By Barbara Falconer Newhall I have a total of three gorgeous, young nieces. One of them, Julie, went to the famous Ascot races in England last year, with astonishing results. Julie thought she was doing most of the people-watching at Ascot that day. But it turns out that some people were watching her. Before she […]
A Case of the Human Condition
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.
A Case of the Human Condition: Long-Distance Mothering
Peter is fine. His appendix was twice the size of normal. But it’s gone for good.
A Case of the Human Condition: Would My Husband Like to Add My Name to His?
Jon and I had been married nearly 12 years. It was time to pop the question again. I had taken his last name as mine. Would he like to add my maiden name to his?
What’s Rhetoric? Let My Two-Year-Old Enlighten You
My daughter Christina discovered the art of rhetoric when she was being weaned from baby bottle to plastic cup. She’d say, “I want milk and I don’t want it in a cup” — an elegant illocutionary statement that usually got her what she wanted, her bottle.
A Case of the Human Condition: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and the Indian I Wanted to Be
Growing up in Michigan, I read “Hiawatha,” but I was never exposed to the poems and stories of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a nineteenth-century Ojibway Indian from the Upper Peninsula. I was culturally deprived.
A Case of the Human Condition: When a Young Mother Dies
In the months and years before she died of breast cancer, Beverly Bondy Rose created a safe and loving place for her little daugther and the people around her. Read more.
A Case of the Human Condition: The Day She Popped the Question
Things were getting serious. My boyfriend had moved his goldfish into my apartment. I had returned from a long weekend to find that Jon had moved his dimestore pets from his place to mine. He was sheepish about this.