Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality

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Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality

I am about to begin my Anne Frank journal. My friend Maureen bought it for me last year when she and her husband visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The journal is red and plain, embossed with a shiny outline of the narrow building where Anne Frank hid for 761 days. Its blank pages are lined. It has a pocket in the back, which holds a 4x7-inch black-and-white photo of its young author. It will be my 40th journal. I should have more but I didn’t start keeping them until I was 46.

And yet, Anne Frank is the reason I began to write at all. I was 13 when I first read her diary. Until then, what I knew about World War II was what my mother told me, that my father had fought in it but I was not supposed to talk about it. And what I culled from black and white movies, “Pride of the Marines,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which I watched on Sunday afternoons with my mother on a small black-and-white console TV that was the centerpiece of our parlor.

Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality.

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Two words to end drunk driving: Just stop

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Two words to end drunk driving: Just stop

The bedrooms are what I continue to see: Teddy bears on a child’s bed. A young woman’s calendar red-marked with celebrations planned. Back to school shoes still in their box. Running shorts tossed in a corner. Books on a night table, one with a bookmark midway. Different bedrooms full of different things, all stark and empty without the lives that gave them life.

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As the endless days drift by, who can remember a thing?

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As the endless days drift by, who can remember a thing?

My brain is acting out. It is in high dudgeon. I say “Help,” and it says “No.” I say “Please,” and it slams a door. I put a stick of butter in the microwave to soften and then forget to add it to the blueberry muffins. I decide to take a walk and then walk in and out of my house a half dozen times because I forget first my scarf, then my AirPods, then my phone, my glasses, my mask, a tissue, hand sanitizer. If I didn’t forget so much, if I weren’t always searching for things, my Fitbit would have nothing to record.

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Memories take us back to movies, popcorn, friendship, and family

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Memories take us back to movies, popcorn, friendship, and family

I am escaping the present. I didn’t mean to leave the here and now. But, really, the here and now is not such a fun place to be. So why stay?

I was on Facebook sipping my morning coffee, scrolling through reposted news stories, reading the comments of people I don’t know (Why do I do this?), getting more and more annoyed, a too typical morning, when up popped a post with a slightly blurred photo of the Randolph Movie Theater, the one that was on North Main Street in the 1950s. And just like that, the present was gone and I was at that old theater, the box office right in front of me, my best friend Rosemary beside me…

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A children’s book reminds us how despair can turn to hope

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A children’s book reminds us how despair can turn to hope

A children’s book has made me feel a little better about all that’s going on in the world right now. Not complacent better, or less interested better. Just better.

Who knows how long I’ll feel this way. A day? A week? Until I foolishly watch World News Tonight, bad things from every corner of the earth, the tragic and trivial, crammed into a 30-minus-8-minutes-for-commercials slot? Until the middle of the night when sleep is impossible and everything bad that ever was, is, or will be kidnaps my brain? Until it’s next month or next year and we’re still in the same mess we are in today, with not just a virus killing us but a virulence that is as deadly…

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Seeking a cure for ‘heart fatigue'

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Seeking a cure for ‘heart fatigue'

“Heart fatigue.” That’s how I read it. But it was “Heat fatigue” a friend had written. On Facebook. Her dog had been overheated so she soaked a bath towel with cold water from a hose and draped it over his back. “He seems to really like that,” she wrote, posting a picture of her dog at peace, eyes closed, ears up, sleeping the sleep of the untroubled. I envied the dog. I looked at the towel and wished there were as simple a solution for heart fatigue…

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The Heartbreaking Way We Learn Eternity Exists

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The Heartbreaking Way We Learn Eternity Exists

‘Why are we here?” I used to know. I used to be so certain.

“We are here to know, love, and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.” That’s what the Sisters of St. Joseph drummed into my 6-year-old head. That’s what I read in “The New Baltimore Catechism.” That’s what I recited day after day after day. So that’s what I believed. This life is temporary. The next is eternal. Sister said. Father Finn said. My mother said. So who could doubt…

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A Reminder of What Can Be Lost

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A Reminder of What Can Be Lost

It's a little book called "Yellow Star." Not many words. Written for young adults. I found it at a book sale at Rockport Public Library in October. The cover lassoed me. It's a photo of a small, somber child with cropped brown hair and clear brown eyes wearing a double-breasted pinkish coat trimmed in brown velvet. When I was small, I had a similar coat. It was plaid, but the same style and the same kind of collar. It itched my neck. I wore it the Christmas Day I was 5. I know this because my father dated the photo he took…

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Yes, Manners Still Matter

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You can't make up these things. It was last month. A weekday. I was meeting Rosanne Thomas for lunch to talk about her new book, "Excuse Me — The Survival Guide to Modern Business Etiquette," because Thomas teaches manners in these mannerless times, and, God knows, a course in civility and kindness and an awareness of others are things our culture could use a dose of right now…

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Putting New Life into the Words of a Love Endangered Long Ago

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Putting New Life into the Words of a Love Endangered Long Ago

My father is the reason I said yes to an e-mail asking whether I wanted a review copy of "Love Letters from World War II." But I didn't think this at the time.

The book's cover is what I thought drew me: photographs of a man and a woman looking like characters in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, lean and beautiful, and of a time, both staring outward but looking inward, too, separate, facing away from…

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Don't Let Those Books Remain Unwritten

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Don't Let Those Books Remain Unwritten

I wanted to be like my grandmother. So I wrote out stories for my grandchildren, short, rhyming "Good Night" stories. Later, I decided to publish them. I would write some letters. I would make some phone calls. I would not give up. I would get this done. This is what I told myself. I wrote one letter. And got some great advice about structure and how to tell a better story. Then I went on line for the next step and learned that it can take up to five years to have a children's book published. Five years? I didn’t want to wait five years. Now it is six years later…

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In praise of valor lost in cultural debris

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In praise of valor lost in cultural debris

How is it a woman can live for 98 years, be a war hero decorated by five countries (England, France, the United States, Australia and New Zealand), write a book about her experiences (``The White Mouse''), have many books written about her ( ``Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine,'' Peter Fitzsimons; ``Nancy Wake: SOE's Greatest Heroine,'' Russell Braddon), inspire a movie (''Charlotte Gray,'' starring Cate Blanchett), yet die unrecognized by a nation full of people who know the most trivial things about the most trivial people? (Think ``Jersey Shore's'' Snooki.)…

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Emotions illustrated vividly in book about Down syndrome

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Nancy Tupper Ling lives in Walpole. When her childhood friend gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome, Ling wrote the baby a poem, ``Our Fragile Emissary,'' a love song that has been e-mailed around the world.

Six year later, Ling wrote her first children's book about this child, ``My Sister, Alicia May.'' She sent it to a Raynham publisher, Pleasant St. Press. The co-owner, Jean Cochran, a children's book author herself, loved the manuscript, bought it, and then went looking for an illustrator.

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Lucy's learning. But are doctors?

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Lucy's learning. But are doctors?

When I brush my granddaughter Lucy's hair and put it in a ponytail, I always kiss the back of her neck. And she giggles. She is 3. She talks. She dances. She goes to school. She plays house and tea, and kick ball and follow the leader. She loves books and Bambi and church and playing with her cousin Adam. Lucy has Down syndrome. She looks and acts more like a 2-year-old than a 3-year-old. But is this so awful? Don't we say, "Children grow up too fast"? Lucy isn't growing up too fast. She's taking her time.

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The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived

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The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived

A long time ago, when my daughter was 14, she had a homework assignment: Choose six people, dead or alive, real or fictional, with whom you would want to be stuck on a deserted island.I assumed I'd be one of them. Her brother was, and her godfather, and Mary Poppins and Matafu, a resourceful young boy in a book she was reading, and Doogie Howser, a TV doctor.

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A RWANDAN SURVIVOR'S TALE OF FORGIVENESS

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A RWANDAN SURVIVOR'S TALE OF FORGIVENESS

It is not a beach book. It is not funny like "Marley & Me" or intriguing like "Beach Road" or trendy like all the Whitey Bulger books now suddenly in print. It is, no doubt about it, totally incompatible with summer and sand and sea air laced with Coppertone and flimsy bathing suits and cups full of lemonade. "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" is exactly what you don't want to read on a summer day. Which is why it's not on any summer reading list that I've come across. But here is why it should be.

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Potter's mirror of desire brings out hopes, dreams

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Potter's mirror of desire brings out hopes, dreams

I've been reading Harry Potter slowly, not because it isn't good, but because it is. Because it isn't just one great, compelling, I-can't-put-this-down story, but a series of great stories, each chapter a complete tale. It's nice not to rush through the words. It's fun just to read. Fun? It's a kid's word isn't it? Adults don't have fun. They have weekends off. They take vacations. They go to movies. They walk, run, ski, read biographies. "Was it fun?" That's not what we ask each other. We say, "How was the movie? The snow? The weekend? Did you have a good time?"

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