How many people could say they lived the life they dreamed?

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How many people could say they lived the life they dreamed?

He was a boy when I knew him, a friend of my son’s, 14 or 15 the first time he knocked on our door. I don’t remember the day or even the season, the days and seasons so much the same back then, teens in different shapes and sizes always at the door, knocking or ringing the bell. I can picture him clearly, though, as if it weren’t 40 years ago that he came calling, as if the boy he used to be had stood in my kitchen just yesterday.

He had a mop of dark, shiny curls. Big brown eyes with a shine of their of own. A shy, sweet grin. And a solidness, a compactness that made him seem sturdy, even older at times. Mike Ippolito. He was funny and shy and polite and indiscriminately kind. For me, he is frozen this way in time.

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Cherishing porcelain angels, and the real ones in our lives

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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.

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A daily phone call, and the love that endures

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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.

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Watching and escaping the world from a favorite chair

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Watching and escaping the world from a favorite chair

The chair was Judy Taylor’s idea. She has one in her bedroom, a big, comfortable chair. It’s where every day she sits for a little while and reads. We were with our husbands on a cruise ship, on vacation. Remember vacations? Lying around reading something compelling? We were both reading “The Couple Next Door,” sipping some sugary drink and thinking about nothing except how great the sun felt and what we were going to eat next. This is exactly what Judy and I were doing — reading and drinking and talking — when the conversation turned to her “reading chair” and how much she loved it. “You need to get one,” she told me.

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By telling their stories, we remember those we have lost

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By telling their stories, we remember those we have lost

I saved his letters, 301 typewritten pages, all single spaced, all caps. “SHAME ON YOU!” the first began. “YOU MADE ME CRY. I’M EIGHTY YEARS OLD AND YOU MADE ME CRY.” Ray Redican wrote this to me on Dec. 24, 1993. On Dec. 26, when it arrived in my mail, I picked up the phone and called him. This is the way our friendship began and the way it endured. He wrote and I called.

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Looking for a silver lining in a tragedy

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I keep looking for the silver lining in the long, slow dying of a friend who should not be dying. He's too good a person for the world to lose. But this is how life works. Good people die every day. Now it's Kyle Gendron, a good man in the middle of his life, who has a wife and three young children he would give anything not to leave.

Kyle Gendron and his wife, Kerry, and their children.

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Doctor keeps dishing out an earful, and loving it

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Doctor keeps dishing out an earful, and loving it

I don't know much about Dr. Reardon, my ear, nose and throat specialist, except that the man is in love with ears. After all the decades he's been looking at them, you'd think he'd be done. Seen one, seen 'em all. Bring on some toes and elbows, please. But every time he walks into the examining room where I sit with my clogged up ear, he is almost whistling, eager to get to his chart and his very realistic ``you can take it apart and move it around'' facsimile of an ear and explain to me how the middle ear is a hollow chamber in the bone of the skull. He is as earnest as a sonnet.

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She was no saint, but she looked like one

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A woman lives and dies out of the spotlight, 88 years on earth; and who, besides her family and friends, knows the mountains she's climbed, the fears she's faced, the impossible things she's accomplished? Without headlines or a song or a book or paparazzi to record the story, what happens to the story?

In words, Louise Nolan's story would describe a saint - selfless, loving, faithful, kind. But she wasn't a saint. Saints are stoic. Saints endure, carry on, play the hand life deals. Saints sacrifice.

Louise didn't sacrifice. She loved.

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A light of love and joy toward others

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A light of love and joy toward others

"May I always put the needs of others before my own. May I so love my family, friends, and co-workers that they see only Your goodness in me. May Your love and Your light shine through in everything I do." - A prayer for growing spiritually. Beth Spence Cann may never have said this prayer. It's Catholic and she was Congregationalist. But she lived it. She put the needs of others before her own. It was the best thing about her. And, in the end, it was the worst. She was murdered two weeks ago by a man she tried to save…

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What parents can't control

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What parents can't control

t's eight in the morning and my husband and I are talking about laying stones around the periphery of the garden, big stones, more boulder than brick, in an effort to keep the dirt in and the rabbits out. It's a sensible plan, except for my worry about the little kids who cut through the garden and race down its slope. "Maybe stones are a bad idea," I say to my husband. "What if the kids fall?" "Maybe living near a street is a bad idea," he says, meaning you can't protect children from everything…

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I'm sure she knows I loved her

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I'm sure she knows I loved her

She died on a Monday in September between a weekend when my son was home and a Tuesday night pizza party. The sun didn't blink; the world didn't pause. Nothing happened - there was no presentiment of change, not even a flicker of feelings to make me think of her, my long ago friend, a woman I loved, a woman who was good to me, passing through and by and on. Flo Grossman died on Sept. 25 and I didn't know until Dec. 19. How can this be? The world should have felt different that Monday - slighter, duller, because the space filled by a vibrant life was suddenly left vacant.

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Helping one family at a time

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Helping one family at a time

Terry Orcutt spends her days on the phone and most evenings, too, listening, taking notes, asking questions. "Where do you live? What do you need? How many children do you have?" Her concern is real. Her love for people she doesn't know is real, too. It's what drives her and what sustains her, call after call. "Love one another as I love you." This is Christianity's number one rule. Terry Orcutt lives this rule. She loves without question. She sees God in all people. So does her husband, Jim.

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