Never mind that she has dark blond hair and light blue eyes and the fairest of skin. Or that in four weeks she'll be 17. Or that she was in love, seriously in love, and that was good, that was great, but then it was bad and now, well?
Never mind.
Read MoreI haven't put him in my dead book yet. A hard word, "dead." A word you want to camouflage with softer syllables: deceased, departed, passed on. But dead is the right word because dead is hard, people you love not in the next room, or the next town, or on the telephone saying, "Do you know that I'm the only one in the world who can call you daughter?"
Read MoreHe was a picture on a wall at my Great-aunt Mary's house, a son who went to war and never came home. Aunt Mary was sad all the time. Uncle Pete was strange. My grandmother said this son was their only child. I was an only child. I knew how sad my mother would be without me…
Read MoreHe arrives at the door on a perfect spring day wearing a helmet, riding shorts and a grin that is his signature. With some people, you notice their hats, ties, scarves. With Antonio, you notice his smile. It's after 5, after work, and he has pedaled from Brockton to Canton, a distance that takes 20 minutes to drive, without traffic. ``It's a beautiful day,'' he says. ``So warm. So nice.'' And I look at him and think, he's right. It is.
Read MoreThey stood at the bottom of an escalator at T.F. Green Airport in Providence Thursday afternoon, three little boys and their grandparents, the oldest boy no more than 4. He was holding a sign that spelled out with different-colored crayons, ``WELCOME HOME, MOM AND DAD.'' The sign was bigger than he was. I wasn't the only one riding the escalator who smiled and then swallowed hard seeing this. A lady who'd been on my flight wiped tears from her face. Even the hardest faces softened. I didn't hear the grandmother say, ``Look. There they are!'' But I watched her point and saw the boys - all three of them - find their parents in the crowd and light up the way only children can, everything that matters to them on that escalator coming back home to them…
Read MoreI wasn't surprised when I read that John Kerry was taking a break this week from the hard job of campaigning (talking out of both sides of your mouth CAN be exhausting) and jetting off in his own private plane to his $ 4.9 million Idaho getaway to spend down time with his lovely wife, Teresa. I wasn't even shocked to learn that his very luxurious bungalow is just one of five palatial homes he and his wife own. Hey, it's all relative, if you know what I mean…
Read MoreTracey Newhart WILL get into Johnson and Wales. The powers that be will eventually see the light, because the light, in this case, is unflattering and neither the Commonwealth of Massachusetts nor Rhode Island's premier culinary arts school wants to be seen as the bad guy, keeping a young woman who has tried her hardest from fulfilling her dream.
Read MoreWe added our granddaughter, Lucy, to the collage this year. But not sitting on Santa's knee. It snowed. She has a cold. So we sat her under the tree and clicked away making funny noises and funnier faces until she rewarded us with one of her blink-and-you'll-miss-it smiles. It's her first Christmas and Santa or no Santa, it was a Kodak moment….
Read MoreLast Sunday, in Roman Catholic churches around the world, the Gospel told the familiar tale of a rich man's quest for Paradise.
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," Jesus said.
This is a bold statement. But what does it mean? That the rich are doomed? That in the afterlife the poor finally get what they never had on Earth?
Read MoreI never understood. All the times Maureen told me she couldn't do this and she couldn't do that, I gave her a hard time. "What do you mean you're cooking a meal for your mother's anniversary Mass." Or her brother's. Or some other deceased relative or friend…
Read MoreThe piano sat in the living room for 33 years. A baby grand, it took up a lot of space. It was old, it didn't hold a tune, it needed to be refinished, but I loved it - not just for the notes that filled the house whenever it was played, but for its history. It was my in-laws' piano before it was mine. My sister-in-law played and my father-in-law sang and strummed a ukulele, and friends would come by to visit or to have dinner and inevitably end up around the piano. For years, it made music for parties that seemed to run one right into the next.
Read MoreHe never believed in signs. When I told him about my mother and the bird, he just smiled. "It was more than coincidence," I would argue. And he would give me a look that may as well have been a pat on the head. My friend, Father Coen, had no trouble believing in the Resurrection, the Transfiguration, the Ascension, transubstantiation and eternal life. But he couldn't buy the simple fact that a lone bird flying in a barely open window on a cold November day was a sign that my mother was safe and that she had found a way to tell me…
Read MoreIt's strange what your brain decides to remember, what it puts in first place and shuffles to the head of the class. It's not rule-bound like a teacher. The brain doesn't select the smartest or the best looking or even the cleverest memory to take out of mothballs. It's almost as if it reaches into a grab bag of life and pulls out whatever it finds. A snippet of conversation here. A splice of an afternoon there.
Read MoreEvalyn had her bone-marrow transplant a month ago. The words take a single breath. One exhale and they're said. Even their meaning fails to hint at all a transplant entails. The word is ordinary. Transplant evokes an ivy grown too big for its pot, upended and plunked down in a bigger, prettier container; or a sprawling bush dug up from the front yard and moved to the back. Transplants are a part of gardening. A little sun, a lot of water and transplanted things grow sturdier. Even a human transplant is just a person raised in one place who now lives in another.
Read MoreNothing had prepared her for this. Jennifer Johnstone was a healthy 26-year-old, 35 weeks pregnant with her second child, a girl, whom she and her husband Scott had already named Madison. She had ultrasound pictures of Madison too. One showed her so tiny that it was difficult to see her as anything but an outline. In another, Jennifer could almost see her daughter's smile. "This is your baby sister," she'd tell Cameron, now age 3. "Do you want to feel her kick?" she'd ask, taking his hand and guiding it with her own.
Read More"The Dairy Queen has, what do you call those things?" Ron asks his wife of 36 years.
"McFlurries?"
"No. No. It's a 'd' word."
"T? Tiramisu?"
"Not 't,' Maryann! 'D.' " Ron and Maryann are visiting from Alabama. They are in the family room sitting on the couch eating Healthy Choice Coffee Almond Fudge ice cream. The Healthy Choice apparently has triggered memories of a less healthy choice. The subject of the Dairy Queen has come out of nowhere.
Read MoreSomewhere, on an old home movie, still on a reel, are seconds of Amy doing cartwheels in my garage. The film is dark, so her face is hidden. But you can see clearly her small, thin body, her short, straight hair and her dark-rimmed glasses, which, even when she wasn't doing cartwheels, were always slipping down her face. Amy did cartwheels the way she did everything, as if she had to do as many as she could, while she could. As if she knew she had to set records in record time…
Read MoreIf life is a train ride, with all of us on our own, each in individual cars, bumping and chugging and sometimes careening down the tracks, then my time with Wilmha was a series of quick but welcome visits that happened many miles and many years ago. We were in the middle of our ride when we met, the theoretical middle, miles of life already lived and, barring cataclysm, miles more to go.
Read MoreAunt Mary wasn't my aunt. But that's what I called her. That's what most everyone who met her through her nephew, George, called her.
"This is my Aunt Mary," he'd say. And the name stuck, for it was a perfect fit for a woman who was like a favorite aunt - the one who always likes what you're wearing and praises your food and admires what you've done to your house and tells you you have nice children, even on days when they're not being so nice.
Read MoreYou wonder what makes an ordinary day stand out in memory. Who takes the mental snapshots that we see when we look back through time? There are no real snapshots recording the day, because there was nothing special about it. Nothing special at all.
Read More
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