Looking back at Loss

June 10, 2010

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Jeffrey Zaslow, “Families with a Missing Piece: A New Look at How a Parent’s Early Death Can Reverberate Decades Later,” raises important issues to consider if we are sincere about doing our best for all our collective children. Obviously it is a terrible thing to lose a parent, […]

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Eye on the real prize

June 9, 2010

Okay, I just love Derek Fisher.  One of the Lakers’ most senior players, he is my favorite not just because he’s great, but because he plays (and lives) with so much heart, so much love—and you can just see it and feel it. Wherever the series goes (and obviously I hope it goes to the […]

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Hotel Rwanda

June 8, 2010

Life is a dream-like poem; the trick is in learning to simultaneously live it and interpret it as it’s happening—and in learning to trust the dream’s architect rather than in making constant changes to the plans. On Memorial Day I was turning my tumbling composter as a squadron of WW II planes flew directly over […]

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The Undersea World of Jed Clamp-it

June 7, 2010

In the old days nursery rhymes like “Ring around the Rosie” were actually about bleak things like the plague.  In the spirit of getting medieval on the primeval black death tragically washing up on certain beaches, I found myself humming the theme to “Beverly Hillbillies,” but with some different lyrics spilling out.  Sing it with […]

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Saving my kids from "Saving Private Ryan"

June 6, 2010

A few years back, when both my boys were still in elementary school, we were still holding the line on shows like Family Guy and various R rated films that my kids swore up and down that their friends were getting to watch.  Reasons for certain kids we knew “getting” to watch certain media fare […]

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Word One

June 5, 2010

T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Christopher Wren (architect of St. Pauls) went to All Souls College at Oxford, and like their many illustrious classmates who have attended this elite graduate school going back to 1438, they took a really hard test just to get in.  Often it included the famed one word essay:  you were […]

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Arrival of the Fittest—childhood evolving

June 4, 2010

A reader sent me a link to a Salon interview by Thomas Rogers of Melvin Konner about his new book The Evolution of Childhood.  A few things stood out to me; Rogers asks, “What’s the evolutionary purpose of adolescent rebellion?” Konner replies, “In our culture, we give kids the message that at a certain point […]

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Sweet still at sixteen

June 3, 2010

Andy and I were talking and she suggested that it might be nice to post something on how kids, even at they continue to grow (and despite being intermittently mouthy, rude, entitled and impossible) actually remain cute and sweet to us parents. When our little crawlers were still in car-seats, the big boys and girls […]

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Paying loving attention to attachment

June 2, 2010

Lindsey at A Design So Vast wrote a recent post, “There is something holy in authentic presence,” that got me thinking about attachment. Lindsey’s post is about the intense power that authentic presence has on people, as evidenced by artist Marina Abramovic who has a piece going at Museum of Modern Art in New York […]

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Who likes to rock the party?

June 1, 2010

I have been to relatively few concerts in my life.  Amongst the reasons:  crowds. When I see vast swaths of humanity swaying together to Bono, I think:  Porta-potties. In recent years I have been intrigued by the personal discovery that, if the mood is right, if the food is good, if the light falls graciously […]

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