The pan was not exactly a thing of beauty even when it was new, but it was comely, emerging from its box exactly as described: “perfectly balanced … premium materials … beautifully designed.”
My husband held it with both hands as if it were a chalice, then raised it over his head to admire it from all angles. It was a consecration. Only the bells were missing.
Read MoreEverything 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 MoreIt 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 MoreWe are arguing, once again, about a calendar. Specifically a digital, made-to-be shared, work, home, entertainment, never-miss-a-birthday, color-coded, easy to access and always at our fingertips smartphone calendar. Which we share. After 51 years of give and take — I don’t make him listen to Ethel Merman and he doesn’t make me listen to Led Zeppelin — my husband and I quarrel daily about the most unimportant thing: the way I keep track of appointments, birthdays, and celebrations. We have been quarreling about my haphazard bookkeeping since he retired 6 years, 4 months, and 22 days ago…
Read MoreMrs. X is lovely, a fellow passenger tells my husband and me. But she doesn’t speak much. When asked a question, her husband always answers. Even if it’s a simple question. We are seated with them one night at dinner and I meet her eyes. “Are you enjoying yourself?” I ask. And she smiles and nods and then turns to him to answer. Where are you from? And he says England. Is this your first cruise? And he tells us, no. It is one of many…
Read MoreI was Beverly Theresa Curtin back then. Twenty years old. A senior at Bridgewater State, the college my father chose for me. I commuted. He bought me…
Read MoreI took it out on him, the person I love most. We do this sometimes. It was over the silliest thing: wreath hangers that went missing.
"Did you move those wreath hangers that were in Julie's room?" he asked, poking his head into my office. "I thought I left them there." I should have stopped what I was doing right then. Got up from my chair and helped him. If a friend had lost something, if a stranger had knocked on my door and said, "I had wreath hangers tied to the Christmas tree I have on my roof and they must have come undone because they're not there now," I would have put on my shoes, grabbed my coat, and joined him in his search…
Read MoreHe 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 MoreIt's the first time in a year I've seen Rosemary happy. The strain is gone from her face. The tension in her neck, her eyes, the way she held herself tight, the way she was braced for tragedy - all vanished, like a soul exorcised, like night dispelled by day.
Read MoreThis is the first day of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bigelow Sahlin Jr.'s officially blessed life together. Yesterday they were married. Today they are married. Already, one night is gone. Already the world has changed, and my friend's son and his new bride have changed, too, in obvious and in imperceptible ways.
Read MoreThey met in Virginia in 1946. They were in their 20s. She was a Navy nurse, and he was a Navy doctor. He noticed her in the cafeteria, then on the dance floor. "All the fly boys liked to dance with her." He liked how she walked - "Lily had her own kind of gait." And how "she could recite poetry like mad." And how, at the age of 16, "all on her own she decided to become a Catholic." There wasn't anything that Dr. Jack Manning didn't like about Lily Sharpe Fields. They married at the US Naval Chapel in Portsmouth, Va., and a year later Jack Manning brought his new bride and infant son home to Taunton…
Read MoreOf course he was telling me a better way to prune the rose bush. That's what he does. He's Mr. I Have a Better Way of Doing Everything, a man with vision, practical in his assessments and, as he likes to remind me, always on target with his recommendations. "Just get a saw and get rid of the whole bush," he said last Sunday afternoon as I belatedly attempted to tend to a wild mass of dead wood and thorns that I hadn't bothered to look at all year. I had killed my rose bush with inattention and was now determined to bring it back to life with a little pruning, a little Miracle Grow and a lot of love…
Read MoreThirty-four years ago my husband and I stood at the altar at St. Bernadette's Church in Randolph and before God and friends promised to love one another until death did us part.
Death was something straight out of the movies back then, drama relegated to the final scene. So were the words: "To have and to hold, from this day forth."
I was 20. The groom was 21. Our favorite song was the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" ("if we were married").
Read MoreI don't know his name or where he comes from or where he goes when he leaves the hospital. I don't know if he has children, a job, a house, a car, a life that's more than a vigil. I know nothing about him except that he sits in a hospital chair in the afternoons beside a wife who cannot walk or talk or reach out even to touch his hand, a wife who may not even know he is there….
Read MoreIf I had my old high school diary, which I read and tore into a million pieces when I was in my early 20's (Why did I write only when I was miserable? And why did I write so much about boys?), I would see pages and pages of musings about Richard.
There'd be a lot of nasty stuff, I'm sure. Not because I didn't like him. I did. I do. But I was jealous of him. I didn't like that he was so important to my best friend Rosemary. I wondered whether he would be good for her and good to her, and what would happen to me if they became a permanent pair.
Read MoreI always get the story wrong. No matter how many times I hear it I confuse the details. Was he wearing the sweater with the reindeer the night they met? Or was she? Was it September or October 1947 or 1948?
It was Sept. 5, 1947. He was wearing the reindeer sweater. She was wearing a red Sheltie Mist sweater, white bucks and a camel-hair skirt that swirled every time she swayed. I know because I can see her legs, long and shapely. Incredible, unforgettable legs. That's what Joe said the first time he told me the story and that's what he always says, every time he relates it.
"She had great legs" and "she was absolutely beautiful."
Read MoreI probably looked at the book five years ago. That was the last real "occasion." Twenty years married then; a time for reflection.
Tomorrow it will be 25 years.
I unearth it now from among a pile of baby books and children's drawings and saved holiday cards and report cards and diplomas. It is, surprisingly, in good shape, discolored only around the edges. The square photographs, rimmed in white, the rust-colored pieces of scotch tape, the prices on the back of the congratulations cards - 15 and 25 cents - these are the things that date it. I carry it into the kitchen, thinking how strange it is that this book is a quarter of a century old.
Read MoreAfter The Miracle, I envisioned myself a cook. For days when I looked into the mirror, I saw Julia Child. I dreamed about scallions and leeks. I pored over the food section in the papers. I cut out recipes. I actually thought about subscribing to Gourmet magazine. I believed I was a changed woman.
The Miracle had convinced me. I'd had a dinner party, and it had been a success. The smoke alarm hadn't gone off. No one left the table with stomach cramps. I didn't have to serve Tums for after-dinner mints. I'd done the impossible: I'd cooked a meal people had actually swallowed and enjoyed.
Read MoreYou read the statistics and look around and count the number of couples who are no longer couples, who live miles apart or in the same house, who pledged to love one another but are now indifferent strangers, and you know there is no happily ever after.
But you believe in it anyway. A lifetime of love songs and fairy tales can't be undone by other people's unhappy lives.
"It'll be different for us." That's what every bride tells herself as she walks down the aisle. "Our marriage will always be loving and romantic and ideal."
Read MoreOK, so I'm a sucker for sentiment. Plunk me down in front of a carousel on a hot summer day, give me some cotton candy, let me hear the calliope and the yelps of excited children and I get all filled up inside, although I may know no one, although I may be among strangers.
Give me a seat at a recital. Let me hear children sing. Put me behind a school bus and let me watch as the bus stops and the kids spill out, and I get a lump in my throat.
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