I was steering my cart through Toronto’s most twee greengrocer when a stranger looked up from the organic broccoli and exclaimed in a booming voice, “Hey, I know! You’re the gal who used to live with that writer!” He meant J.D. Salinger, no ex-lover of mine but in the past much taken with girls of tender years, one of whom was my sister Joyce.

In the December issue of Vogue, a magazine I rarely buy but this month couldn’t resist, Hillary Clinton is profiled by Jonathan Van Meter, who closes his eye-opening interview with this question: why is she such an inspiration to women when Margaret Thatcher, who reached greater heights, was rarely described in those terms?

I’ve come to think the art of living, especially in old age, depends on rewarding the people who can meet your accelerating needs. It’s often possible to bully or needle others into helping you out, but at a huge personal cost. Who wants to spend time with a whiner who can’t stop lamenting her loneliness?

It’s been years since I last thought of Eleanor and Frank Milliken, who taught generations of students at my small-town high school quite a lot about their respective subjects—science in her case, Latin in his—and even more about life.

Hi I lost my mom 10 months now..I miss every… Posted by nanoo.

I’ve just joined a highly addictive website that keeps pulling me away from whatever I intended to be doing instead. No, not Twitter; that was yesterday’s time suck. My new online obsession is a far more exclusive affair, strictly for those of us who went to school in the acutely class-conscious town of Durham, New Hampshire.

My Mother was amazing. When I was girl I was… Posted by cherri.

For a couple of nerve-crunching months this past summer, I couldn’t tear myself away from the fractious, foul-mouthed, flat-out dispiriting debate over U.S. health care. Watching the epithets fly from sober, well-mannered Canada, where we think of health care as a citizen’s right and would no sooner pack a gun at a public meeting than abandon our firstborn child in the woods, I sometimes felt like a rubbernecker at the scene of a brutal car crash.

Have you heard the buzz about A Christmas Carol? No, not Disney’s fancy-schmancy animated version starring some guy named Carrey as Scrooge—the reading at Church of the Redeemer on December 6, in which Toronto stalwarts of the stage and page will bring Dickens’ classic to life with nothing but our voices and our affection for the ultimate Christmas yarn. I’m honoured to be among them.

You know the old saw “Never go to bed angry?” Don’t believe it. I learned in the first few years that there’s just no hurrying a truce when we both need some breathing room. Here’s why we’re still together, and what I’m still trying to learn.

In 1976, when we still believed in “having it all” and “glass ceiling” was a skylight with pretensions, I landed my first magazine job. Career gurus told me I should learn to act more like men. These days it’s career-minded men who are being told to emulate women. So says Men’s Health, the modern guy’s mentor on every aspect of manhood from getting laid to getting ahead.

I have this odd little habit that amuses my husband. To be honest, I’m told I have many odd habits. They involve bits of crumpled Kleenex, loose bottle caps, single socks emerging from the laundry…oh, enough of that stuff! Let’s talk about a happier subject, books and pens. The two go together, as far as I’m concerned.

There’s a depth of desire—fierce, wholehearted and relentless—that can seize the heart of a teenage girl and carry her away, perhaps forever. Some girls are so determined to be thin that they’ll starve for their notion of beauty. Others have staked their sense of self on joining violent gangs where rape is the price of admission. Laura Dekker, 14, is raising teen obsession to a loftier plane. She intends to become the youngest person to sail around the world solo.