Category: Love & Relationships

“Those we love are never really lost to us - we feel them in so many special ways. Through friends they always cared about and dreams they left behind. In beauty that they added to our days...in words of wisdom we still carry with us and memories that never will be gone. Those we love are never really lost to us - for everywhere their special love lives on.” - Amanda Bradley This Christmas, while strolling through a store to buy my wife a new pair of slippers, I stumbled upon something quite unexpected. It was a stand-alone plaque which read “Soulmates” across the top, with a picture frame inset right beneath it. On the left-hand side read the following quote: “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.…

“Always be there for the person who is always there for you.” – Unknown On a recent night of channel surfing, I heard the following sentiment: “As we grow older, our Christmas lists get smaller and we find out that the things we really want can’t be bought.” For many, that list would include unconditional love, acceptance, commitment, compassion and having someone be there to share in your life. “Buying” something is an easy task – finding a person possessing all those characteristics is invaluable and difficult. But not impossible. As I started writing this post, it reminded me of a song I always find myself coming back to year after year without fail – Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 hit Time After Time. It’s one of those songs which often leaves me…

When I was a little kid growing up in the early 1980’s, I remember being fascinated with the fictional superheroes on television and in comic books who possessed extraordinary magical powers. For me there was Batman, whom I first discovered while watching re-runs of Adam West prancing around in tights in the 1960’s action/adventure show. As cheesy as the program might have seemed, there was something alluring about “The Bat Cave” and “The Bat Mobile” – not to mention the neat tricks he had hiding up his sleeves.  I even remember one Halloween, excitedly dressing up as my favorite caped crusader - one of the few Halloweens when I actually wanted to keep my costume on! But my allegiance to the superhero community didn’t stop with Batman. Other favorites included…

“A strange thing is a memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.”  - Grandma Moses Nowhere is a memory better captured than in a photograph. For some families, their legacy in pictures is chronicled in hard-covered, highly organized photo albums, haphazardly tossed in shoe boxes and old dresser draws, or arranged in clearly defined folders on local hard drives. Regardless of how you choose to store and ultimately retrieve these photographs, they provide you with a memory, trigger an emotion and remind you of those who’ve sacrificed so much so that the next generation could prosper. My father-in-law…