Benjamin Franklin is quoted as having said, “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.”  If you think Ben’s was a cynical view of human nature, you may wish to examine your own track record.  How many times have you broken a confidence, and to what degree? 

I’ll come clean and admit that, [...]

As precious gifts, children are meant to be cherished.  Innocent human beings, they look to their elders for life’s basic necessities and, just as importantly, guidance, love, and protection.  These truths should be obvious.  It boggles my mind, then, when I witness mindless acts that place little ones in danger.

Driving down a busy commercial street [...]

Given the state of the world, I think that children of all ages would be prudent to revisit some of the core lessons that our parents taught us when we were younger.  If you were like me, you probably sloughed off much of this advice and only took it to heart when your parents’ fears [...]

As socially advanced as we like to think we are, the onus of child rearing still seems to fall largely upon the shoulders of women.  We tend to focus, therefore, on the struggles faced by single moms, while ignoring those confronted by men forced to raise children alone.  In some ways, this huge responsibility can [...]

Just about half a century ago, The Kinsey Report, the runaway primer “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask,” and the Free Love movement all brought sex from its hiding place in the bedroom out into the open.  Ricky and Lucy slept in separate beds, but the Brady Bunch [...]

Although not celebrities whose public faux pas, such as wardrobe malfunctions, are exposed on national TV, we’ve all suffered our share of bloopers.  Who among us has not exited a public restroom with toilet paper trailing behind us or stuck beneath our shoes?  Have your pants ever split, or worse, at an inopportune moment?  Maybe you [...]

Playing dress up is one of life’s little guilty pleasures.  Almost every little girl has surreptiously ransacked her mother’s belongings in order to appropriate them, usually on rainy days when we were bored, or when our mothers’ backs were turned.  Who can forget the slightly forbidden thrill of easing open our moms’ closets to select [...]

Dating is the process by which one person gets to know another better.  It begins with physical attraction, for if the parties are not attracted to each other, what is the point of dating?   Because it is often hard to hard to judge a book by its cover, and because even the prettiest and most [...]

Once upon a time, a string tied around one of our fingers signaled something important that we needed to remember. As our brains age along with the rest of our bodies, we find ourselves reaching more often for that string to tie around our fingers.  Unfortunately, like the jokes surrounding this practice, many of us [...]

The other day a co-worker reiterated the title of the old Phil Collins song to me, Just Another Day in Paradise.  As the theme of the tune revolved around the impoverished, my colleague’s statement was as sarcastic as the song title, for he was having a rotten day.  His cynicism prompted me to examine some [...]