She is upstairs cleaning her room, the 21-year-old. The new college graduate is out, out, damn spotting childhood and adolescence to make way for the working woman she has become.
Necessity has forced her to do this. She can't fit what she brought home, what she has collected in the past four years, in a room that is a storehouse for her first 17.
Read MoreTodd was playing in a yard. Kristen was jogging on a country road. Michael was driving to work. Chris was driving home from work. Lisa was getting in her car. Michelle was crossing the street. All of them children. All of them alive one minute, dead or soon to be dead the next.
Christopher Baldwin, 19, back home in Somerset after his first year of college, was rollerblading last Sunday night when he was killed. Police say a 1985 Camaro struck him from behind, pitched him onto the car's roof and hurled him into a stone wall.
Read MoreHe was my mother's uncle, not mine. I hardly knew him. But I knew about him. He was part of the family lore. "Stop slouching. You'll look like Uncle Pete." "What are you doing staring at the ground when you walk. You don't want to be like Uncle Pete."
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Dear Lauren, Here it is, certainly the most important day in your life so far, and I find myself thinking in cliches - "It seems like only yesterday. Where did the time go?" - because I really don't want to think at all. I'm fine as long as I don't look back or ahead - as long as I live only this day. But this day invites reflection. You are graduating from college. You are officially grown up. You have been for a while. But now the world will know it. In a few hours you will have a diploma; you will have proof. How can I not stop at this juncture of your life and of our life together, and remember what brought us here?
Read MoreLet me see if I've got this straight: I live in a country in which it's perfectly OK for college professors speaking in classrooms or graduations or anywhere else they choose, to promote hate and racism; but where clergy are warned, when they take the podium at school events, that if they say the G word they're breaking the law.
No wonder this country is so messed up.
Read MoreI love this story: A Colombian scientist who has developed the first vaccine against malaria announced last week he is refusing offers of millions of dollars from American drug companies and giving his vaccine to the world.
Dr. Manuel Elkin Patarroyo has turned over all legal rights for the vaccine to the World Health Organization. His is a selfless act in a selfish world.
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It isn't news anymore, because it isn't new. It's a fact of life. Bad service is standard. Good service is rare. And it's getting rarer every day.
You walk into a store in search of a particular item and you see salespeople, but they're talking to one another. They ignore you. You wander from rack to rack - it's obvious you're looking for something - but no one comes near you. The salespeople continue to talk.
eopSo you leave. You go to another store. But it's the same there. Salespeople standing around neglecting customers.p
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I read a few weeks ago that the hottest home videos these days are the X-rated kind. Absolutely normal Americans are setting up cameras and performing all kinds of sex acts for the not-so-private eye, then selling these feats of fancy so that others can observe and maybe get in the act, too.
There was no hint, of course, that this behavior might be slightly abhorrent. There was not a single syllable of moral wrestling in the piece. It was straight news. This is what people are doing.
Read MoreIf I had my old high school diary, which I read and tore into a million pieces when I was in my early 20's (Why did I write only when I was miserable? And why did I write so much about boys?), I would see pages and pages of musings about Richard.
There'd be a lot of nasty stuff, I'm sure. Not because I didn't like him. I did. I do. But I was jealous of him. I didn't like that he was so important to my best friend Rosemary. I wondered whether he would be good for her and good to her, and what would happen to me if they became a permanent pair.
Read MoreThree of the children are out in the field with their father when I arrive.
It's a Kodak moment: The girls run with their arms outstretched through spring grass under a cloudless sky, their dog loping along beside them. Tabitha's hair flies behind her like a kite's tail. Xena runs double-speed to keep up. Shiloh, 2 1/2, walks and runs, stopping every few steps to hike up her long, cotton dress…
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I was going 75 mph in a 65 mph zone. It doesn't matter that other motorists passed me at faster speeds and didn't get caught. It doesn't matter that millions of people drive more than 10 mph over the speed limit every day. I was breaking the law and the police officer who stopped me was doing his job.
I didn't beg or cry or plead when he pulled me over, though I would have if I'd know what was going to happen. I didn't even tell him that my father had been a police officer.
"You want to hear my excuse?" I said.
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I went to find it the other day and it was gone. Where did it go and when? Every other time I've reached for it, it has been there. It's just a tacky, little poem I memorized in high school. But it lived in my head my whole life. And now it has vanished, leaving behind a sole stanza: "Lonely as an island/ blue as the sea/ nothing to live for/ that's me."
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It's the weirdest thing, preparing for a son to come home. Cleaning the house as if he were a guest. Counting the days until he arrives. "Rob's coming home,” I've been telling everyone for a month.
But the words are wrong. "Coming home" implies he is staying home. And he's not. He's just visiting. He'll be here a few days…
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