From "Young at Heart" to "The Way You Look Tonight," "Love and Marriage" to "My Funny Valentine," there was a song for every mood, every time of day, every event. I, like a million girls before me and a million since, fell in love with Sinatra through his voice, and what a voice it is.

There is a rhythm to the baseball season that fits neatly into the lives of devoted fans of the game. It is nearly religious. Just as you can count on Easter Sunday, Yom Kippur and Kwanzaa popping up on your calendar, you can also count on pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training.

I have been to a few concerts in my life, but for some reason something always went wrong. I once stood on a ledge outside the mezzanine section in Madison Square Garden to watch Bob Seger. I hovered there, my right arm locked around the railing, as I listened to the music and tried very hard not to fall to my death into the crowd below.

Blanche is so old that she knows everything. The heat of the June day rises up from the land. Everything smells like fresh air and earth, black and loamy. The strawberries are ripe, like red buttons beneath green leaves.

Enough already! You are stressed out. Overworked. Underpaid. And buried under your day-to-day life. Sure, you could practice yoga, try to eat healthier and learn to rest more. But how about, for one brief moment, recapturing your youth. For me, these six things do the trick.

Seems you can't drive a mile on any main road without almost running over a guy in a unitard riding a bicycle. I don't have anything against this activity. In fact, I used to love biking. Of course, things were different then.

I grew up in the 1970s. I didn't wear a bike helmet. I didn't even own a bike helmet. I am not certain if manufacturers made them for my type of social, local biking. I biked all over town, helmet-free, hair blowing in the wind, thinking nothing of it.

When I was 5 years old and saw Annette Funicello dance on the "Mickey Mouse Club," I felt as if I were witnessing perfection. Even viewed on my family's boxy, black and white television, she was like a goddess.

Looking at the calendar, it's already spring. Yet the calendar is irrelevant here in Chicago, as it offers no help in predicting the arrival of warmer weather. In fact, I acknowledge the arrival of the season the same way every year. Like magic, a day comes when the streets and sidewalks seem to be overflowing with beautiful women wearing shorts, skirts or dresses.

I have been in three major car accidents in my life -- two of my own making and a passenger in the third. Having survived all three I have always felt that I am not going to die in one -- I just hope God doesn't take that as a challenge. This is the story of the first one.

Life, as it always has been for her, is what you make it. If you choose to let things get you down, they will. It's all about the attitude that you bring to the table and learning to live in life's positive cracks even when they are hard to find amid the darker disappointments.

Bobby Rogers of the Miracles died recently at the age of 73. As lyrics from 'Shop Around,' 'Tracks of My Tears,' 'You've Really Got a Hold on Me' and 'I Second That Emotion' reverberate in my head, I'm reminded of a different emotion that I'd shared with Rogers and the fellow Miracles in 1967.

Despite all of the hard work, the stinky, slimy, exhausted-ness of having a baby, there are times when I miss it so much it's as if something is pulling on my uterus, some external force telling me I NEED a baby.

On my back, I carry a three-bedroom, 2,200 square foot house. It all looks great. It would be great to live here with someone. But that is not going to happen, so I'm trying to get out of here.