Sandy's Lingo
Words Her Way
Archive
My Husband Bought Me a Robot
It's sort of like a pet, except you feed it electricity and it eats dirt. It’s clean . . . and it cleans. It’s an iRobot Roomba, a vacuum cleaning robot. Roomba (we call her “Roo”) was supposedly a gift for me. It is true that I hate, hate to vacuum. You’d...
Degrees of Separation: The Antidote for Empathy
At a certain age (mine) you begin to read obituaries. And you develop a systematic separation procedure to put as much distance between you and the deceased. On a good...
A Midwest Mom Hosts a NYC Wedding
Here Comes the Bride, 1972 First came the dress. My mother sat on the other side of closed doors as two salesladies positioned me on a pedestal, arranged the train, and lifted the short blusher veil over my (supposedly) virginal face. The ladies threw open...
The One: My Daughter’s Love Affair With a Viking
“He’s the one,” Allison announced three years ago. These are three words I had never heard my 31-year-old daughter say. I wasn’t surprised, really, because during the week that “the one” visited, my usually attentive daughter didn’t answer e-mails, texts, or...
Three Weddings: A Secret One, a Surprise One, a Long-Awaited One
The Secret Wedding Thursday, September 24, 2015 * Twin Towers Senior Community Chapel An 87-year-old man and an 86-year-old woman walk into a chapel. Between them, they have an accumulated 121 years of marriage. My father’s marriage to my mother accounts...
Books Over Nooks: An Ode to the Paper Page
My mom used to say, as we pulled the car into the garage on any humid August day, “Well, we air-conditioned the house. We air-conditioned the car. If only we had air-conditioned the garage.” I thought of my mother yesterday as I experienced a gap in comfort on...
What makes a good teacher? Not what “they” say.
Perhaps you are a teacher and find yourself returning to your classroom . I hope you enjoyed your three-month vacation. Oh, not three months? Do the math, you say? Not really a vacation, but unpaid leave? Oh, whatever. I digress. Many of you are starting...
Making Love: The truth about a 44-year marriage
I did not love Rick the day I married him forty-three years ago. I knew this a month before the wedding when I briefly cancelled it, my mother assuring me, through gritted teeth, that the deposits and the invitations and the centerpieces she’d stayed up all...
Om: Meditation Aggravation
Let's begin with a joke, shall we? Three Yogis are doing meditation in a remote cave. One day a sound is heard from outside the cave. After about six months, one of the yogis says, "Did you hear that goat?" Once again, there was silence. About a year...
Bite Nite: A Fun Family Food Tradition
I think my husband dreamed this up when the kids had discovered we weren’t really as cool as their friends, about the time they were ten and eleven. They called it a "borgasmord." Here’s how it worked. Each of us were given three strips of paper. On each...
Role Reversal on a Trip With Adult Kids
Rick and I had been standing on a hot Amsterdam tram through thirteen stops, using our wide stances to stabilize ourselves and our hips to stabilize our luggage. When the doors opened, there was Henrik, our Norwegian son-in-law, to carry our suitcases. He...
Gay Pride Parade: Nobody does it better than San Francisco
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. " ~Dr. Seuss "I'm a supporter of gay rights. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are...
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