So what if our highly romanticized image of a room full of dandies in knickers and powdered wigs bravely affixing their signatures to a document on the Fourth of July didn't happen exactly that way?
All in Holidays
So what if our highly romanticized image of a room full of dandies in knickers and powdered wigs bravely affixing their signatures to a document on the Fourth of July didn't happen exactly that way?
As we set out toward Normandy, the teacher stood in the front of the French tour bus and reminded the boys of D-Day in June of 1944. We passed German bunkers. We stopped at Utah Beach. And Omaha.
Then we went to the American cemetery.
Maybe it was the chocolate lab puppy. Perhaps it was the parrot.
No one seems to remember exactly what it was about the bachelor who moved into the townhouse next door that first attracted the attention of three inquisitive kids.
Felton J. Outland has never read a book about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II.
He's seen almost nothing that Hollywood has made of one of the ugliest episodes in U.S. Naval history.
When people talk about the horror, the sharks, the madness, he turns away.
Dad was generous to a fault with his family and friends, but pinched pennies in unlikely places. He cheerfully paid his taxes, lavished gifts on all of us, donated heavily to charity, but hated road tolls.
When I arrived, they were thrilled to see me in the way only your parents can be.
On Independence Day many of us still get goosebumps thinking about the brave signers of the Declaration of Independence who knew they could be signing their own death warrants by committing treason against the crown.
Together, the Dougherty family set out to see America, while facing their fears and growing stronger.
Think Outward Bound in a battered station wagon.
My mother was unforgettable. This chain-smoking, hardworking, sarcastic bank teller - queen of the drive-in window in our little New Jersey town - provided my brother and me with a cornucopia of memories.
For years, I've been offering assorted explanations for why I spent three years in Dublin during the early 1980s: To cover a war without going to the Middle East. To avoid appearing in public in a bathing suit. To cure a case of unsightly hand warts. To date guys with Irish accents.
The list changes but almost always contains a kernel of truth.
Big box stores hijacked our first president’s birthday to save space in advertisements. Outrageous.
On the morning of the Fourth of July, on a leafy side street in Trenton, N.J., a tall, gray-haired man with a mustache will open his front door, step outside and solemnly hang an American flag.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day and I feel it’s my duty to once again remind everyone that corned beef and cabbage isn’t remotely Irish. No one in Ireland eats that slop.
If you’re at my table, you’re getting the canned variety – whole berries in a bowl and the log on a plate.
My mother could climb trees, ice skate and walk miles in high heels. There was no way was I letting Superwoman get her hands on me with the worst kind of a confession: A belated one.
“Kerry you have GOT to come downstairs,” she began breathlessly. “Santa ate the cookies and the reindeer ate the carrots!”
Our childhood home cost my parents $7,000. It didn’t come with a refrigerator, let alone a fireplace.
Hey, it’s Christmas. We need something to unite us in righteous Yuletide indignation.
My absolute favorite Thanksgivings were spent at a wobbly card table covered by a freshly ironed bed sheet.