Growing up in Philly in the early 80’s, I knew two families who had a pool. One was a church elder and his family. He was one of the Three Kings in our Christmas pageant and sang with an amount of vibrato that reduced small children (or at least me) to hysteria. Thankfully, a church…
Author: Esther Baird
A Whale of a Song
By Esther C. Baird First published in the Chronicle Transcript May 7, 2021 This last April vacation week our family went to Maui, Hawaii. Going to Hawaii from the East Coast is never an easy undertaking, but doing it in COVID times is like getting the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Well, except…
Longing For Human Connection
By Esther C. Baird First Published in the Chronicle Transcript Apr. 29, 2021 This year has been low on random human interactions. We’ve been locked away from the side comments of our favorite grocery clerk, from the gas attendant who dances at night by the light of the pumps, and from the sing-songy barista at…
Teens in the city
By Esther Baird First Published in the Chronicle Transcript, Apr. 5, 2021 It’s happening, the winter of our totally supercharged discontent is fading. There are signs of life including crocuses, daffodils, buds and the return of ticks to let us know that, “we have not,” to quote a very important movie, “gone quietly into the…
Everything’s gone to seed (not stink) bug
By Esther C. Baird First published in the Chronicle Transcript Mar. 13, 2021 So it’s been a year since the world plunged into a pandemic. I know you may want to talk about when you first bought a mask, or the last live event you went to, or that time you stood in line at…
All Systems a Go Go
By Esther C. Baird First published in the Chronicle Transcript, March 11, 2021 Well Regular Readers, the time has come. Our daughter, whose life has been chronicled in this column since 2006, when she was 15 months old, now has her driver’s license. You may recall last summer when I was skeptical about the learning…
Here there be viruses
First published in the Chronicle and Transcript By Esther Baird. Well Regular Readers, I’m typing this from day nine of quarantine, or to be more precise, isolation. When you are a close contact to a person with COVID-19 you quarantine. When your whole family goes down like a raging infectious ball of corona-fire, you isolate….
A Sub Kind of Day
By Esther C. Baird First published in the Chronicle & Transcript 2/4/2021 I’ve long said I’d wrap our two girls in bubble wrap if they could go to school in person during COVID times. Whatever it takes, I am willing to pitch in; which is how I found myself as a Pre-K substitute aide last…
At Home with an Atypical Christmas
First published in the Chronicle and Transcript Dec 19, 2020 I’m not sure how your holiday season is going, what with the pandemic and all, but it’s certainly not normal and we are finding ourselves doing things we never imagined. Like, just for example, hanging out in the poinsettia corner of Home Depot, sitting on…
Road Tripping To Thankfulness
Well, it’s Thanksgiving week here in good ol’ 2020 and we’re finding new and unusual things to be thankful for. For example, we recently took a road trip to that fabled destination that lights up the eyes of teenagers across America: Western Pennsylvania. Hey, it was new to us and, therefore, exciting. We planned a…