Childhood | Beth Byrnes

Winged flowers

Posted on September 2, 2016 20 Comments

When I walk through our family room in the morning, someone says in a bright and hopeful voice, “I love you”. No, not my spouse who is usually at work by this time, but my companion Psyche. And she means it. Recently, I saw a study on what makes for longevity. It was conducted by […]

To be or not to be … a parent

Posted on July 12, 2014 6 Comments

When I was on jury duty, we had a lot of downtime waiting on the benches outside the courtroom until our case resumed. In a previous post, I mentioned that the halls would reverberate with the anguished discussions of people involved in contentious divorces and child custody battles. I often sat next to a fellow juror in […]

Till death (all of) us do part

Posted on March 23, 2014 32 Comments

This is what I would consider a ‘think piece’ and it is still a thinking-in-progress, really my mind working out loud, so please indulge me as I spin this. I have the rare opportunity to be forced out of my comfortable niche and into a foreign environment, little different from the one that Margaret […]

Cherchez la faim

Posted on February 25, 2014 37 Comments

There is so little time to do anything frivolous these days. One thing I miss is listening to NPR. When I visit my relatives in North Carolina, I stay with Annabelle’s parents, two college professors to whom I am related on my mother’s side. They have two big-screen TVs but those are disconnected most of […]

Treasures lost

Posted on February 11, 2014 16 Comments

This is a totally spontaneous post because I happened to read about two people who I really admired passing away this month. Completely tangentially, we decided to try subscribing to the LA Times again, to see if it was any better than the last time we had it delivered. Geoff grew up with this paper, […]