Their gift is a year-round commitment
/The Boston Herald
December 14, 1993
How many people could say they lived the life they dreamed?
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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.
Read MoreCherishing porcelain angels, and the real ones in our lives
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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 MoreA daily phone call, and the love that endures
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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 MoreThe love he gave keeps his grieving family going
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A man died suddenly on February 25th. His name was George Thomas IV. He was 38, married, the father of two boys who are 5 and 3, and a baby daughter who is due in August. It was early evening. He was working out in his basement. And he collapsed. His wife, Marissa, found him.
Read MoreWatching and escaping the world from a favorite chair
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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.
Read MoreBy telling their stories, we remember those we have lost
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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.
Read MoreSpreading kindness along with homegrown tomatoes
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I am trying to focus on the tomatoes. The ones I found yesterday in a small plastic bag hanging from the handle of my front door. Cherry tomatoes, still warm from the garden. Tony brought them. He did the same thing last year and the year before, delivered tomatoes then slipped away, not ringing the bell, not looking for a thank you.
Read MoreLooking for a silver lining in a tragedy
/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.
Read MoreThe power of just one caring person
/At first glance, George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life" has nothing to do with Charlie Wilson in "Charlie Wilson's War." But with some help from my grandson, Adam, I learned otherwise.
It takes just one caring person to change the world. That's what my grandson, Adam, learned at school last month.
Read MoreFacing cancer with generosity, honesty, and grace
/I don't know Kyle Gendron, except socially. We say hello at functions, make small talk, and now and then, I post on his Facebook page "Wow!" and "Amazing!" because he is such a superb photographer.
When I e-mail him sometimes for advice about photography, he always e-mails back.
Read MoreAppreciating our differences
/Kristen Franks loves her sister Jacqueline. She loves her wit and her compassion and her work ethic and her tenacity.
She loves that Jacqueline has a job where she is valued and appreciated, and that the people she works with respect and admire her.
Read MoreA journey, then, finally, home
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John never bought her a Valentine card. He surprised her on only one birthday. And every December, he insisted they wait until it was nearly Christmas to put up the tree because Advent, for him, was a time of preparation, not celebration. He was like that. Pragmatic. Prudent. Practical.
Read MoreDoctor keeps dishing out an earful, and loving it
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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.
Read MoreToo late to thank a priest who reached out to us
/He was a priest in his fifties and she was a child in my arms, and he embraced her from the first time he met her. Father David Ziomek loved Lucy from the get-go.
He called her "my friend Lucy" and looked deep into her eyes. And, always, always, she smiled into his.
Read MoreShe was no saint, but she looked like one
/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.
Read MoreA light of love and joy toward others
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"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…
Read MoreWhat parents can't control
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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…
Read MoreGlorify the quiet streetlight
/The Boston Globe
February 25, 2007
I'm sure she knows I loved her
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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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