“We’re going to be late,” my husband Francis began saying two hours before the Navy Ball. He would repeat the phrase every 15 minutes. It was October 1994, the night of my first formal military event as a Navy spouse. We had only been married one year, and I was four months pregnant. I sat…
Month:
Desperately Seeking Reunion
“C’mon, please go with me,” I begged Patti, “we’ll have fun, I promise.” But my best friend since 9th grade was skeptical. She thought our 35th high school reunion could be a bust. But she agreed to go, as long as we — our husbands, Patti and I — would make a speedy exit when…
Gold Star Mothers: Shining bright since WWI
When I was a teenager, I spent an inordinate amount of time staring out of windows, over the water, into the distance, up at the sky — pondering my place in the world. I was prone to feeling overwhelmed by minuscule problems, so contemplating the vastness of the universe comforted me by making my worldly…
Balancing blind faith and stranger danger
Before our girls went back to college this year, we gave them the usual advice. Don’t walk on campus at night alone, don’t take rides with strangers, etc. I stopped short before arming them with pepper spray. I wondered, do they really need to have their thumbs poised, ready to blind someone with pepper spray?…
