Veteran journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life as she knows it.
I’m Barbara Falconer Newhall and I’ve got an incurable Case of the Human Condition. And since you do too, I’m counting on you to laugh and cry along with me as I riff on life as we know it . . . Below you'll read about my creaky, old fifties house, my forays into home gardening, my shopping stories, my spectacularly low-fashion wardrobe -- and more.
I waited too long to get married. By the time Jon and I said our vows, the contents of my hope chest had become outdated, old-fashioned, fussy — unusable. As a result, after thirty some years of marriage, I continue to be the owner of a dozen or so beautiful, hand-embroidered, virginal pillowcases. Read more.
I believe in microbes. Microbes are like God. You can’t hear them, taste them, smell them or see them with the naked eye. But you know they’re there. Lately, I’ve had more experiences with microbes than with God. I’ve been sick a lot. Read more.
Apparently, it snowed last night on our little hill in Oakland. There was snow all over the place at 11 a.m. — on cars, on the lawn around a local hilltop swimming pool, on Mt. Diablo to the East, and dripping and plopping off the trees.
The kids were still pre-schoolers at the time, and it had been another night of sleep deprivation for me. “Tell me it gets easier,” I said to my friend Nancy. “Well, actually it gets harder,” she replied. Nancy has a daughter three years older than Peter. She keeps me briefed on the parenting realities ahead. Read more.
A couple dozen of us took a tour of Birmingham High School, aka Seaholm High, during our reunion weekend in October. It looks like quite of few additions have been made to the building. I thought the designers did quite a good job of being faithful to the Fifties architecture.
We just keep getting better and better — and less and less like a bunch of adolescents. The class of 1959, Birmingham High School, Birmingham, Michigan, stopped talking long enough to let me take some pictures — October, 2009.