I don’t drive friends to the airport, bring them treats from my kitchen or even remember their birthdays but I have my own way of honouring their presence in my life. I write standout letters of recommendation. Here’s how I do it.

Although I’ve never Twittered or even texted and am rapidly acquiring the knees of a nonagerian, I share a bond with kids who have yet to take a legal drink. Some lowlife has stolen my iPod.

I once saw an ad for a designer handbag that, aside from all its other irresistibly of-the-moment features, was “big enough for everything except your issues with your mother.” We modern women still have enough of those to fill an old-fashioned steamer trunk. Writer Sarah Treleaven unpacks the maternal trunk with me in an interview for her “How to Be Happy” series.

Lately I’ve been thinking of a man who’s lying in a hospital bed, incoherent and minus a leg. It’s been almost a week now since he was maimed in a stand-off with a taxi driver, and he’s still in no condition to tell police exactly what happened late last Friday night on a picturesque downtown corner flanked on one side by a cafe and on the other by a former bread factory, recently converted into lofts.

After close to 40 years with the man I love, there are times when the sweetest thing he can tell me is, “I’m going out of town on business for a couple of days.”

I feared that my son’s adolescence would reduce me to screaming, fist-shaking fury. I had no idea that the dread teen years would be my best years as a mother.

The more I learn about Sarah Palin, the less I trust her. But I’m not here to tell you why I’ve hardened my heart. I’m actually rushing to Sarah’s defense. Remember that dishy story about her thinking Africa is a country? Turns out it’s a fiction planted on the blogosphere by a fake policy wonk named Martin Eisenstadt.

Sometimes I look back on my son’s teenage years and wonder how we ever got through. It’s not that we had a hell-raiser on our hands, just that there are so many ways for a promising, likeable, headstrong kid to fall from the precipice of adolescence. A kid like Brandon Crisp, age 15. His funeral in Barrie, Ontario, is expected to draw 1,000 mourners who loved him, searched high and low for him or simply know in their hearts that what happened to Brandon could happen to their own child.

I could have sworn the place to be on the momentous night of November 4, 2008 was Grant Park in Chicago. But I’ve only just found out that a joyous crowd of Bob Dylan fans were celebrating change at the University of Minnesota, in a sell-out concert by the man with the big white hat, the sunken cheeks, the ruined growl and the visionary grasp of the tumultuous American story.

Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve…there must be all kinds of ways I fell short this week. Enough guilt-tripping, I say. I can think of three small, good things that I almost didn’t bother to do because they seemed so inconsequential. And sometimes it’s the little things that people remember.

On Tuesday night along with countless millions all over the world, I held my breath in front of the TV, waiting for the moment I never thought I’d see in my lifetime: a black President-elect, Barack Obama, addressing an exultant crowd where friends wept in each other’s arms and exhausted but awe-struck children sat on their parents’ shoulders to get a good look at a spectacle that will linger in their minds until they leave this earth. I have always been something of a loner, but yesterday the windows in my head blew open and I saw myself part of that throng.

When my mother took her last breath, my sister was… Posted by Carol Harrison.

Although Hallmark doesn’t know it yet, April is grandchild month around here: a new grandbaby on the way, another for my sister-in-law Linda, plus an essay of mine in a terrific forthcoming anthology Eye of My Heart: the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of being a Grandmother.