Growing up, my grandparents and I were very close. They lived only 10 minutes from my house, and my brother and I saw them often, whether it was for a holiday or birthday or no real reason at all. When they hit their seventies, however, they began leaving town for a few months out of the year. Like migratory birds and many fellow Jewish grandparents, they flew south for the…
Don’t you just hate it when someone tells you they’re going to do something, and then they just blow it off? Like for instance, a certain Debutante (whose initials happen to be LD) who is supposed to post every Wednesday morning by like, 6 am EST, but was so wrapped up in her own life last night that she forgot? Don’t you just hate that? Here are my other pet…
The idea sounded decent in theory. A week at a Club Med in Florida, courtesy of the in-laws, who’d taken a fantastic anniversary trip to Bermuda with the entire family that we couldn’t attend, what with the birth of our third conflicting with it and all. But that’s a story for another day. Anyhow, at least Club Med would provide day care for the kids and activities galore with which…
A few years after my parents divorced, when I was 15, I went to Florida to visit my cousin Shelly for spring break. By myself. I mean there was no reason to stay home. My older brother had escaped to college and my dad had giddily remarried a younger, less complicated wife who he was busy having too much fun with, and my mother, who’d spent a good portion of…
Happy Halloween! I grew up in Denver, Colorado where it never failed to snow on Halloween night. Which means, most of my Halloween memories involve my brother and me, wet and miserable, tromping along in three inches of sidewalk slush, moping because we had to wear our coats over (or worse, under) our costumes. Again. I still love Halloween. I just like it better in Florida. And now, a word…
Ahhh, the middle, the ever-expanding, what-the-hell-is-happening-here middle. I am not talking about my waistline. That’s a whole other post. (How does ten pounds attach itself to you that quickly, anyway?) Rather, I am, right now, smack in the middle of writing my new book. And while the middle is growing, the plot is not. I am, in other words, writing a whole load of (do NOT fill in the blank…
We’ve been smelling smoke for weeks down here in South Florida. Too long of a dry season has turned our brush to tinder, and lightning strikes, for which we are a world leader, seem to prove that Mother Nature is a pyro at heart when they don’t come along with the typical afternoon showers. Hundreds of acres have blackened, and homes have been destroyed. We are lucky enough that we…
I have memory lapses. Long ones. Like, had you asked me about my favorite childhood books last week, I’m not sure how many I could have rattled off. Frankly, if you asked me about my favorite childhood books when I was eight years old, I likely wouldn’t have had any titles to give you either. I’d have looked up from whatever book I had my nose in, raised my eyebrows,…
This week’s topic, Bookstores, comes at an advantageous time for me, as I have recently had the pleasure of visiting two of Florida’s most well respected independent stores and had the distinct honor of meeting their owners and staff. Bookstores have always been hallowed ground for me. Always the New Kid, the Bookworm, the Tomboy, all those childhood labels fell away as soon as I found a bookstore, the great…
Spiders send me into paroxysms of joy. Or my first car, a 1980 Fiat Pininfarina Spider 2000 did anyway. I have no idea how I came to own the car. One day it appeared in the driveway and my mother told me that on the 5th of each month I’d need to pay some guy named Courtney $200.00.
