My mother and I entered the little room at the bank, her safety deposit box in hand. It was time to catalogue the contents, which no one had looked at for several decades. I helped her open the box and then stood back. This is...
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By November, if all goes well, my wife and I will have gone from no grandchildren to five in under a minute. Well, not quite, but that’s what it feels like. My parents have been married long enough to have children in their seventies, my mother...
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I was the lucky one. I got the bare mattress in an open-air screened porch. It was the end of August in upstate New York, one of the Finger Lakes just across the road. The brisk lake breeze cooling the room in the black of...
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We think the past behind us, and the future ahead. That errors and misjudgments in the rearview mirror are over, and possibilities to come are visible only through the front windshield....
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Of course, the garage door had slammed shut and the bolt shot home. I wondered whether this would qualify in the Guinness Book of Records as the most locked doors encountered in a single evening....
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In 2002, forty years after leaving, and at the behest of my wife and children, I returned to South Africa for the first time...
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Cleaning and closing the house on the Cape brings with it the end of summer rituals...
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Perhaps, just perhaps, I’m wrong about the power and willingness of deities to affect our lives...
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The stuff of everyday life makes us who we are, and it’s the job of the writer to identify those truths and make them accessible. We do that by finding the universal in the particular. We start out with the relationship between two people and...
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A century ago a man was born who knew that things could and eventually would get better. Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in Mvezo, in what was then The Union of South Africa, a self-governing member of the British Commonwealth. He was born...
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