…and a crank caller saved my life — When I got divorced — after nearly thirty years of marriage — it was a little hard to explain. When I was in a good mood, I’d make light of it. It’s like the joke my father used to tell, I’d say, about the little boy who didn’t speak a…

Online dating no more! “Jenny, she’s the center of my universe,” my friend Bruce says mistily. And I think, gosh, I wish I could find a man who’d talk about me that way. Of course maybe it helps that Jenny of the flowing red-blonde hair is a Labrador retriever. What…

“As long as a flower blooms, she will live on in us, in those she loved” “You’ll get all my things when I’m gone,” my Great Aunt Jim told me the last time I saw her. “The doctor says I’m going to die. I told him I’d rather die than…

Who’d want to be a leap year baby? Statistics prove, prove that you’ve one birthday, just one birthday every year…went the “Unbirthday Song” in Walt Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.” And that’s true, except for those, like my youngest daughter, who were born on Feb. 29 in a leap year. Early…

It’s January. And if Christmas is the “most wonderful time of the year,” as we’ve heard incessantly since Halloween, January is the worst. Here in frozen northern Indiana — the part that seems to extend above the Arctic Circle — the prediction is for a low of -11 by the…

…and justice isn’t always what you think. — When I was a little girl in Alabama, a relative of ours killed a man. Frank, we’ll call him, was my father’s cousin-by-marriage, a giant of a man and a meat-cutter by trade. …

Brrring…Brrring…I race for the phone. “Hello?” “Dorothy?” Elderly lady, heavy Eastern European accent. “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number.” “Is this…?” The number she reads is mine. “Yes, but there’s no one her by that name.” “Oh…” she sounds puzzled. “There’s not? I’m sorry. …

Family recipes/Family stories The apartment door is standing open, and from the kitchen my friend Sarah calls, “Just put your coat in the closet and come on in. You know,” she says, “I just spoke with a cousin of mine, she’s about 83 or 84 years old, and I was…

…and his prayer was answered Patrick didn’t want to be the baby of the family. “For the longest time he kept asking for a baby brother,” his mother said. At the time, Rita and her husband had four children, ranging in age from 18 down to eight. Rita was already…