Tag: Family
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MY FATHER ON FATHER’S DAY
I barely knew my father, but the fragments I held—eccentric brilliance, deep-sea dreams, fleeting moments in Alaska—still shape how I think about fatherhood. He lived wildly and inconsistently, burning bridges and chasing ideas. In the end, I was just a lightbulb in a long line of missed connections.
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GRANDMA AND SINCLAIR LEWIS
I was filing away some of my grandparents’ papers the other day when I spotted a short letter addressed to my grandmother, Cecile Belle Adam, in October 1940. It was a simple letter about missing a dinner engagement or similar and it made me start wondering why do we bother keeping such old correspondence. Then I looked at who sent it and immediately thought: Could it be? Could it be THE Sinclair Lewis? The Nobel Prize laureate for literature? Not a chance, I thought, and filed it away. But it was…
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VALE SIMBA (1995-2016)
It is a tradition in Australia to throw a party on your 21st birthday. So we thought it would only be appropriate that we throw a party in April when our cat, Simba, turns 21. We were going to invite the neighbours and friends who looked after him over the years and we’d wear silly hats and sing songs. We wanted to celebrate the life of the family pet who gave us so much joy for 21 years. We won’t be throwing that party. Simba took his last breath today. His…
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AN EAGLE SCOUT
Day 7 of 7: Challenge on Nature Photography. Eagles, Amery, Wisconsin – 1973 For the past six days I have shared my appreciation of nature with you. For my final day in this nature photography challenge I’m going to share a personal story about how I developed that appreciation and my concerns that today’s generation doesn’t share that love of nature. I’ll bend the rules of the challenge a bit. I said at the beginning that I was more interested in writing stories than showing my pics. So I’m not going…
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FAREWELL INDIA
We were overwhelmed by the number of family members who came to the airport to bid us farewell and a safe journey home. Ravi and Minny left Gudur before dawn for a three-hour journey to the airport; Chandra, Sampath, Uma, Kumari came from afar the previous days and Usha, Santhosh, Raju and Sujatha came from Chennai. They all came to have one final chance to say goodbye. Imagine taking a six-hour round trip like Ravi and Minny did just to say farewell at the airport. We arrived to the airport early…
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A WEDDING IN KAKINADA
Padma and I jumped out of bed at 7.30 as we were told a car would drop by at 9.30 to pick us up and take us to the wedding. Lots to do to get organised. But we must have been so exhausted that we had forgotten we were in India. It was more like 11 before we finally left the hotel. No one seemed concerned that the wedding was set to start at 10, so I just sat back and enjoyed watching the street scenes of Kakinada as we drove…
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CALLING ALL WEBERTS
Grab a map of Germany and find Frankfurt in the centre of the country. Then trace your finger about 100 kilometres northeast and amongst the forests and fields you’ll find the tiny hamlet of Olberode. In 1364 four brothers Adolf, Christian, Frederick and Eckhart cleared land at the site and the village of Olberode was born. Now, 650 years later, Olderode is throwing a big anniversary party and is inviting its lost sons and daughters to return to their ancestral homelands this September. In the mid-1800s emigration fever struck Germany and…
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LOST SOMETHING?
Some people have a knack for losing things … not me. I can tell you countless stories of how things I have ‘misplaced’ – wallets, phones, sunnies – have miraculously found their way back to me. And now I can add to that list a one hundred dollar bill. Padma and I received a card from Josh for Christmas and upon opening it we found a crisp new one hundred dollar note. In the card, Josh wrote, the money MUST be used to treat to yourself to dinner at Jaime Oliver’s…
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AN OVERNIGHT IN HELSINKI
Noon in Helsinki. The sun hardly makes an appearance at 60 degrees North and barely gets much above the horizon. As we’re right near the winter solstice we only got about six hours of light, but it was hardly light as it was overcast and dark and dreary all day. A lot of ties to Russia in Helsinki. Here’s a statue of the Russian Emperor Alexander II right on the Senate Plaza in front of the White Lutheran Church. The Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral is a central landmark of the city. It…
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