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It’s nearly holiday time and the ritual of gift giving rises to the occasion like a freshly baked bread. The clichés about giving abound: It’s better to give than to receive. You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving. So when we’re celebrating any milestone or holiday, it might be prudent to fall back on the messages embedded in these truisms to be more benevolent and creative in our gift giving. Fortunately, we have picked up...

Magazines, websites and TV food shows tell us how to get ready for big holidays with lots of food, multiple courses, gorgeous table settings, and invited folks from near and far. But here’s how it –or at least was for me–is in real time and without the sugar-coating! Day #1: Read cookbooks, food magazines like Bon Appetit and Saveur, and The New York Times online for recipe ideas. Roast beef brined? Potato latkes with caviar (the Russians after all are now pummeling ISIS and on our side, maybe)? Faux gravy without the giblets? The voice inside your head screams: “That’s not what you had last year. You can’t...

Dear Friends and Family, Call us old-fashioned, and we are in many ways, but there are times when emailing and texting just don’t seem to be proper decorum. Yes, it’s better to email or text than do nothing, but more prudent to call, and best to write that old-fashioned note.  Think Jane Austen–or any of your favorite authors and epistolary novelists…who took pen to paper to share their kind, heartfelt words. Make them your muse. Writing a note doesn’t mean composing a Ph. D. thesis, but a few meaty sentences whether you’re writing to say how sorry you are for...

My mother lived and died with class. She was a link to a certain kind of past and that is part, but only part, of why I mourn my mother, Beatrice or “Beattie” as she liked to be called, or Grandma Bea, my kids’ moniker. Just days before she slowly and peacefully slipped away in a morphine-induced state of unconsciousness, the disease that had presented itself as cancer 23 years ago had resurfaced with a vengeance. She had been left back then without a jaw, which she had reconstructed so it resulted in a crooked smile. Yet, she managed with...

The longer we live, the more we experience joy and sadness, both packed together like sweet and sour flavors in an Asian recipe. It’s the pain-pleasure principle Sigmund Freud posited. Life is to be lived to the fullest with pleasure as the primary goal whereas pain is more immediate and difficult to accept. Now that I’m approaching age 70, I find myself smack up against the reality of pain-pleasure more as I deal with my mortality and prodigiously recall the good and painful granular details of my life—the streets where I lived as a kid, days in school and childhood...