Archives What I Really Know

What I Really Know About Gossip: Small Towns

A reader writes about her family’s experience with small towns and gossip.

March 1, 2010

What I Really Know About Long Walks: The Upside of Looking Down

I have a special way of walking. I look down at the path instead of up and ahead—perhaps because I’m a tall woman who is used to stumbling on rocks and sticks and minor hillocks as I make my way. You could call me a down-looker, as opposed to the other half of humanity, the up-lookers.

February 18, 2010

What I Really Know About Tough Choices: Beating the Odds

I got right to the point. “Do you want to live?” I asked my mother. Full of life-support tubes and other medical paraphernalia, she could only nod her head vigorously in the affirmative.

February 11, 2010

What I Really Know About Tough Choices: Both Mothers

A Bulletin reader from Freehold, N.J., writes about the tough choices both her adoptive mother and birth mother made.

February 4, 2010

What I Really Know About Healthy Eating: Adventures in Foodland

My knowledge about good food is from my childhood. Today, this is called healthy eating. In my parents’ eyes it was simply fun.

January 28, 2010

What I Really Know About Healthy Eating: Papa’s Request

My grandfather was never short of appetite. A good Southern wife, my grandmother was happy to indulge him: fried chicken, beans with ham hocks, corn bread, chicken-fried steak, bacon. Several heart attacks later, my grandfather had multi-bypass surgery at age 75.

January 14, 2010

What I Really Know About Healthy Eating: Poor Man's Soup

Eventually I realized that healthy eating is more than the sum of the ingredients. Healthy eating is a spirit brought to the table, a mindset, an occasional splurge, knowing that some tastes are too good to miss.

December 29, 2009

What I Really Know About Holiday Travel: Pay It Forward

A reader writes what she really knows about holiday travel.

December 29, 2009

What I Really Know About Holiday Travel: A Layered Approach

We landed in Chicago on the dark morning of Dec. 24. I was bumped, and, with no prospects of another military flight, went to the civilian terminal. I was reminded at the counter—as if I had forgotten—that this was wartime and space was at a premium.

December 17, 2009

What I Really Know About Holiday Travel: The Spirit Is Out There

A reader from Texas writes about finding the holiday spirit, in this What I Really Know About Holiday Travel essay.

December 3, 2009

What I Really Know About Tough Choices: My Daughter, My Donor

A reader writes about her daughter's decision that saved the reader's life, for an essay about What I Really Know About Tough Choices.

November 25, 2009

What I Really Know About Tough Choices: My Father's Last Wishes

A reader writes about her daughter's decision that saved the reader's life for an essay about What I Really Know About Tough Choices..

November 25, 2009

What I Really Know About Family Get-Togethers: Brandy in the Soufflé

I loved the holidays as a kid­—all the family gathering together. I could see down the road from our kitchen window. “When will they get here?” I’d ask my mother for the millionth time. Sweating, with flour up to her elbows and a wisp of hair dangling across her face, she wouldn’t even look up from the pie dough spread out before her: “Not yet, I hope. I still have to make the pumpkin filling, and will you peel the potatoes?”

November 20, 2009

What I Really Know About Tough Choices: Stepping In

A reader writes about taking care of her dad for a What I Really Know essay on tough choices.

November 19, 2009

What I Really Know About Tough Choices: Why Not Me?

Time to move from the shadows of my easy chair of thinking and into the bright light of action. Time to tell my oncologist my decisions about breast cancer surgery.

November 5, 2009