The worst thing about the movie "Angela's Ashes" isn't that it's a bad film. That it's too long and grim and plodding and depressing, and that it's an indictment of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Irish themselves doesn't matter. It's only a movie. It'll be gone from conversation and the big screen in a few weeks and relegated to video stores a few months later.
Read More
Two weeks until Valentine's Day and I still have my Christmas decorations up. We're not talking a few decorations, a snowman here and a poinsettia there. We are talking Christmas from head to toe, the creche, the garland, holly, wreaths, the lighted Christmas scene, the collection of Santas. We are talking cards still taped to the walls. Only the fa-la-las are missing.
Read More
JUPITER, Fla. - At a friend's condo, ten stories above the ground, we are transported from winter to summer. The condo is all glass and balcony, the indoors like the outdoors only with comfortable furniture. Our bedroom faces east. The kitchen faces west. For the four days we are here, we wake up early every morning to watch the sun rise and hurry back each evening to see it set.
Read More
In the words of my good friend Anne King, who owns a hair salon, not a baseball team: "It boggles the mind." Derek Jeter, the 25-year-old Yankee shortstop is about to sign a seven-year $ 118.5 million contract and one can only wonder, has this country gone mad? Money doesn't fall from the sky nor does George Steinbrenner have a printing press in his office cranking out whatever he needs to keep his players happy. There's only so much hard cash in this world and when ballplayers get fat, other people - people with real jobs - get taken.
Read MoreI dress with care when I go to see Ann. I stand at the closet door and think about what to put on and try extra hard not to wear black. Ann says I wear too much black. "You need some color," she insists. "You should wear reds and blues and purples."
Read MoreI thought THE LOOK had gone the way of penny candy and flavor straws. "What look?" I expected people to say when I asked about it. But instead there was all this nodding and smiling and instant recognition. "Oh, I know THE LOOK" and "No one could give THE LOOK like my mother." And "You know what? My mother still gives me THE LOOK."
Read More
God forbid that Conolrad alert is ever for real. Barely a dusting of snow, and civilization as we know it caved Thursday morning. The ground was hardly wet when traffic skidded to a stop. I think we've all gone soft. I counted four abandoned cars on a four-mile stretch of Interstate 95 before 9 a.m. You could see the white lines on the road, there was that little snow. And you could see for a mile. This was not a whiteout. This was snow, pretty white crystals falling from the sky, not fallout from a nuclear bomb.
Read MoreWhat has happened to shame?
Isn't anyone ashamed anymore? I know embarrassed is still around (see our president). And humiliated (see Peter Blute). And sorry because people (even Jane Swift, finally) are generally sorry when they get caught doing not quite the right thing. (There is, of course, no really wrong thing these days.) As for shame, it's a word so out of use that it will soon have "archaic" next to it in the dictionary. I can imagine a child a few years from now picking up an old book and reading, "He hung his head with shame" and thinking shame must have been some kind of heavy trinket people used to wear in the old days.
Read More
Michelle and Victor Clerico speak in whispers because sound hurts their son's ears and they touch him gently because pain comes with even the lightest touch. Frankie is 5 and handsome with thick red hair and smooth pale skin and a heart as big as he is small. He tells his parents that when he dies he's going to Heaven and that God is going to give him wings. He tells his little sister: "Don't be sad. When I'm in heaven you won't be able to see me but I'll keep an eye on you."
Read More
I never lived in Codman Square yet in every sense of the phrase, I grew up there. I was 11 and in the seventh grade, a commuter student at St. Mark's in Dorchester and as lonely as I would ever be. That's when I discovered the square and the library that overlooked it. Every day when the neighborhood kids went home to lunch and the other commuters ate their waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches in the gloomy auditorium, I walked up the hill past Girl's Latin to the Codman Square library.
Read More
ABOUT COLUMNS ARCHIVES WHAT’S ON MY MIND GALLERY IT’S NEVER TOO LATE BOOKS CONTACT
Copyright © 2020 Beverly Beckham
Web Design by: SKILLARA | Marketing + Media
