Dancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love

/
Dancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love

Chris paved the way. I didn’t know this when he was alive, how one human being would alter us, how one human being would show us a world we might have looked away from had we not known him.

This dawned on me as I sat with my family at the wedding of Chris’s grandnephew a few weeks ago. And this realization has stayed with me, that Chris McLean didn’t change just my family and me. He opened the eyes of everyone who knew him. And then everyone who knew him opened even more eyes.

Read More

Leaving part of my heart so far away

/
Leaving part of my heart so far away

I’m in Florida visiting my uncle LeRoy. He’s sleeping as I write this, although it’s nearly 10 a.m. and he is always up and about by 7. But it’s dark as night in his house. And quiet. The air conditioner makes some noise but not much. He has it set to 80 degrees.

There’s no reason for my uncle to be up early. That’s what I think. It’s a Sunday morning so there’s nowhere he has to be. And then I think there’s nowhere he has to be every morning.

Read More

A Mother’s Day wish to see her own again

/
A Mother’s Day wish to see her own again

You know those questions that pop up on Facebook? The kind we used to ask at dinner parties, when we had dinner parties. Questions like, if you could spend a day with one person living or dead, who would it be?

For years I chose famous people because of all I could learn from them. Jesus Christ. Mozart. Queen Elizabeth II. Today, though, if asked this question, I would choose my unheralded, very much missed mother.

Read More

Cheers for unstoppable Lucy, as she graduates from high school

/
Cheers for unstoppable Lucy, as she graduates from high school

The words always come. That’s what I tell myself when I can’t find them. I sit. I think. And I wait. And when the words still won’t come? I ask myself what it is that I am struggling so hard to say?

Maybe this time what I’m struggling to say is simply thank you. Thank you, world. Thank you, Canton High. Thank you, friends and relatives and neighbors and teachers and doctors and dance instructors and used-to-be strangers who have walked this road with us, sometimes many times, leading the way.

Read More

Christmas in April, and the timing was perfect

/
Christmas in April, and the timing was perfect

I can see the Christmas tree from where I sit. It’s in the front hall, and because my office looks out on the hall the tree has been my companion since early December.

It’s artificial, of course.

Right now it is decorated for Easter, festooned with Peeps and chocolate eggs and small, fuzzy bunnies and forsythia plucked from a neighbor’s yard.

Read More

Cherishing porcelain angels, and the real ones in our lives

/
Cherishing porcelain angels, and the real ones in our lives

I didn’t mean to fall in love with him. I came to Florida to rescue him. That was the first time. It was March and his wife had just died. And there were COVID-19 restrictions: No wake. No funeral Mass. No funeral. No friends stopping by.

Leroy, my uncle, was alone in a home he had always shared. And then his knee gave out and he fell. An ambulance raced him to a hospital. After a few days, he was given a cortisone shot. After a few more days, he was transferred to a facility for rehabilitation.

Read More

A season of reunions, each full of tears, relief, and joy

/
A season of reunions, each full of tears, relief, and joy

It had been 311 days since I’d seen my youngest grandchildren. We’d said goodbye the Monday before last Christmas in a parking lot in Connecticut. My son had rented a car for the occasion, and driven from Manhattan. His wife was back at their apartment packing. Two weeks later, they, their three children and Daisy, their dog, moved to Scotland.

That day in the parking lot of a strip mall, we spied a small restaurant, which was still serving food outside. It was a mild day for winter, but still chilly. We sat at separate, metal tables, with our jackets zipped and scarves around our necks. The kids ordered hot chocolate and chicken fingers. The adults drank coffee. All of us chatted about Christmas and the new year and what it would bring.

And we pretended to be happy.

Read More

A daily phone call, and the love that endures

/
A daily phone call, and the love that endures

He never complains. I call him between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. every night and he is always upbeat.

“Hi Beverly,” he says and I hear a smile in his voice.

“Hi LeRoy,” I answer, and because he’s smiling, I smile, too.

LeRoy is my father’s youngest brother, the last of the Curtin clan, my grandmother’s baby, my only living uncle. He was born 94 years ago this Sunday, on Oct. 17, in Cambridge when Cambridge had more factories than universities.

Read More

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

/
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.

Read More

In this Land of I Don’t Know, I know all that I am missing

/
In this Land of I Don’t Know, I know all that I am missing

I say out loud, every day, that I am so grateful for e-mail and FaceTime and WhatsApp, for all the technology that lets me see and talk to my grandchildren, though they are in Scotland and I am an ocean away. I try to remind myself how lucky I am. My son sends me photos of the kids in their school uniforms. They started school last week. He takes pictures on his phone and…

Read More

Searching for the heart of the matter

/
Searching for the heart of the matter

I am so busy taking care of things, that sometimes I forget to look at him. Doctor’s appointments. Medications. Physical therapists, occupational therapists. Who is scheduled this week? What day? What time? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? I see him, of course. I see his thin, white hair, his faded blue eyes, his false teeth that sometimes slip when he’s talking, the way his mother’s did, his hearing aid that shrieks its presence but is as useless as a bandaid behind his deaf ear. An old man in an old chair, struggling to see, to hear, to keep up, to get up, and to not give up.

Read More

When there’s no way around it, we’ve just got to go through it

/
When there’s no way around it, we’ve just got to go through it

“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” is a children’s board book that my friend Anne gave me to read to my first grandchild, Lucy. I read it to her for years. It never captured me. I liked “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” much better. But Lucy liked the repetition of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” and when Adam came along, he liked it, too. “We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! We’re not scared. Uh-uh! Grass! Long wavy grass. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”

Read More

A ‘plethora’ of ‘delectable’ words, and even more love

/
A ‘plethora’ of ‘delectable’ words, and even more love

Amy has called me Mimi since the afternoon we met. She was 5 then and though I wasn’t her Mimi, my grandson Adam, who also was 5, called me Mimi so she did, too. I’m still not Amy’s Mimi. Not officially. But unofficially, in our patchwork quilt of a family, I am. I am Mimi and Amy is my granddaughter because she is the daughter of my daughter’s partner, and until the world comes up with better words for what we mean to each other, we’re stuck using words that don’t quite fit. Which is ironic considering that Amy Hylen is a stickler for words.

Read More

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

/
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…

Read More

With the world upside down, I’m learning grace from my grandchildren

/
With the world upside down, I’m learning grace from my grandchildren

Charlotte has been home from school for two months now, shut in with adults and her 16-year-old brother. She turned 13 last month. A big birthday, 13. Her mother sent out an e-mail to family and friends. Let’s have a surprise drive-by parade! It rained on her birthday. But Charlotte didn’t care. She woke to balloons and cake and presents and hugs and smiles and Happy Birthday signs strung everywhere. Outside was raw and ugly but inside was just about perfect…

Read More