and then I came along to offer another challenge.

Thank You…

We had our Thanksgiving lunch at the Senior Center today, and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to being thankful. Gratitude has been a popular subject on the Internet lately, from the hoopla over Tim Tebow’s public prayers of thanks for his God-given talents to Facebook challenges to post a status of gratitude each day in November.

Author, Know Thyself

I was chatting on-line with my son earlier this week. As I’ve mentioned, he’s a writer, too, and I was telling him about the all-time high I reached on my blog the day before.

Nouveau Poor

Once upon a time in the 1980s, I lived the American Dream, at least the dream as outlined in all the advertisements. My husband and I ran one of the most successful insurance agencies in the country, we had a house in the nouveau riche section of North Dallas with more bedrooms and bathrooms than there were people in our family, and our three-car garage housed two Mercedes and a new Hyundai for our son who was, by the way, attending a very prestigious boys’ prep school.

Church Ladies

I have a friend who is the minister of a church in a small town west of Fort Worth. For some reason that I cannot fathom, he has been practicing Bikram yoga for the past two years. Why anyone would voluntarily go into a room heated to 105 degrees and twist themselves into knots for 90 minutes is beyond me, but he likes it so much that he has gone to California to take a nine-week teacher training course. After the first week during which he suffered from dehydration, extreme nausea, and what I imagine as a steady diet of tofu and bean sprouts, he posted the following comment on Facebook:

So LA is supposed to be chic or cool or whatever…but I tell the truth: I’d love to see a Southern church woman in a flowerdy (yes, flowerdy) dress holding a Tupperware container of fried chicken and deviled eggs about now.