This is the day that your headache won’t go away, regardless the amounts of Advil you’ve wolfed down with a Tums chaser so you won’t get an ulcer with the water so you’re not left with chalk jammed in your teeth. This is the day you’ll be stuck behind Grandma driving 37 miles per hour on the freeway and you will honk and curse and huff and puff like an idiot in a rush to go nowhere just because it’s that kind of day.

You can’t see her well, Grandma. She’s shriveled down to a solid 4’8” and that’s including the lavender hair but you could swear when the sun hits at an angle just so and you squint and look at her rearview mirror, well, you could swear that that little old lady is smiling at you. …Read on

When you are given something called “Friendship Bread,” be wary. It’s not like I was given the actual finished product, I got the dough and a dizzying list of daily instructions with the promise of the finished product. That is when I got extra suspicious. I was told that “Friendship Bread” was an old Amish tradition (this is done as a selling point, I assume) but figured, anything with such a blatantly obvious adjective has got to be bad, right? I mean, for years I walked right by the closest neighborhood sushi (and never went in) because, and only because, it was called Amazing Sushi and everyone knows that anything called Amazing (fill-in-the-blank) has got to be major crap. (I later learned, in a desperately hungry moment of weakness that it is the best sushi in town.) …Read on

This is one of those things I can definitely blame my mother on.  Why I never reached her long-limbed stature, had that glamorously sensual neck or movie star beauty are harder sells in the ‘it’s-all-your-fault’ department, but this, this is so very different.

It all started with my mom actually.  Come breakfast time, she’d sit amongst the tropical fireworks of bougainvillea that sprawled lazily in our back garden porch in Venezuela and eat imported toasted English muffins with imported cream cheese and imported jam.  She could have started her day with so many different delightful things bountiful in this South American culinary haven:  arepa con queso guayanes (grilled or deep fried cornmeal cakes hugging a buttery fresh white cheese that makes mozzarella di buffalo seem tough and chewy) or perico (no, not parrot as the name implies, but …Read on

I like listening to classical music to remember my father.  It was the one detail I had not divulged to anyone else.  In the years of bitterness, anger, and deception that had slowly built a calloused wall between us, I still had that stream of pureness that effortlessly floated out as notes from Beethoven, Mozart or Brahms (his favorite) were played.  I’d find myself sitting in the quiet intimacy of my car listening to the music playing loudly and softly thinking of Sunday mornings long ago when the air was thick with youth and carelessness as the bacon gently sizzled and life was good, safe and sweet.

Mom was alive and very beautiful, wrapped in her mocha-colored terry cloth robe, always an odd shade in my young mind, yet, soothing in the way it contrasted the gentle blush …Read on

It starts inconspicuously enough, like, when your kid turns towards you and gives a whole-hearty, sloppy sneeze in your direction.
‘Okay, that was gross’, you may think to yourself, but, being that it is your kid (the one that inevitably has crapped, puked, and pissed on you at some point in your bonding) you most likely will think nothing of it.
And so you go on your way.

The other one may cough on your food when you aren’t looking.
Dirty little fingers inevitably snag a bite of your chocolate cake (they never steal the broccoli). Whatever.
Either way, one of these mugrats houses some sort of cold that is silently passed on to you.
So that when you wake up three days later with your throat on fire, your eyes glazed and bloodshot and your head throbbing as if a chau gong where banging ceremoniously …Read on