When I was quite young, my parents took my brother and me to the Natchez Pilgrimage, a semi-annual tour of antebellum mansions organized by the Natchez Garden Clubs back in 1932 as a way to bring tourists to Depression-wracked Natchez, Miss. Club members dressed in crinolines and hoop skirts guided us through the white-columned mansions. A pageant was a major part of the Pilgrimage, with children dancing around a maypole, a king and queen, and tableaux depicting Natchez history. One of the tableaux, titled “Cotton Pickers,” depicted a “land of laughter, love, and song” where “fields … whiten (with ripe cotton bolls) and darkies … sing.”

A few weeks ago I was back in Natchez as part of a tour group cruising down the Mississippi. This time there were few “Gone with the Wind” moments. We toured a plantation, but we spent more time in the slave quarters than in the mansion, and even more time in the exhibit showing the hot, heavy and dangerous work of getting cotton picked and prepared for market before the ginning and baling were mechanized. On the way back to our boat, we stopped at Forks of the Road, site of the second-largest slave market in the U.S. back in the day.

You know how, every once in a while, you get that really deep question from somebody at a party: Which figure in history would you most like to meet?

I always have my answer ready for that doozy: Marco Polo.

Sen. John McCain is dying, but as his daughter, Meghan, noted, so is she and so are the rest of us. Therefore, his eventual passing isn’t noteworthy – at least not insofar as the certitude of it happening – because we’re all in the same boat.

My husband is something of a connoisseur of National Memorials, having been born and raised in Gettysburg, Pa. So on our recent visit to Hawaii, we fulfilled his long-held wish to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor.

As I walked into the family room, my heart stopped beating. There, in the middle of my new beige carpet, stood my 1-year-old daughter, Lauren, in a puddle of blue paint, smiling brightly. Instantly, my eyes began to sting with the tears that would soon come. We’d saved five years for that new flooring, and now it was ruined. Oh, the joys of being a parent.

Over the past 37 years, the one thing I’ve gotten really good at is crying when it comes to my four kids. It all began when I found out I was pregnant with Michelle. Having been told I may never have children after a miscarriage early in my marriage, you can imagine my ecstasy. Then, nine months later, blood-curdling wails rattled the hospital walls as I delivered her the old-fashioned way, sans drugs. No epidural or oral medication to ease the pain, just a stick between my teeth and Lamaze breathing. Crazy, I know, but back in the early ’80s, I took my new role as Mother Earth seriously. Jenni would soon follow, and my tears of joy became deeply profound.

I went to Japan this month with my mother and two nieces. It was my fourth trip to Japan, my first ever to see cherry blossoms in full bloom, and by extension my first experience with the nation’s excitement over these delicate, ephemeral trees.