Well-behaved kids give back what they take in - respect

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I met them the first time when they walked into my mother-in-law's house with their parents on New Year's Day four years ago.

"My brother's daughter, Jeannie, is coming with her family to visit all the way from New York. Won't you stop by and visit, too?" my mother-in-law phoned to ask.

I bet I groaned about having to visit someone I hardly knew. I bet I complained about all the things I had to do: take down the tree, vacuum up the pine needles, get my life in order, ready the slate for the new year.

I know I went to my mother-in-law's intending to stay just a little while. But that was before I met Jessica, Tabitha and Xena.

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Fisher Price people don't kill kids; guns do

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Usually I read these things and take them for what they are: a warning that once I would have memorized, but that now I just peruse. I don't have little kids anymore. I don't need to worry about toy safety.

But the story was about Fisher Price's Little People and though it has been years since I picked up the cow and put him back in his barn, and arranged the plastic children in their swings, I finished the article because of all the toys my children had, Fisher Price Little People were my favorite. Even the words on a printed page evoke nostalgia.

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Who steals their smiles?

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In pictures they're smiling. Check out the magazines. Notice the ads. Look at the pretty girl with the good-looking guy - no worry on her face, only a smile.

On TV it's the same, and in movies. Smiles, smiles everywhere. Everyone is grinning. Everyone is cheerful. Everyone is having a good time. This is what we are supposed to be doing - smiling, connecting, enjoying life.

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`You don't count. Sit down'

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I never thought I would love her. I never dreamed I could even like her. I answered the phone and heard her voice, unrecognizable after 32 years. When she identified herself and asked me to come and see her, I said yes, out of duty and curiosity and perhaps even old-fashioned respect.

That's what I told myself. That's what I wanted to believe. But I went for more selfish reasons than these. I went to see if she were as mean I remembered; to show her she was wrong; to once and for all open the door on a moment that has colored my life, then slam it shut and lock it forever.

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Real life fear is worst of all

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It's the story I hear most often. I will be listening to someone tell me about a day spent at the beach 30 years ago, a glorious day. Everything was perfect until.

And suddenly I will be listening to a different story, a story stained with bewilderment and betrayal and tears. I will be talking to a woman whose husband drinks - he didn't always drink, he used to be a nice guy. You should have known him when.

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Today's kids are forced to become adults too early

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You sit and listen to kids talk today and it about breaks your heart because they're not kids anymore. They know too much. They've lived too much. They're only 6 or 8 or 12 or 14 and they have adult worries. Their parents are divorced or their mother's an alcoholic or their father's abusive or has a girlfriend or is never home or is always home because he lost his job two years ago and hasn't worked since.

They spend their days in front of TV watching people cheat and lie - on the news, on soap operas, on sitcoms.

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This play taught its performers joy of harmony

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There is not even an attempt to keep them quiet. They swarm into Concord's Alcott School auditorium, at 10 o'clock on a Friday morning, all of them happy because they're missing something - arithmetic or social studies or science; most of them chatting, a few of them shouting. The din is festive, chirpy, happy, full of kids' sounds.

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13-year-old's book brings ghetto life into focus

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"Life in the Ghetto" is a non-fiction children's book, written and illustrated by 13-year-old Anika D. Thomas. You read it and you think it's horror fiction. It can't be true. You don't want it to be true.

On the front cover against a background of coloring-book red bricks, is a child's drawing of a girl's face. The girl in the drawing is crying.

On the back cover is a photograph of the author standing in front of her red-brick home. The windows behind her are boarded up. Trash litters the ground. But the steps to her apartment are clean.

Anika is smiling in the picture, but it is fake, a smile-for-the-camera pose. Her arms are folded and her eyes avoid the camera's lens.

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Lessons in a summer garden

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Lessons in a summer garden

t must be a byproduct of age. It must develop like a taste for lobster or pate, or like gray hair, slowly, but inevitably. How else to explain it? When I was young I used to hate working in a garden; now I'm old and I love it. Why?

When I was a child, you couldn't lure me outdoors. My mother tried. She bought me a package of bachelor button seeds and a planter at the five-and-ten and brought in from outdoors a pail full of loam and said, "Here, now you can grow your own garden." She must have believed that once I saw life spring forth from seeds I had personally buried in dirt I would be awed and treasure all life that emerged from the ground. But it didn't work that way. I didn't have any interest in the seeds…

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Childhood joy: It can't last

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There's this little girl, just 13 months old. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, her father tells the woman next to him. She is toddling around the doctor's waiting room totally unconcerned that everyone else is sitting. She races to the TV, stares at it for a minute, then turns away. She picks up a book she finds on a chair, looks at it, then puts it down. She approaches a stranger, meets the stranger's eyes, grins, then runs back to her father who hasn't for a second taken his eyes off her.

She is a tiny thing, a baby, still bald, the blond fuzz on her head barely visible. She wears pink pants and a teal green sweater and a grin that shows off her teeth. Her mother is in the doctor's office because within weeks she will be having another baby. But it's clear the father is totally enthralled with this one.

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Divorce, Sesame Street style

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The saddest story in the news last Friday had nothing to do with crime or politics or the economy. It had to do with the way we live our lives, and the way we treat our children. It was a heartbreaker, yet relegated to the back pages, as if it meant nothing at all.

Sesame Street announced that it was putting its new episode about divorce on hold because the preschool children who had previewed it had become upset and had found it too painful to watch. The Snuffleupaguses were splitting up and the kids didn't like it a bit.

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The making of a child athlete

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I don't think I'm biased. Well, maybe a little, but not much. I love her, that's a fact. But it's not the kind of love that blurs reality. I don't think she's perfect. She's just a typical 14-year-old kid.

But on the balance beam and on bars and on the floor when she's doing her routine, when her hair is in a pony-tail and her back is arched and her toes are pointed and her legs are straight, she isn't 14 at all. She is ageless; she is art, all liquid and grace with movements that are cool and smooth and satisfying.

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Another change, a memory lost

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I don't get sentimental over the closing of stores anymore. Things change. Things change so often and so fast that change itself isn't as dramatic as it used to be. One store pulls down its shades, and a few weeks later another opens its doors, and for the most part, I hardly notice. But I used to. I used to mourn the passing of the places I frequented as a child. I carried a mental picture of the way things were, the way I thought they always would be, and I expected life to honor that picture. I wanted the places I loved to stay just as I remembered, untouched like the room of someone on a vacation, who at any moment may return.

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Holiday shopping: Love made it fun

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The woman was hassled. You could see it in her eyes, in the way they darted about the place, and in her footsteps, quick and impatient, eager to keep walking past. But the storefront intrigued the little girl at her side. "What does the sign say, Mommy?" the child asked. "It says, `All items $1,"' the woman explained. "You mean everything in that store costs a dollar?" the child said.

"That's right," the mother replied.

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Child is the real victim of divorce

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Sometimes you don't want to hear it. You want to drive past the house, away from problems that shouldn't exist at all.

He said this. She said that. He has a lawyer. She has a lawyer. Two adults who vowed to love each other now spend their time tearing each other apart. And in the middle there is always a child, a bewildered child, who loves them both. This time the child is not even 3 when Mommy leaves.

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