Darby Girl's Perspective

I guess everyone loves a parade and yesterday I watched Downingtown Borough's Christmas Parade. A lot of people say they live in Downingtown but like me they have a D'town post office but live in Uwchlan Twp. Lionville, Upper Uwchlan Twp., etc.. The Borough of Downingtown is not very big actually and like my hometown, Darby Borough, it is an old mill town. Whenever I am in Downingtown Borough I see the similiarities to the Darby Borough of my youth. Many of the residents are members of the Firehouse, the Moose Club holds "Family Night Dinner" on Wednesdays and the VFW always has some activity or event going on. There is a diner, a jeweler, a bunch of hairdressers where the older women still get a wash and set. So, naturally, I thought of Darby while watching the Christmas Parade and for a few minutes I was in Darby, the band in Blue could have been DC Marching Band and the Clowns teasing the kids could have been anyone's Dad. Problem was, like in a weird dream of...

I don't have a Christmas decorating plan but it invariably ends up happening the weekend after Thanksgiving since I've had a few days off and the usual laundry, vacuum, clean the toilets, that occurs every Saturday was already done on Wednesday. So, the boxes come up from the basement, their peculiar but familiar scent heralding the season as effectively as the angel Gabriel. There are delicate angels and vintage snowmen and garland and mistletoe and odd pieces of things that need to be glued or discarded but end up back in the box unused and unrepaired. There is a box of Christmas books from when the kids were little, our bedtime reading for many years of Decembers. I know it is time for them to go but the feelings they evoke are stronger even than the ones I feel when unwrapping the old tin cans that my grandmother used to store her pizzelles. I am not sure what to do with the books since I don't intend to give them away and it seems silly to leave them out. We are a fam...

I make promises that I cannot keep. You wouldn't suspect. I am so reliable to my family and friends. But I do it nonetheless. I promise that I will quit smoking when I know it is a promise that I am not willing to keep. Maybe I should just promise to think about quitting. I do that all the time anyway. I promise to listen better but I am incapable and often have to ask either Ali or Mark Anthony to repeat the story. This is not fair. A story is not half as good the second time around. They tell me many stories. Maybe I should ask them to tell me only one story a day. Maybe then I could listen better. I wonder what story they would choose. I promise Danielle and Caesar and I used to promise Mark, when he was still alive, that I would write a book. Danielle and Caesar still ask every few months about "my book". I tell them it is fine. I write a little here and there. Sometimes I am impatient and ask them how I am supposed to write a book when no one has clean underwear...

“I’m strict,” Dottie Sandusky told the court with a proud tilt of her chin. “I like for things to go in a certain way." Don't we all? Life has a way of teaching us, usually sooner rather than later, that we have very little control over the biggest things in our lives. For me that lesson was learned after the birth of my first child. I imagined how our days would unfold, my husband, baby and me. I mentally created the idyllic holidays around the fire, the prize winning Halloween costumes and I looked forward to an idealized version of the modern family. Until day two. Two days home from the hospital, late into a Saturday evening, well, Sunday morning, after rocking and nursing and singing to a screaming baby for over an hour or so there was silence. Finally asleep. I glanced down in the darkened room at the little stranger and was astounded to find her not asleep, but wide eyed, staring deeply into my own eyes. This was not the baby of my imagination but a living, bre...

By mid-afternoon on this, unusually warm for January Friday, workers from Radnor to Mayfair, in cubicles and behind Wawa counters were discussing the news from the Diocese of Philadelphia. The announcement culminated a week of speculation about the fate of our Catholic schools. Nowhere was the news more painful than on the “hill of Drexel” for there sits what was once described as “one of the finest buildings in the diocese”, Archbishop Prendergast High School for Girls and the more modern structure, Monsignor Bonner High School for Boys. After nearly 60 years of educating the young men and women of Delaware County, the schools will close in June. These bare facts, reported throughout the region this evening, seem flimsy and irrelevant to what the schools mean to the students there now as well as those of us long ago graduated. Talk of budgets, restructuring and dwindling enrollment belie the true impact the schools closing will have on its current students as well as the commun...