Dad was wrong. As a kid, every chance I got during the summer, I flopped onto the couch in front of a fan to read books until I drifted off to sleep. Summers were for napping. Dad toiled at a full-time factory job before coming home to climb onto the tractor and work the fields the rest of ...
Gardening season has sprouted, which means there will be plenty of fresh vegetables soon. It’s horrible. I’m not against healthy eating, it’s just that dining on what’s good for me is, to use a scientific term, yucky. Do-gooder nutritionists claim we need lots of fresh veggies, ...
I read the other day that San Francisco won’t let lawmen use facial recognition technology anymore because sometimes the computer hoots and hollers, “Hello!” across a crowded restaurant at the wrong person. Me, too. The difference is that technology never pretends to be waving ...
Years of far-too-personal research have taught me that the best way to learn something is to screw it up. This is not true in all cases. Folding fitted sheets serves as the prime example. Experience makes a lousy teacher when it comes to sheets that frustrate me into fits. I end up wadding ...
For a generation — my mom’s — Erma Bombeck was the voice of motherhood. Not the Shangri-la, idealized, TV commercial version of every-hair-and-tablecloth-in-place mothers. Erma wrote about the real-life adventures of mothers with piles of dirty dishes, dandelion bouquets and smuggled earthworms stashed in the kids’ underwear drawers. Erma told it like it was — with humor, grace and exasperation. Twice I’ve attended the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton, where I met Erma’s kids, Betsy, Andy and Matt, and her husband, Bill. Her love was evident ...
One of the coolest things about my secret identity as a children’s author is that I get to read kids’ books and pretend that it’s research. “I’m working on my next novel,” I sputter to the librarian. “Oh, I believe you,” she chuckles. She hands me the comic collections of Uncle Scrooge and Little Lulu, a recorded book of “The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle” and a DVD of “VeggieTales: Tomato Sawyer’s and Huckleberry Larry’s Big River Rescue,” and winks. “Don’t study too hard.” Experts now say that reading kids’ books is the adult thing to do. ...
