Catherine Gigante-Brown

TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) has been around for at least five centuries –– there’s got to be something to it.

Were you going to run into that cute guy John Williams on the way home? Would you see Anne Marie by the lockers and sort out what to do for the weekend? It was hit-or-miss, and that was the beauty of it. The breath-holding chance of it all. Now, our kids’ friends are as close as a keyboard stroke away. It’s too easy.

Makeup and I have always had a love/hate relationship: I love it; it hates me.

Alas, I am the lone female in a house full of men. Only two men, but they take up a lot of space.

The santero sent us off with a shopping list of ite

Food can be more than nourishing; it can be healing.

I try. I really do. But whenever I attempt to embrace my husband Peter’s Cuban culture, I always screw up.

Although I tried to convince myself that I wasn't racist, if the truth were told, I didn't like Muslims. Especially after 9/11.

We’ve pieced ourselves back together in a patchwork quilt of ragged emotions. The aftermath of 9/11 wasn’t easy for us, yet it was much easier than for some. People standing 50 feet away from Peter didn’t come home that night; he did.

I was 21 –– a Catholic, heterosexual college student, living at home in Brooklyn and still trying to discover who I was. At the crossroads of her life, Lorde knew exactly who she was. She was waging a war against cancer and sharing an old house in Staten Island with her kids and partner. But maybe we weren’t so different after all.