To call my Dad the Gift Giver might be a bit of an overstatement. Gift giving would have been pretty close to the bottom of his list of talents when we were kids, even below housekeeper and chef. But the gifts he did give were memorable. Years ago, riding in the car with my Charlie,… Continue reading The Gift Giver

Hiking in Gambrill Park yesterday, I happened across a tree, split into two just feet from where the common trunk was rooted in the earth. The tree wasn’t really exceptional in any way, except that it brought me immediately back to my childhood and our backyard on Red Coat Lane. A wonderland of rocks, roots,… Continue reading The Tree

35 years ago, my mother died during that magical period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the worst and possibly one of the more common times to die. People try to hold on for special occasions - birthdays, holidays, anniversaries - only to lose their battles in the middle of the fights towards the inevitable. That year,… Continue reading The Christmas Sweater

my favorite handwritten letters involved little punctuation no capital letters run on sentences and often ill formed alphabet letters they were puzzles filled with daily life food recipes family and love my favorite letters were written by an elementary school dropout who was pulled from school to care for her father and her siblings after… Continue reading Dorothy

He would be 97 years old today. My father. He was a good dad to me. I say ‘to me’ because each of us experiences a parent differently. I’ve learned this as I’ve gotten older, both from the view of the child and the view of the parent. As the fourth kid and the second… Continue reading A swell guy