How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

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How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

It always begins with Perry Como. That’s what I tell my granddaughter, Charlotte. Until I hear a Perry Como Christmas song, I have no holiday spirit. But once “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” or (“There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” plays on the radio? I’m all jingle bells and holly.

And Charlotte says, “Who’s Perry Como?” And I say “Can you imagine, 60 years from now, someone asking you, “Who is Taylor Swift?”

But of course, she can’t imagine. She is only 16.

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"Unk," says Charlotte

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"Unk," says Charlotte

A few months ago my daughter Julie was worried about her daughter, Charlotte, who, though almost two, wasn’t talking.

“Charlotte points and says ‘unk. It’s the only thing she says. She calls everything ‘unk,’” she told her pediatrician. He nodded his head and said not to be concerned but if at her next visit Charlotte still were not talking, then they would begin to look for reasons why.

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Charlotte’s Sweet 16 happened as suddenly as spring

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Charlotte’s Sweet 16 happened as suddenly as spring

Hard to believe. Isn’t that what we say about time? Hard to believe it’s almost May. Where did April go? Hard to believe the boy who just left for college has already finished his freshman year. Hard to believe my daughter and her husband are about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Didn’t my husband and I just celebrate ours?

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The questions I wished I’d asked my father

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The questions I wished I’d asked my father

Sometimes we shared a cake. I have a picture that proves this. It’s of my father and me, blowing out candles on a double-layer birthday cake festooned with confectionery flowers, which my mother made for the two of us when I was 6 and he was 30.

In the picture, I am seated before the cake doing more looking at than blowing out the candles my mother has arranged. Thirty-one for him, seven for me, the extras for good luck. My mother was always courting good luck.

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Two little girls laughing until someone told us to stop

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Two little girls laughing until someone told us to stop

When we were kids, I was jealous because Janet Butler’s birthday came three weeks before mine. It was a big deal back then, growing older, growing closer to what we called “grown up.”

Janet, who was born on Jan. 29, lorded it over me when she was 9 and I was still 8, when she was 10 and I was still 9, when she turned 13 and I was still 12. “Baby,” she’d say, but not in a mean way. She was never mean. She was a tease. She was funny. She’d sing-song the word “baby” and then laugh.

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Remembering how the animals spoke inspires the Christmas spirit

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Remembering how the animals spoke inspires the Christmas spirit

Back when I was child, I watched a Christmas show I have never forgotten. It aired on Dec. 21, 1951 (Thank you, Google), which means I was two months shy of 4 when I sat between my mother and father and learned that all over the world for a few hours every Christmas Eve, animals are given the gift of speech.

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Our entire country has become a war zone

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Our entire country has become a war zone

I cannot pronounce Luhansk and Lysychansk, because I have stopped watching television news. And because I no longer hear these names spoken, I don’t know how to say them.

I stopped watching the news every night because it is all calamity and conjecture interrupted by ads paid for by pharmaceutical companies, which would go bankrupt if, tomorrow morning, we all woke up well. And because the nightly news teaches me nothing I can’t learn by reading, I switched to print months ago.

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I’ve watched him grow up, but it caught me by surprise

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I’ve watched him grow up, but it caught me by surprise

My daughter Julie has an app on her phone that makes it simple to create a digital collage. So I am used to getting photos from her, which juxtapose images of last summer with images of this summer or that show her children at multiple ages on multiple first days of school. She recreates poses, too, driving to a spot where a picture was shot and taking a photo of the same people in the same pose, from the same angle a year or two later.

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When my Aunt Lorraine was young, beautiful, and all mine

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When my Aunt Lorraine was young, beautiful, and all mine

My cousin Darlene sent the photo in a text message. Our cousin Jan had e-mailed it to her. I had never seen it before. It’s a black and white shot of two girls on a beach, young women you’d call them today, but girl is who each was back then, in the early 1950s. Beautiful girls, both of them. One salt, one pepper, the blonde in a black bathing suit, the raven-haired one in white…

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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 blown kiss kindles memories of the young mother I once was

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A blown kiss kindles memories of the young mother I once was

He’s a toddler and he lives next door and because I have been nowhere for months, I watch him more than I would have pre-COVID. I watch him with wonder the way I watched the trees this spring grow from spindly, gray sticks into the lush, green canopies they are now. Pre-COVID, I wouldn’t have been dazzled by the slow, daily growth of both the trees and the boy. I would have noticed spring in all its beauty, of course. And I would have noticed the toddling boy, too, smiled and waved at him before I got into my car. But my head would have been elsewhere. I’d have been thinking about traffic, and where I was going, and did I have my phone? These things would have been my focus, not the little boy next door…

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If only we could reshuffle the days of our lives

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If only we could reshuffle the days of our lives

Random is what I would choose. If I could choose.

Life no longer sequential. Instead, all of our days would be shuffled like songs on a CD played out of order. No order. No growing up. No growing old. Imagine? Random. You wake up on a Monday and you’re 23 years old and there’s not a wrinkle on your face. Lying next to you is your spouse who is years younger than your adult son, whom you saw just the day before when you woke up and were 70…

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He Was My Hero. He Was My Father.

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He Was My Hero. He Was My Father.

It made him sad, leaving before the ending. Not just the ending of “Lost,” a television drama he was hooked on. It made him sad to leave us, too, his family.But he knew there was more. “I think they are all in Purgatory,” he said a few weeks after “Lost” premiered. The popular weekly series, which aired on Wednesday nights…

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Every School Shooting Must Be Shocking to Us

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Every School Shooting Must Be Shocking to Us

If you look at statistics, you can convince yourself it isn’t so bad. What’s the chance of a child getting shot and killed at school? It’s less than getting hit by lightning. It’s less than being kidnapped. It’s less than dying in a car crash. So the numbers are with us, right? But it doesn’t feel right. And every time there’s another shooting, every time another child is murdered, it feels terribly, terribly wrong…

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

I have a picture of me, at age 11, in my favorite dress. It was pink, not too pale and not too bright, and it was A-lined and buttoned up the front. I wore a crinoline under it, so the dress swooshed when I walked. In the picture, you can see my white ankle socks, but not my shiny black patent-leather shoes. It was spring. I was in sixth grade at Tower Hill School in Randolph. In seventh grade, I was sent to a Catholic school where I was made to…

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Wonderful Memories, Just Beyond Reach

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Wonderful Memories, Just Beyond Reach

If only you could wrap up a few happy moments and give them back to people when they are in need of happiness. If only you could freeze the best of times the way you freeze fresh-picked blueberries in June to savor again on a December day. We have memory, yes. But memory is a tease, a still shot, a small picture of what was, not all of what was. It’s a blueberry pie on the cover of a gourmet magazine, beautiful to look at but tormenting, too…

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With Each Paper Crane, a Child’s Love Takes Flight

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With Each Paper Crane, a Child’s Love Takes Flight

I keep looking at them. They arrived in a 12-by-16-inch manila envelope, addressed to my husband. So, technically they are not mine.

“I hope 73 brings you joy and happiness!” Megan, who is 11 and our son’s oldest child, wrote on a card she made for her grandfather. “For your birthday,” she continued, “I made you 73 paper cranes. Each one represents one year of your life.” My husband spreads them out on the couch. They are colorful things…

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Dream Machine Casts Spell at the Walka Walka Mall

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Dream Machine Casts Spell at the Walka Walka Mall

It started with Adam, who is 14 now. He was 4 then. He said “goed” instead of “went.” “I goed to the Walka Walka Mall,” he’d announce every time we took him to the Walka Walka Mall. (The Walpole Mall, where he walked and walked — “walka walka” — his favorite place.) Now it’s the favorite place of my youngest grandchildren.

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