Dead Air or Well-fed Relationship?

“Just the headlines!” Paige demanded, interrupting me with more brass than a marching band. I’d known her game through years of friendship.  As a retired broadcaster, she gets impatient with lengthy descriptions. “Okay, okay!”  I feigned defeat, waited for her reaction, then went right back to telling the same story, only faster. She tilted her…

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Baby Present

So here I am…a man who never had younger siblings, a man without a child, a man who’s never changed a diaper and gets paranoid around babies…and I’m having lunch with a dear friend and meeting her five-month old son.  I said the standard things — “he’s so cute,” “what a good baby,” “are you…

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A Blunt Object To Ease Self Doubt

Accepting her Golden Globe statuette for her performance in “Les Misérables,” Anne Hathaway humbly thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association “for this lovely blunt object, that I will forever use as a weapon against my self-doubt.”  A humble admission of her truth from this graceful, poised movie star. As writers, we are just like Hathaway…

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The Last Line: Writing Through Grief

Friday morning before dawn, my mother’s life came to a peaceful end after a 12-year struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. “Dad,” I said on Saturday evening after the visitation as we sat in his home blankly watching TV.  “The minister asked if we wanted to prepare something for her eulogy.”  I mentioned I’d talked to my…

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