family
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Do You Believe in Magic?
- March 24, 2019
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
5 Comments
I was at a chateau in the Burgundy region of France for my cousin’s wedding when a butterfly flew in my room. It hovered there for a few minutes, flapping its orange and black wings, just hanging around, and then it flew outside and landed on the hundreds-years-old stone façade, taking in the view. I
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The 98.1% Jew
- August 7, 2017
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
In my never-ending, self-absorbed and completely-boring-to-any-other-human-being desire to understand myself, my family and my history, I decided to take not one, but two DNA tests. I ordered the kits and dutifully filled the test vials with saliva (not as easy as it sounds), and then waited for the results. Having explored my family tree to
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Always Drive Defensively and Other Lessons
- July 25, 2016
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
The summer I was 15, my grandfather gave me my first driving lessons. He and my grandmother had driven from Boca Raton, Florida to San Diego, California and rented a house on Coronado Island for the summer. It was my family’s first summer living in Los Angeles, and what with adjusting to our new home
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What Men Do In a Midlife Crisis
- March 3, 2016
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
When I was 19 years old, my father and mother separated for good, after years of going back and forth, trying to make their marriage work. Having married at the tender ages of 20 and just 21, a week after graduating from college, it’s not all that surprising that their relationship couldn’t be sustained for
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Why I Kept My Kids Busy During the Summer
- June 29, 2015
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
There were not a lot of lazy days during the summer when my kids were growing up. A week after school ended and a week before it started they were home, without plans or schedules, but for the most part, most of their summer days were spent in organized activities, from pre-school through middle school.
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Why Housework Matters
- June 15, 2015
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
There was an op-ed piece in the The New York Times entitled “The Case for Living in Filth” about the role men and women play in the management of the home. Among the writers and philosophers cited in the article are Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir, one indication that the topic of housework and the
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Selling Our Home of 24 Years – Part One
- April 20, 2015
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family, midlife
I know this place. For twenty-four years we’ve lived here. I arrived, almost thirty years old with my one-year-old baby girl in my arms. I had fought moving to this suburban community for two years, but my husband was right – it was the perfect place to raise a family. So that’s what we did.
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Don Draper, My Father and Me
- March 30, 2015
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
When Sally Draper got out of the car on an episode of Mad Men in 2014 entitled “A Day’s Work” and turned to her father, the handsome and tortured Don Draper, and said, “I love you, Dad. Happy Valentine’s Day,” I saw my father and me. I saw the love that she felt, despite her father’s mistakes, neglect,
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Photographic Memory 2.0
- January 12, 2015
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
Along with the zillions of other things that computers have changed and redesigned in our lives, one of the most pervasive is the art of the photograph. Once upon a time, the process of taking, developing, labeling and archiving photos was a labor-intensive and tactile process. There was some mystery to it all – we
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Sometimes, Life Takes a Toll
- January 6, 2015
- Posted by: Sharon Greenthal
- Category: family
Every year we spend Christmas with my husband’s side of the family. There are 16 of us, and for the most part, this is the only time we see each other all year. The grandchildren are nearly all adults now, and the “kids” are all, except for one, eligible for AARP cards. What used to