The Good Portion

My husband and I spend our Thursday evenings doing something a little out of the ordinary: we go to assisted living facilities and recreate old-time radio shows for the entertainment of the residents.  Our little troupe performs old favorites like Baby Snooks, Fibber McGee and Molly, Sam Spade, and The Honeymoon Is Over - better known as The Bickersons. This Sunday afternoon one of our fellow radio players dropped by the house to rehearse a "new" episode of Fibber McGee.  After we were finished, just for the fun of it, we decided to do a quick read of our latest Bickersons script, even though none of us would actually be the ones performing those roles this time around.  As the title suggests, John and Blanche Bickerson spend every episode bickering, always in the middle of the night. It's rollicking fun to act out their skirmishes. This is why, after our friend went home, I had the Bickersons on the brain as I closed myself into our tiny bathroom. Paul and I have...

At age forty-six* I shredded my mother’s papers. It was ten months after she died, at age eighty-seven. The documents spanned twenty years of life, hers and mine. Hundreds of bills fretted over. Hundreds of checks written. Thousands of moments represented: fears, pain, courage, labor, dreams, and prayers. A fourth of her life. Half of mine. Two evenings spent, shredded it all. Life is short. Shorter than I imagined. You think eighty-seven years is a long time. But it’s not, not when you’re the one living it. And you are. I don’t know when my time will come, but I know that it will seem to me then as though no time had passed at all. “How did I get to be so old?” I will ask. I know, because I’ve asked it already. And what will I say then that I’ve lived for? Will I say that I’ve lived and loved well? If my time comes today I’m afraid I’ll say “no”. Today is the day to repent. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in ...

My family was ahead of its time. Mine was not the idyllic late-sixties childhood. I was a latch-key kid a decade or more before there was a name for such a thing.  But even before my latch-key days I was ahead of my time. I attended a unique private school in Culver City, CA which provided both before and after school care. It began in my pre-K year. I must have been four years old.  My mother and I would get up early in the morning, while it was still dark, to get me dressed in my uniform.  I ate my breakfast, and then we were off to work.  Mom would pull the car up to the curb in front of the school.  There Mrs. Aiken was waiting to escort me through the glass double-doors of that two-story building. It all seems so ritzy in retrospect - as if I were the daughter of a president or a celebrity. At the time it felt ordinary. Inside those doors they taught the little ones, pre-K and Kindergarten, to sing in French.  They taught us to use paste, and not...