God I love Anne Lamott.  On Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and any holiday for that matter, I post very carefully on social media.  On Mother’s Day this year Anne Lamott wrote “here is my annual Mother’s Day post, ONLY for those of you who dread the holiday, dread having strangers, cashiers and waiters exclaim cheerfully, mindlessly, “Happy Mother’s Day!” when it is a day that, for whatever reason, makes you feel deeply sad. This is for those of you who may feel a kind of sheet metal loneliness on Mother’s Day, who had an awful mother, or a mother who recently died, or wanted to be a...

One Father’s Day when I was about 13, I had the idea that my gift to my dad was to remove all the rocks from the dirt trench lining one side of our house, where my parents planned to put in rose bushes. My dad was going to use the rocks I removed to build a stone wall in front of our house, like the ones in New England my parents loved so much.  After one day of working in the dirt and rock pile I felt like one of the kids from the movie Holes, and was ready to throw in the towel. I was already regretting not just buying my dad a nice tie!  It took me all summer to finish that project but...