Beach House in the Burbs

While the new royal baby, George Alexander Louis, has an awful lot going for him--a mouthful of name, money and his pick of fabulous castles to call home--his new parents may need some parenting tips, and I'm not sure they have the best role models to turn to. In case they want to swim outside the Royal Gene Pool for parenting help, I'd like to offer up these tips from my dad, who's been a parenting King for longer than I can remember! 1. Love unconditionally. Dad loves cars a lot. This was brought home to me when in the months following me getting my driver's license I hit everything in sight--and many things that were out of sight--poles, the garage, an MG convertible driven by a nasty man in a mustard-colored suit smoking a huge, smelly cigar. And as hard as it was to call Dad and tell him I'd hit something else, it was never because I thought he'd stop loving me. Keep this in mind when little George throws the royal crest, just to see if it will break ...

Here you go, part 2 of "9 cheap ways to enjoy the summer, a list in 3 parts." In case you missed part 1 , I'll wait while you check it out. (humming Jeopardy music in my head) Now that you're back from reading (or rereading) part 1, here's part 2: 4. Catch lightening bugs (or oooohhhh and ahhhh when a sweet, precious child does it) 5. Go to the library. It's air conditioned (It's going to be over 100 degrees here at the beachhouse for the next few days. I'm melting already), has really nice people who work there (some of my best friends are librarians, literally, hi, Lesley), and has great books. A wonderful way to spend a hot afternoon. 6. Sit on the porch after dark (it's too freaking hot to sit out there in the day) and tell stories. Ghost stories, family stories, made-up stories, funny stories--all are even better when told to people you love--and accompanied by homemade ice cream. So, get away from your computers, get out there and...

My grandmother, Nana , who passed away in December, left us one final Christmas present this year--one more round of "Shut up and Go!" Many years ago, Nana told us she'd come up with a new game to play after Christmas dinner. All day we (cousins, aunts, in-laws) bugged her about what this new game was, but she wouldn't tell. She dropped a few non-hints, like, "it doesn't have many rules, except that everybody has to play. Oh, and a couple of others that I'll tell you about later. Now, keep stirring that gravy." Then she'd smile and add, "But you're gonna like it." When dinner was over, she got a couple of the cousins to follow her to the back of the house while the rest of us gathered in the living room--a small space, that opened to the dining room. We sat on the sofa, on dining room chairs, and in the floor. In a few minutes the cousins came back toting big cardboard boxes. Nana had a basket with folded pieces of paper in it. The ...

My Nana died a week ago today. She was 92 years old and lived, at least as far as I knew, a full, wonderful life, though she certainly had her share of hardship. She left behind three daughters (my mother included), eight grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. We were all at the burial and memorial service in Charlotte, NC, this past Friday. Five of the eight grandchildren spoke about Nana at the service. And I learned that she apparently thought we were all as special as I know I was to her. That was the theme that ran through all five of our stories. Here's what I said about her. I knew from early on that Nana loved me, not in some abstract, send me a card with money in it for Christmas kind of way, but in a concrete way that made me know she wanted me around. She introduced me to her friends. She wanted to know mine. She was a part of my life. I took all of that for granted until my freshman year of college. I was at Emory, living in a dorm that had been built in the 1920s. I...

Today's my dad's birthday. Rather than wish him the standard Happy Birthday, which I do wish him, I thought I'd honor him with a list of things he's taught me over the years. He was a math teacher after all, way early in his life--before I came along, thank goodness--however, math is NOT one of the things he was able to teach me. Things I've learned from my dad: 1. Dogs are not only man's best friend, but can be woman's too. Daddy and Leroy 2. Never buy a new car. 3. It's important to have hobbies, and if the hobby requires a costume, even better. Daddy in his "assless" motorcycle chaps and Harley vest 4. A sense of humor helps in any situation and hides a multitude of sins. 5. A song can brighten your day, so learn the words and at least the bass part, even if you don't know the melody. Daddy singing with Lesley and Jim 6. Thessaloniki, Greece, is a great place for a father-daughter trip Daddy at the church of St. Dimitrios in Thessaloniki...

Clowns, jugglers, mimes, these were all suggestions from the double-wedding committee (family friends who had been giving opinions our entire lives) 22 years ago when my sister and I were planning our wedding. People look at us funny when Susan and I talk about "our" wedding, but given the outside committee we had to deal with, the grooms didn't get to have a lot of input. On this anniversary, as I look back at pictures, there are so many things I remember I about that day. The videographer (and member of the wedding committee), the late, great Harry Watters, rendered almost invisible, just like my mother insisted. The wedding brunch. Daddy was presented with a trophy by committee chair Judy Watters for surviving (and paying for) the whole ordeal. The trophy reads, "Life's work well done; rest thee now." My dress, which had been my aunt's when she got married in 1956, hanging from the ceiling fan while guests milled around in Mom and Dad's living roo...

Twenty-two years ago today was wedding eve. The day before an event the likes of which Huntsville, Ala., still has not seen duplicated. But the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner also stick in my mind, not only because they were a lot of fun, but because the dinner marked my introduction to daylilies. The wedding was double, my sister and I got married together. Here we are at the rehearsal dinner, (Chris, Karen, Susan, Gregory) with the spectacular daylily centerpiece that my in-laws and their friends created. We inherited those daylilies, which are blooming profusely this year thanks to a fair amount of spring rain. These are photos I took this week. I wrote the following piece about our daylilies several years ago as public radio commentary. But the sentiment still holds true on this day when I find myself thinking about them and that very special time 22 years ago. When I'm in a good mood, I look out at the thousands of daylilies blooming in our yard and think about our wedding...

Nothing says summer in the South like the sight and aroma of boiling pig heads in the backyard. Okay, so this little adventure had nothing to do with being in the South and everything to do with having a sister with a dead-animal fetish (and I mean that in the most wholesome sense of the word). A student in one of her anthropology classes bought pig heads from a butcher, shot them with bullets, hacked at them with a machete, then buried them to see what would happen. Susan (the sister) was very pleased at the student's ingenuity. Then, joy of joys, when the class was over, the student told Susan she could keep the pig heads! Rapture! Unfortunately they still had a little tissue attached. And nobody wants that. So, she brought them over to boil in Chris's outdoor, turkey-frying pot. (Thanksgiving will never be the same.) The smell of boiling hog fat--it reminded me of the old-timey candle-making smell on steroids--permeated our yard and house for hours, but look at the payoff. T...

I actually have the world’s greatest mom. Ask anybody who knows her. She’s smart, kind, sweet, loving, fun, interesting, caring. The list goes on and on. But one of the best things about her is how good a teacher she is. She taught for a living, and over the years she taught me many important things, like … 1. Food is not the most important part of a dinner party. (Thank goodness, because I am not a cook, but I love having people over.) 2. Love really can be unconditional. She’s been mad at me, disappointed in me, unhappy with me, but I’ve never, ever felt like she didn’t love me. 3. Tolerance is the most important part of any long-term relationship. 4. If you want your children to care for you in your old age, you better be really good to them when you’re young and able and caring for them. (She was. Now we are trying to be especially good to our gaggle of nephews, since they will be stuck with us in our dotage.) 5. Having your nose buried in a good book is a great way to spend the da...

... OK, not into a bar. It's not a joke. Chris walked into the alternations shop the other day, wearing a cap because his bald head gets cold, to pick up a pair of pants he'd had hemmed. He looked quite handsome in his cap, apparently, because Sandy, the owner, said, "You a very handsome man. You need more hats." So, along with his pants, she handed him a large shopping bag full of a bizarre collection of hats and scarves. I know because he brought them all home. Inside the bag were such treasures as a pink and white baseball cap with an after-market elastic chin strap sewn on, a black straw hat with bright red band, a couple of straw driving caps, two fluffy burgundy hats that you'd have to be really cold to wear out in public. Picture Phyllis Diller-style hats. There were at least a dozen. As I tried on hat after cap, I noticed that they smelled like little old lady, in a good way. A way that reminds me of my great-grandmother and maybe a little of my grandmothe...

Over the past week the response I've gotten most often to "My dad wrecked his Harley," isn't, "How is he?" but, instead is, "Your dad has a Harley? Cool." Because he is going to be okay, I can live with this response. And it made me realize I don't know anyone else whose 71-year-old father has a Harley that he rides regularly. (Or at least used to ride regularly. He's still not sure whether it's totaled or not.) He rides it so regularly, in fact, that he owns assless chaps and a reflective, nearly glow-in-the-dark Harley vest. He chipped his sternum in the accident, a break that takes a long time to heal because there's no setting it, and he can't stop breathing to hold it still. But his doctor says he'll be fine because he works out. My father, who was a couch potato of the highest order for at least as long as my mother's known him and they were high-school sweethearts, started going to the gym after he retired. Before...

For Eli's 15th birthday we ordered up snow! It was a gorgeous, windy, cold day. My nephews, Eli the birthday boy, and his younger brother Jake, enjoying the snow. It's always such a great surprise when it actually snows--especially in March.

"A dead cat! She brought me her dead cat," Susan, my forensic anthropology professor sister, said. "Wow! Your students must really love you," I said, after a bite of chicken vegetable soup. "Yeah, they do. Next week she's bringing me her dead ferret. Will you pass the cornbread, please?"

Tacky or charmingly retro? I've got to go with charmingly retro--though, in fact, it isn't retro at all, but the real old McCoy. My grandmother and the aunts sat around a card table decorating Christmas balls for years, it seems. One year, when my sister Susan and I were maybe eight and nine, we got to help. Grandma had tons of costume jewelry on the table. Lots of garish gold ribbon. Those weird satin-wrapped Christmas balls in every color imaginable (and some, like this odd salmony color, that really aren't imaginable). By the time she and the aunts finished the project, Grandma had an entire tree's worth of Christmas balls dripping in pearls, jewels and ribbon. She hung no other ornaments on her tree after that. Grandma latched onto a tradition and kept with it forever. Grandma died in the summer of 2001. We didn't have Christmas on our minds at the time. But off and on since then I've wondered what happened to her Christmas tree ornaments. This year I though...

This is an entirely inappropriate blog post for someone who not only voted for Barack Obama, but also is thrilled to pieces at what she has seen from him in the days since his inauguration. But I can't help it. For as genuinely happy as I am to have a Democrat back in the White House, I am almost that happy to have temporary possession of a Confederate States of America cuckoo clock. Its tacky kitschy quality speaks to the tackiest part of my Southern soul. Here's how we came to have it. Last week when my sister and I went to Huntsville, Ala., to surprise our mom for her birthday, we found a surprise ourselves. We walked into the living room, a room that has changed little since we grew up in it. A room that hosted my mother's liberal friends during all the dark years when they had to practically meet in secret due to the conservatism that permeates Huntsville. Despite its history, the room housed a CSA cuckoo clock, complete with Stonewall Jackson on a horse, Robert E. Lee...

It's just been birthday central around here lately. First Elvis , then my mother, then my nephew and Chris's is next Thursday. But I can't let Mom's get lost in the shuffle. She turned 70 on January 14, an event my sister and I decided couldn't go by without some sort of celebration, despite Mom's insistence that she didn't want a party. She got one anyway, an intimate party of four. Susan (my sister) and I drove from Atlanta to Huntsville, Alabama, on the 13th, arriving about 6:30 p.m., while Mom and Dad were at the gym. Daddy, who was in on the plot, had left the front door unlocked. We brought dinner, homemade chicken vegetable soup, angel rolls and birthday cake. Plus, we'd stopped at the Piggly Wiggly in New Hope, Alabama, and bought ice cream for coffee punch and to go with the cake. We set the table with Mom's crystal and china. Leroy, Daddy's shih tzu, let us know when they were almost home. He starts whining whenever Daddy's car reac...

I don't hold myself out there as a music critic. But I know what I like. And I like Christmas music that makes me smile and gives me energy to get things done while I'm listening to it (or keeps me awake if I'm in the car). The Keith Taylor Trio's jazzy O Christmas Tree-O is just such a CD. And it's available on CDBaby. Check it out. It will put a smile on your face and a HO-HO-HO in your heart! (In the interest of full disclosure, Jim Cavender, the bass player on the cd and the one in the middle in the picture is my cousin-in-law. He's also the one who introduced me to my husband many years ago. So he's long held a special place in my heart. But that doesn't mean the cd's not good. It's fabulous!)

No, I didn't finish 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I got to 20,000 and realized a couple of things: 1. The book was going nowhere, at least nowhere I could figure. The GPS had completely quit after leading me down increasingly narrow roads with no view. 2. If I'm going to participate in the challenge again, and I might, I have to go in more prepared. I decided on a whim, on the last day to sign up, to participate this year, thinking maybe it would spur some sort of fantastical writing. But, alas, it didn't. I need to go in with more than a tiny spark of an idea that sounded great in my head at two o'clock in the morning, but somehow didn't translate to more than 20,000 words--and it required stops at numerous metaphorical gas stations to ask directions to get that far. Because I'd essentially abandoned the idea before Thanksgiving (I traveled with my laptop, just in case. Mostly it sat in my room calling my name occasionally but wit...

My husband, the dog and I are off for sunny South Florida for Thanksgiving with his (husband's not dog's) family. I hope you all have a lovely holiday with plenty of good food and good company. I'll be back next week.

Nearly 10 years ago, back when we had more energy than money (Now we have no energy and no money, but that's another story.) my husband Chris bought a Jeep. Not one of those nice Grand Cherokees that the commercials show going off-road, but that you know never leave the pavement because who in their right mind would get a $40,000 car mired in the mud. No, he bought a 1984 CJ-7, a rugged, no air-conditioning, no radio, no room for sissies, real man's Jeep. In other words, he bought a hobby. For the first few months Chris' relationship with his Jeep was purely destructive. He moved my much nicer, much newer car out of the garage and pulled the Jeep in. “Only for three or four days,” he said. He spent hours over the next months taking parts off, cleaning them, oiling them, gazing at them all over the garage floor. Finally, he was ready for the next phase of his hobby, though my car wouldn’t move back into the garage for many more months. Chris did lots of work under the hood, ...