Learning to Stop at “I'm Sorry”
/'I'm sorry," my friend Michael said. He wasn't even in the room yet. He had just opened the door and was in mid-step when…
Read MoreA Reminder of What Can Be Lost
/
It's a little book called "Yellow Star." Not many words. Written for young adults. I found it at a book sale at Rockport Public Library in October. The cover lassoed me. It's a photo of a small, somber child with cropped brown hair and clear brown eyes wearing a double-breasted pinkish coat trimmed in brown velvet. When I was small, I had a similar coat. It was plaid, but the same style and the same kind of collar. It itched my neck. I wore it the Christmas Day I was 5. I know this because my father dated the photo he took…
Read MoreYes, Manners Still Matter
/You can't make up these things. It was last month. A weekday. I was meeting Rosanne Thomas for lunch to talk about her new book, "Excuse Me — The Survival Guide to Modern Business Etiquette," because Thomas teaches manners in these mannerless times, and, God knows, a course in civility and kindness and an awareness of others are things our culture could use a dose of right now…
Read MoreTalking Beats Texting, and Yet We Keep Typing
/
'Why don't we talk on the phone anymore?" Anne and I say to each other when we do talk. When we're sitting across a table from each other playing cribbage and chatting about life and books and movies we've loved and places we've been. Across a table from each other, we never stop talking.
But we don't pick up the phone…
Read MoreHow We Live — and Die
/They insulate me from the world. They keep me away from network TV and the barrage of bad news, which is incessant. They make me pay attention to what is happening right in front of me because they are in front of me, children singing a song, reciting a poem, telling me about a book I have to read or a movie I have to watch…
Read MoreLearning to Look a Little Deeper to Discover a True Treasure
/
'You plant black-eyed peas, that's what you git," my daughter's friend says in an Oklahoma drawl she exaggerates whenever she wants to make a point. I laughed when I first heard this phrase some 20 years ago, but it's a saying our family quickly adopted.
I found myself thinking these words while listening to my granddaughter Lucy belt out the score from "Gypsy" on our drive home from seeing…
Read MoreWords May Sting, but Silence Destroys
/
They stopped speaking to each other decades ago, two cousins who lived within walking distance of one another, cousins who had been good friends, who had a shared history, who'd spent holidays and weekends and countless family celebrations together, who always got along until one of them couldn't forgive what the other insists…
Read MoreOur Lives Can Turn on a Dime — Just Look at History
/You'd think, having lived a long life, that I would know some things. And I do. I know facts. Lots of them. But not nearly enough. And I understand so few of the "why's" behind what I know.
For example: I have been reading about the Second World War since I was a child, both fact and fiction, and still I don't understand the reasons for all that happened. Last month, I read yet another book, "The Holocaust — A New History," by British historian Laurence Rees…
Read MoreChanging Lives, One Child at a Time
/
Cheryl Opper began when her only child started high school. It was November 2003, and she was 46 and wondering what she was going to do with the rest of her life. Thumbing through the pages of Family Circle magazine, she found her answer.
A woman in California had started a program to help children
Read MoreA place for men to talk about cancer
/The room looks like a private lounge at an airport. Nice carpet, good lighting, soft chairs, bright, colorful paintings, magazines and books, coffee and cookies. The dozen men who sit here, all neatly dressed, look typical. They talk. They laugh. They listen. They look as if they are discussing sports or politics or pubs in Dublin.They are, in fact, discussing cancer. Their cancer…
Read MoreIt takes a face to change a heart
/A few days ago, six of us were eating and talking about Rob Portman, the US senator from Ohio who had just announced that after a lifetime of opposing gay marriage, he had changed his mind.
His son had come out, and he had given gay marriage more thought, and I was dissing him for this, not for his change of opinion but for seeing the light only because his son, not someone else's, was gay.
And that's when my friend and teacher John O'Neil made me see the light. "It takes a face to change a heart," he said quietly.
Read MoreNo Words Can Describe Newtown's Pain
/There are no words. Yet there are only words. Tragic. Inexplicable. Carnage. Babies. Heroes.
We use words to make sense of the senseless. Charlotte Helen Bacon, 6, wanted to be a veterinarian. Daniel Gerard Barden, 7, was always smiling…
Read MoreSometimes you need to shout
/Here's what we've all been taught. To be polite. To be quiet. To not make a scene. To go with the flow. To be aware of other people's feelings.
Here's what we teach our children: To acknowledge a person's presence. To look someone in the eye. To say "please" and "thank you." To not interrupt. To say "excuse me." To be respectful.
And it's all good advice. Until it isn't.
Read MoreLearning to accept imperfection
/When a doctor at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia told New Jersey mother Chrissy Rivera last month that her 3-year-old daughter was ineligible for a kidney transplant, she was incredulous and furious.
``Did you just say that Amelia shouldn't have the transplant done because she is mentally retarded. I am confused. Did you really just say that?'' she wrote in her blog on wolfhirschhorn.org describing the meeting.
Read MoreLingering sting, and a vote for change in attitudes
/I thought I would never forget the time, the place, the season. What I wore. What she wore. The faces of the people I met that day.
But I have forgotten. It's a blur. The only thing I remember is wanting to cry.
I had taken my granddaughter, Lucy, into Boston to a modeling agency. She was 17 months old. My grandson Adam, Lucy's cousin, was barely 7 months. It was his mother's idea.
Read MoreSmiles and songs for a happy granddaughter
/Five hours in a car. It's a long time for a 5-year-old to be confined. But Lucy never complained. Not a tear. Not a tantrum. Not even a pout.
My granddaughter was happy, listening to Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella," (sung by Julie Andrews; the child has good taste) and singing along. She ate chicken fingers in a nice restaurant overlooking the water, then she was back in her car seat, singing again.
Read MoreDrop-in child-care convenient, but fraught with hidden danger
/Judith Melisi has been on a mission for more than a year now. But last June it became personal.
For months the Halifax mother had been trying to alert the owners of the health club where she works out to the dangers she saw in the child-care room. Candy that little ones could choke on brought in by older kids. Hot coffee brought in by a worker. The bathroom door left open. An electric outlet exposed.
Read MoreNot just crass, but hurtful
/First things first: "Tropic Thunder" is not an intentionally mean movie that denigrates the developmentally delayed. It is a comedy that pokes fun at Hollywood's preposterous and stereotypical portrayal of all the people Hollywood thinks it knows but doesn't. A big vulgar, way over-the-top film, it's a series of fun-house mirrors exaggerating the bloated egos of actors, producers, agents, and the never-ending sham that is pretense.
Read MoreLearning love from Baby Grace
/She wasn't the prettiest child in the room, because they were all the prettiest, babies still, not one of them over 3, flawless skin, bright eyes, shy, sweet smiles. But my daughter and I were drawn to this particular baby because she reminded us of Lucy, my daughter's little girl, with her sweet round face and her light wispy hair and the thin pale line on her breastbone that told us she had had heart surgery, too.
Read MoreBullock should have condemned drunken driving
/
I've listened to their stories - the painful tales of loss that parents, daughters, husbands, and wives tell. I've looked through thick photo albums they've placed in my hands and at pictures on mantels and walls. I've followed their slouched shoulders down narrow halls, or up a few stairs into bedrooms, where memories live. These rooms are full of intimate things - sweaters hung in closets, banners tacked over beds, books, tapes, magazines, stuffed animals, trophies, a football jacket tossed on a chair, a guitar in its case, a child's flannel pajamas, sneakers in the middle of the floor as if the wearer has just stepped out of them and will be back to claim them sometime soon.
But the wearer will never be back.
Read More