To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I’ve ever written.
No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
The only gift my dad ever bought me is still in my jewelry box. It died at 10 minutes to 11 decades ago, but the gold Caravelle watch keeps my dad alive. A watch isn’t about keeping time. It’s about stopping it.
While journalists cannot right every wrong, champion every cause or fix every problem, they can – through the written word – lift someone’s burden for a day, make some elderly woman on a bus smile or let them know they are noticed by someone.
When you have cancer, it’s like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn’t want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.
It takes courage to sit on a jury. How many of us want to decide the fate of another person’s life or freedom? How many of us want to hold that kind of power in our hands?
I say we all take the pledge and stay home. Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks for what you have, not to save a few dollars to get more.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
Back when I was dating, the dreaded C word was Commitment. As soon as most men found out I had a child, they ran. If I ever got close enough to say the words, ‘I love you,’ they ran faster.
Bakers get excited over aprons. I love the soft cotton ones with pockets like my gramma and mom wore. They always kept a hankie tucked in one pocket, which wasn’t sanitary, but was comforting to the child who needed a tear or nose wiped.
We all have a personal pool of quicksand inside us where we begin to sink and need friends and family to find us and remind us of all the good that has been and will be.
I once heard someone say that prayer is more than words. It’s a stance you take, a position you claim. You throw your body against the door to keep the demons from advancing and stay put until they go away.
Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
Each day is a precious gift to be savored and used, not left unopened and hoarded for a future that may never come.
There’s so much living to be squeeze into the cracks of one little day. You can make someone laugh, smile, hope, sing, think.
Over prepare, then go with the flow.
However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it’s in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.