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FEATURE ESSAY Stories on Strings: Mom Musician Lori McKenna “It's very easy to just become a parent and forget who you are as a person. Country music singer and songwriter Lori McKenna shows moms everywhere that a dream will be fulfilled when the time is right. The right time can take years – it did for Lori – but opportunity, like the proverbial teacher, reveals itself when you are ready. One chord after another, one foot in front of the other with pitter patter of little ones all around you, amazing things can happen. Continue reading Stories on Strings: Mom Musician Lori McKenna Guest Features New Lives In March, on the plane from Iowa to San Francisco, I think about how much I miss a full house. I miss our sons, now ages 23 and 20, and on adventures of their own. I miss their voices, their music, their messy rooms, their friends swooping in for impromptu meals. I miss the details invoked by their interests that lent sure, immediate purpose to my life. I miss the way my husband and I made a good team as parents, he cooking our dinners and encouraging our sons to take risks, I coordinating our schedules and reminding the boys to do their homework...
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How to Enjoy Your Family's First Trip to Disneyland 1. Despite best-selling guidebook advice to the contrary, arrive at noon, starving. Make immediate beeline for the first café and spend $30 on hotdogs. Watch your 4-year-old, who is suddenly on an all-white diet, nibble his bun, spill apple juice all over you, and whine because he wants milk not juice. 2. Wait in line again for 25 minutes to buy milk, which your son will then not drink... Continue reading How to Enjoy Your Family's First Trip to Disneyland
Joyful Noise
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Character Disorder Thomas and I finish reading Stuart Little,and he asks me if there is another volume. I check Amazon and then tell him there isn’t, trying to conceal my delight. I’m sick of Stuart Little. He’s a dandy and a prig. I send my brother an e-mail telling him this. One of Ben’s serious avocations is writing and illustrating children’s books, so I feel I’m telling on one of his friends. But apparently I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know. He writes back that characters in children’s stories are not really characters. They are character disorders. “Look at the vehicles in the Thomas the Tank Engine,” he tells me...
What the Hula Gave Me I missed the first hula lesson because I was in a Japanese hospital trying to find out why I couldn’t get pregnant. I was in my pajamas, finishing up my first ever Japanese hospital meal while 20 local women shucked their shoes and stepped up onto the tatami. I knew some of these ladies from the English conversation classes I’d been teaching for the past nine years at the community center. Others knew about me from their children and grandchildren; I also taught English at the elementary schools in town. While these ladies – farmers, housewives, and a twentysomething hotel worker – attempted to sway their hips like Lance, I was tucking a thermometer under my arm... Continue reading What the Hula Gave Me
Flight Lessons I sit in a prop-driven airplane from the aeronautical Dark Ages as it taxis down the runway. Didn’t they stop making these planes decades ago, except for those two-seaters that fly low over crops, pilot almost visible from the ground? I look out the window, the propeller a steady (Thank God!) blur less than 10 feet away. I notice the chipped paint and a network of scrapes and gashes on the surface of the motor and wonder how deep the damage goes. Will the whole thing come apart somewhere over Connecticut, the layers of aluminum flaying apart like weathered skin? Are there layers of aluminum? How thick is the metal that encases this plane?
The Tulips and the Stone The day my husband found out that his mother’s cancer had spread he sat down with our boys, then aged 4 and 5, and told them that the doctor couldn’t help grandma and that she was going to die. The boys knew she had been in the hospital and they had seen her many times at home feeling poorly, but it never occurred to them that she wouldn’t get better. My oldest son, Peder, burst into tears. “I don’t want grandma to die,’’ he said, sobbing so hard his body was shaking. “Tell her not to die...’’ Continue reading The Tulips and the Stone
Vineyard Ties My father claims that he’s much better at being a grandfather than he was at being a dad. As a grandfather, he’s scarcely missed a performance or a soccer tournament. Now that some of his grandchildren are growing older, he visits them at college and is even planning trips to see those who have already graduated...
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