Monthly Archives: November 2015

The Leadership Summit, eventually

This morning Scarlett and I were sitting at the dining room table where she was eating a typical breakfast of spaghetti and meatballs and I was drinking a cup of tea.

“I didn’t blog yesterday,” I told her, as if admitting something scandalous.

She seemed unperturbed, busy aiming an entire handful of grated parmesan cheese directly into her mouth.

“Please stop doing that,” I said, and then had a flashback to my own childhood and visits to see my Aunt Theresa and Uncle John. Theresa was my grandmother’s sister and everything about her and Uncle John seemed very old and very Italian. Their couch was covered in plastic. The fruit on their coffee table was wax. When we arrived in the morning, they were always eating cold spaghetti, and Uncle John would pinch our cheeks so hard they stayed pink for the remainder of the visit.

Scarlett continued eating her spaghetti, oblivious to my distraction.

“What do you think I should blog about?” I asked her.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “You could definitely blog about Otto throwing up and how Jack almost dropped my tooth fairy in the throw up.” Read More>

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Ramble On

This month brought travel opportunities that I had to decline. ALS TDI’s Leadership Summit in Boston takes place tomorrow, and many of my friends flew in for the occasion. But it seemed like too much for us. Planes, an uncomfortable travel wheelchair, the breathing machine, hotel rooms. All too complicated.

Later this month, many of my friends and family will gather at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, IL for the second annual Speed4Sarah concert and fundraiser. It seems that I should be there for that, but it’s actually been years since we traveled for Thanksgiving. Rob is allergic to holiday travel, in addition to penicillin and bees.

I used to love traveling. When I was fresh out of college, I got a job working for a travel publishing company in the San Francisco Bay Area. I wrote back cover copy for books about far-flung locales like Cuba, Oaxaca, and Wisconsin. I wrote press releases and designed postcards to market our various travel series. I was the traveling publicist for the author Rick Steves, whose Italy guidebook was, and maybe still is, the best-selling travel book in the United States.

It was my job to drive Rick to events and interviews. We got along well. He was impressed by my parallel parking abilities, I was impressed by his uninhibited love of Rod Stewart (including one particularly memorable late-night air guitar performance as we hurtled through Pasadena) Read More>

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A thief in the night

On Thursday afternoon, I rolled out of my house, ready to pick Scarlett up from school. My sister-in-law, Beverley, was the driver that day, and she walked out behind me, pressing the button that opens the side door of the van. As the ramp unfolded, I saw that my path was blocked—bizarrely—by the fat black Honda instruction manual that normally resides in the glove box. I also saw that the driver’s seat was fully reclined, as though someone had been sleeping in the car.

Later, Bev joked that she thought maybe I had made Rob sleep there the night before in a moment of irritation. I laughed. “There’s no way your brother would ever sleep in the car or even on the couch unless it was his choice.” Rob is very, very stubborn, which is irrelevant to this story, but I felt like sharing it anyway. Maybe it’s a foreshadowing thing. I guess we’ll see.

Upon closer look at the van, we realized that all the contents of the glove box were strewn around the floor. I called Rob.

“Did you put the van driver’s seat into a lying down position and empty the glove box onto the floor of the car last night?” I asked conversationally.

“No,” he answered slowly, as though it had not been an entirely normal question. Read More>

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