A street sign shows the way

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A street sign shows the way

The intellect arches its eyebrows, denies it, demeans it. The intellect says, What? Are you serious? The dead do not speak. The dead are dead.

But the intellect is wrong.

I am driving to Bridgewater State University, a sprawling Massachusetts school, which was a small college when I went there. I am meeting my bonus grandson, my youngest daughter’s partner’s son, who is a sophomore majoring in criminal justice. The last time I saw Matt in person, at Christmas, he offered to show me around the now sprawling campus. We made plans to meet at two o’clock in the parking lot near his dorm on the last Friday in January. The morning of our meeting, he texted, “Message me when you get here.”

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How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

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How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

It always begins with Perry Como. That’s what I tell my granddaughter, Charlotte. Until I hear a Perry Como Christmas song, I have no holiday spirit. But once “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” or (“There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” plays on the radio? I’m all jingle bells and holly.

And Charlotte says, “Who’s Perry Como?” And I say “Can you imagine, 60 years from now, someone asking you, “Who is Taylor Swift?”

But of course, she can’t imagine. She is only 16.

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We lose precious things, but hold onto memories

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We lose precious things, but hold onto memories

I did not flush my mother’s anniversary ring down the toilet. I know this for sure because I have not wrapped jewelry in tissue for 44 years. It is missing, because I hid it and I have no idea where.

I flushed the necklace down the toilet. Not on purpose, of course. I’d wrapped it in tissue to keep it safe, then tucked it into the zippered part of my pocketbook where I kept lipstick and loose change. It was 1979 and I was traveling. I was protecting the necklace from thieves. No one would be able to steal it now, I thought.

And no one did.

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The questions I wished I’d asked my father

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The questions I wished I’d asked my father

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.

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Like a warm coat, memories hug us like those we have lost

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Like a warm coat, memories hug us like those we have lost

I told her I loved her coat, which was an almost-to-the-floor black and gray wool that seemed to be embracing the woman who was standing before me. That’s the feeling I had, that the coat was hugging her.

We were leaving a Christmas party, my husband and I, saying our goodbyes and there was Harriet, leaving, too. And I said, “Your coat is so pretty,” and she smiled and stroked the soft wool near the collar. “It was my daughter’s,” she said, and there it was, out in the open, something we seldom talk about, something we back away from every day: death.

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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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Paraselene, peignoir, and the mysterious power of words

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Paraselene, peignoir, and the mysterious power of words

There’s a webpage that lands in my e-mail every day. Maybe I signed up for it. I must have but I don’t remember. It’s called Word Thirst (wordthirst.com) and I love it, not only because it has nothing to do with all the bad things happening in the world, but also because some days it introduces me to words I don’t know, like paraselene, (Definition: a bright moonlike spot on a lunar halo; a mock moon). It also includes a graph, which shows when the word was most popular (in 1811, paraselene was very popular); and if it is popular still (it is not).

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

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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…

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Memories take us back to movies, popcorn, friendship, and family

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Memories take us back to movies, popcorn, friendship, and family

I am escaping the present. I didn’t mean to leave the here and now. But, really, the here and now is not such a fun place to be. So why stay?

I was on Facebook sipping my morning coffee, scrolling through reposted news stories, reading the comments of people I don’t know (Why do I do this?), getting more and more annoyed, a too typical morning, when up popped a post with a slightly blurred photo of the Randolph Movie Theater, the one that was on North Main Street in the 1950s. And just like that, the present was gone and I was at that old theater, the box office right in front of me, my best friend Rosemary beside me…

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If only we could reshuffle the days of our lives

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If only we could reshuffle the days of our lives

Random is what I would choose. If I could choose.

Life no longer sequential. Instead, all of our days would be shuffled like songs on a CD played out of order. No order. No growing up. No growing old. Imagine? Random. You wake up on a Monday and you’re 23 years old and there’s not a wrinkle on your face. Lying next to you is your spouse who is years younger than your adult son, whom you saw just the day before when you woke up and were 70…

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

I have a picture of me, at age 11, in my favorite dress. It was pink, not too pale and not too bright, and it was A-lined and buttoned up the front. I wore a crinoline under it, so the dress swooshed when I walked. In the picture, you can see my white ankle socks, but not my shiny black patent-leather shoes. It was spring. I was in sixth grade at Tower Hill School in Randolph. In seventh grade, I was sent to a Catholic school where I was made to…

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Memory of a Christmas Gift Is a Grand Gift Itself

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Memory of a Christmas Gift Is a Grand Gift Itself

It’s something I think of every Christmas and I don’t know why. I am sitting on the couch in my in-laws’ living room. I don’t remember the couch, though I should. I sat on it dozens of times. I am sitting on the end, in the corner, close to the dining room. My sister-in-law, Janet, is sitting on a chair to the left of me.

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Still in Love with Dollhouse after All These Years

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Still in Love with Dollhouse after All These Years

All the things I've wanted. Saved for. Had to have. Bought. Loved in my life. Then, one day, abandoned. That's what happens with things. Ginny dolls. Cabbage Patch dolls. Elsa and Anna. All history now, passion turned to indifference, generation after generation after generation.

My first real purchase? I was 12. It was summer. I'd baby-sat for an entire week, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, three kids. I'd earned…

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Keep it, because you never know . . .

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You never know is the reason I have a closet full of shoes and boots and coats and hats I don't wear.

For years, my husband has been suggesting that for every thing new I bring into the house, an old thing should go out. When he began telling me this a million years ago, I a) ignored him and b) was a young woman who didn't foresee that one day I might be one of the "old things." You see, my husband lives by this rule. If he buys new shoes, he throws out the scuffed-beyond-redemption ones. If he loses a glove...

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Christmases That Live Dimly in Memory

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The manger was my mother's. But I hadn't thought about its history for a long, long time, because the figurines Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the wise men and the sheep and the cow and the horse and the angels are mine, bought over decades, all porcelain, all white, the small, wooden manger the sole thing that was hers. It's in the background of a picture I keep on my desk all year long…

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Once Again, The Best Tree Ever

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n the beginning, the trees were rag-tag things, missing more limbs than they had. Even Charlie Brown wouldn't have bothered with them.

But my father always did. He'd come home on a December night, a man with a mission, dragging in a long, skinny sapling, branches awry, half its needles frozen, the other half gone. "It's ugly," my mother and I would say. "It's a work in progress," he'd announce, then go get…

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Silver baby fork and spoon set more than just utensils

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All I did was pull open a kitchen drawer to get a butter knife.

I'd been reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, enjoying the early morning quiet. The crumbs in the divider must have been there for weeks. But I hadn't noticed them before. Now they were all I could see.

So I abandoned the paper, dumped all the silverware in the sink, got out the Comet, and began scrubbing.

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