To be young, in love on a summer day
/The Boston Herald
August 24, 1993
What real love is all about
/The Boston Herald
August 1, 1993
Dancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love
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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 MoreLeaving part of my heart so far away
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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 MoreA Mother’s Day wish to see her own again
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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 MoreThe questions I wished I’d asked my father
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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.
Read MoreA smart idea goes awry, but has a brilliant ending
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His TVs were ancient, the screens small, the images dull, the words that scrolled at the bottom impossible for him to read.
“What you need are new TVs,” my husband and I told my Uncle LeRoy last week when we landed on his doorstep for a two-day visit.
Read MoreWouldn’t it be nice? Fifty-four years after we married, it still is.
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Everything has changed since that day. The house in which I grew up. The neighborhood. People I knew. The music we listened to. The way we listened. TV. Movies. Manners. The way we communicate.
I picture the day. It lives in my mind. January 20, 1968, a Saturday. The wedding was at 3. My mother wore a long, teal green dress with three-quarter-length sleeves. My father wore a black tuxedo with a gray vest. There were six bridesmaids and six groomsmen. Do people say bridesmaids and groomsmen, now? The words feel antiquated, stale on the tongue. The bridesmaids wore red velvet gowns, fur hats, and fur muffs. It was very Doctor Zhivago, which was a style at the time.
Read MoreShe dances for the two of them, with grace and love
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It makes me happy to think about them, two people I don’t know, a man and a woman with whom I shared a waiting room for a little over an hour a few weeks ago.
There were six of us in the room, five waiting for the same doctor who’s been known to run a little behind, not because he’s on a break somewhere, reading a John Grisham novel, but because he spends extra time with people who need extra time. And don’t we all need extra time these days?
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 MoreWhen words fail, offering comfort to an old friend
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She counts among the people I could call at three in the morning, a surprising fact even to me, because I don’t call her, not even at three in the afternoon. We haven’t talked in five, maybe 10 years.
And yet.
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 MoreA ‘plethora’ of ‘delectable’ words, and even more love
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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 MoreWhen my Aunt Lorraine was young, beautiful, and all mine
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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 MoreA blown kiss kindles memories of the young mother I once was
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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…
Read MoreA phone call. A pat on the head. Simple acts of love.
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It was a pat on the head from my grandmother. That was the best she could do. A half smile. And, for a split second, something soft in her eyes. That’s how I knew she loved me.
She’d give me a dollar sometimes, for Easter, for my birthday, furled like a pixie stick. A new dollar that she got from the bank, not the butcher. She’d place it in my hand, her fingers touching mine. And again, for a split second…
Read MoreAn ‘angel flying too close to the ground’ gets to soar
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Sometimes, when I am trying to cross the street in front of my house, I count the cars that whiz past. Forty-eight is my all-time high. Mostly it’s about 30 before someone lets me cross. I live on what used to be a country road but is now a busy cut-through. By the time I get from my front yard to the sidewalk across the street, I’m generally sour on the human race. That’s one reality. Here is another…
Read More9 arguments you should never have with your daughter-in-law
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It’s taken me 10 years and three grandchildren to finally get it. A man leaves his parents and his wife becomes his focus. Sons grow up, meet girls, get married and voila, a couple is formed. And like it or not, when this happens the rules change…
Read MoreHe Was My Hero. He Was My Father.
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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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