Every School Shooting Must Be Shocking to Us

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Every School Shooting Must Be Shocking to Us

If you look at statistics, you can convince yourself it isn’t so bad. What’s the chance of a child getting shot and killed at school? It’s less than getting hit by lightning. It’s less than being kidnapped. It’s less than dying in a car crash. So the numbers are with us, right? But it doesn’t feel right. And every time there’s another shooting, every time another child is murdered, it feels terribly, terribly wrong…

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The Questions I Never Asked My Mother

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The Questions I Never Asked My Mother

‘What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence,” is a book propped up on a table under “New Releases” at Barnes & Noble. I pick it up. And can’t put it down. So I buy it. I’ve read only four of the essays so far. I want to absorb each. Maybe even more than absorb, I want to reflect, to think about these writers and their mothers, and to think about my mother, too, and all the things we never got a chance to talk about. Except that we did have a chance…

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Sleeping Beauty Arrives with a Spring in Her Step

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Sleeping Beauty Arrives with a Spring in Her Step

I know I drive my grandkids a little crazy, gushing over every tree, pointing out every flower, oohing and ahhing over the yellow of forsythia and the world turned newly green. “Look at those tulips!” I say, letting up on the gas so that the 12-year-old in the front seat has time to turn her head and gaze at a small garden studded with red and orange and yellow. “Look how beautiful they are, Charlotte. And look, next door, at that dogwood…”

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