Family Feathers

  While filling out a survey, I was forced to check the box for my age.  I knew that I fell in to the 45 - 50 age group, but suddenly I could not remember if I was 46 or 48. I realized this was ridiculous as everyone knows their age, but for the life of me, I could not remember mine. I began doing the math and employed the use of counting on fingers and using a little chisanbop (you're my age if you know what that is) and quickly concluded that I was indeed 48.  I aged two years in two minutes.  It's simply not right.   I don't know if it is the fact that I'm in the 45 - 50 box or if I'm just distracted, but I find myself doing odd things without realizing it.  Last week, while driving into a blinding sun, my children watched with great concern as I repeatedly tried to turn down the sun with the volume knob on my car radio.   Needless to say, I was unsuccessful, but I did discover that punching all the buttons on the radio was a useful coping mechanism and

  While you cannot see it in this photo, this little boy is a magician, an entrepreneur, a child of God, a wizard, time traveler, globe trotter, hacker, Apple genius, cinematographer, singer, artist, stockbroker, friend, son, brother and more.  From the day this picture was taken, I have placed one photo a year in a school bus photo frame that has only one seat left.  I have the senior picture that goes in that last slot and I simply cannot place it on that bus.  That would  mean that he has grown up well and is ready to head out on his own.  He may be ready, but I am not.    They say hindsight is twenty twenty and when I started filling the seats in his bus, I should have started a similar frame and put a picture of me in it each year.  The first year would have a young mom with a full head of hair taking her son to school for the first time.   As the years passed, my hair would be thinner, my hips a bit wider, my smile even larger and my memories even greater. The last pic

             When I was five years old, my grandmother would care for me before school each day.  She would turn the stereo console on and play big band music from the 40's.  I remember dressing up in her mink stole as we danced around the living room spinning and twirling to the classics.  She told me that one day the mink would be mine and I hoped that I would be as beautiful as she was wrapped in luxurious mink.     Time, of course, came and went and my grandmother passed away many years ago.  I have often wondered what happened to her mink stole and wished that I could wear it just one more time.  Little did I know, my grandmother had given the stole to her daughter and sometime during the early 80's when fur was not fashionable and we were wearing hideous things like leather pants and spandex, my aunt tossed the mink into the Goodwill bin near her home. She did not know that anyone actually wanted the mink and donated it to charity.  She told me she remembers lo