My first memory of Mother was her singing “All the Pretty Little Horses” to me at bedtime. We were upstairs in our living quarters above Half-A-Hill T House, my parents’ restaurant/nightclub near Springfield, Mo. I can remember a tune like “Honeysuckle Rose” drifting up to us from Mickey Marcel’s band down below. The fact...
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Sherwood Forest is alive and well at The Adventure Park at Sandy Spring Friends School. You won’t encounter Robin and his merry men, but children ages 8 and up, teenagers, adults and many seniors can maneuver through the old trees as handily as Robin Hood’s band in the legends of medieval England. The “largest...
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Several times each week I stop at my favorite business, The French Confection, in Sandy Spring, Md. I usually have a ham sandwich on a mini-baguette, a mug of chocolate macadamia nut coffee, and a walnut chocolate chip cookie. I relax at one of their wrought iron tables to read, watch customers and what...
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You’re here by yourself?” a fellow traveler asked me on a recent cruise I took from Baltimore to Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Yes, indeed. I’ve been traveling by myself for a long time,” I reassured him. “I can go where and when I please; I don’t have to worry whether someone else is having a...
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One Sunday this past June I decided to check out the farmers’ market in Olney. It was beastly hot and humid, not a good day for browsing, but I parked, gathered up my cane and my shopping bag and set forth over the bumpy, uneven ground that led to the market. I’d only taken...
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Ever since I read “John Steinbeck: A Writer” by Jay Parini, I’ve longed to visit his literary landscape of Monterey County, Calif. I’ve yearned to see Cannery Row in Monterey, Monterey Bay, and especially Salinas, Calif., Steinbeck’s birthplace and now the home of the Steinbeck Center. The Center may be one of America’s less...
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I never knew my Grandmother Nora. She had died more than a quarter-century before I was born, but my mother used to tell me stories about her. One in particular I can still remember: “Your Grandmother Nora rode on a sidesaddle in a torchlight parade for William Jennings Bryan.” I pictured my handsome grandmother...
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