An excess of riches

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The OxFam banquet was a month ago, an event associated with Thanksgiving, not Christmas. And yet the image created there lingers, because what was glimpsed isn't seasonal. It's constant, the way things are every day. That night hundreds of people came to the great hall at the Park Plaza Castle to either dine at a table dressed up for a celebration, to have a good meal, sip wine and be feted; or to sit on the floor and eat rice. It was the luck of the draw that divided the group. Everyone paid $25. But everyone wasn't treated equally.

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Life's forgotten become family at Pine Street Inn

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I should have counted the steps from the Herald. It couldn't have been many. It was no more than a five-minute walk. And yet the walk took me to the other side of the world. The Pine Street Inn isn't on Pine Street. It's on Harrison Avenue, in an old building that looks like most old buildings in this city, brick on the outside,cinder block on the inside. I arrived there with preconceptions. The homeless are alcoholics, drug users, people who have…

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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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Are you a slob? Just blame poor grandmom

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My mother-in-law makes her bed the minute she gets out of it. So does my friend, Anne. Pat keeps Windex and paper towels in the bathroom and wipes down the sink in the morning before she leaves for work. Caryn folds clothes when the dryer buzzes. A different Ann vacuums her garage once a week. Each insists that what she does is easy. "If you make your bed right away, it's done for the day," my mother-in-law likes to say. "Plus it tidies up the room." "If you empty the dryer when it buzzes, then you don't have to iron the clothes," Caryn continually tells me. "It only takes a second. And it saves so much time."

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`Garbage' movie

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My fault. I chose to go to the movie. No one forced me. My 14-year-old had seen it the night before.

"It was so scary," she said.

She hated it. I assumed I'd love it because I like scary movies - "Psycho" scary, "Fatal Attraction" scary, bloodless, I'm-gonna-get-you, bogeyman in the closet, scary.

"Cape Fear" I thought was that kind of movie. I knew it was about a guy, just out of prison, who stalks and terrorizes the lawyer he blames for his long prison term. I anticipated revenge in terms of psychological horror - footsteps on the stairs, creaking doors, shadows in the dark, spine-tingling menace. What I didn't expect was unrelenting violence, Freddy Krueger style.

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War's trauma remembered

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I wasn't there. I hadn't been born. I don't remember.

And yet I do have memories pieced from stories I was told and stories overheard, and television and movies and books. A photograph of a uniformed boy hung on a parlor wall, but the memory is fuzzy, the boy's face unclear. Army? Navy? Air Force? In which did he serve? I don't know. I was five, maybe six. I don't remember the boy's name; I couldn't pick him out of a crowd. But I know he was a boy, not a man.

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Adolescents talk about sex, not love

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They are seventh and eighth graders, ages 11, 12 and 13. I teach them writing once a week, in an after-school program they have chosen to attend. They are bright kids, interested and interesting, but more important than smart, they're sweet. Half child, half teen, human beings brimming with potential. In class last week I asked if they thought public schools should give out condoms. Eighteen of the 19 who responded said yes. Here's a sample of what they said: "I think it is a good idea to distribute condoms throughout the school system," wrote an 11-year old

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Condoms: The `safe sex' myth

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The argument is that they're going to do it anyway. "Nothing will stop kids from having sex. Nothing has ever stopped them. At least if they use condoms they'll be safe." That's what my friend says, and three 14-year-olds agree. These 14-year-olds, like most American kids, are used to watching people "do it" on TV, are accustomed to reading magazines brimming with sexual advice, are constantly digesting ads that romanticize and trivialize sex, are always listening to "sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it, but everybody should" songs. Many get the same message when they see their parents leave home and them for a life of sex and ease.

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And they all forget to ask kids

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The child in me sees things clearly. She watches as I struggle to identify what's wrong with public education. She waits as I read the experts, even allows me to make some vague generalizations studded with silver-dollar words before tapping me on the shoulder and saying: Wait just a minute. Do you really want to know what's wrong with public schools? Do you really want to know how to make things better? Then put your notes down, sit a while and think.

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An AIDS sufferer speaks out

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Nothing seems wrong. Midge Foster, 46, a woman with blond hair and a warm smile, answers the door in sweatpants and a shirt, greets her guest, pours two cups of coffee and the pair sit in the living room and talk in normal voices, as if they are talking about normal things. But what they are discussing is not normal. It's something that wasn't supposed to have happened. Three years ago, Foster, who lives in North Attleboro and whose only daughter is grown, joined the convent. Two and half years later, before taking her final vows, she decided to leave.

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Smashing pumpkins and trust

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I look out my office window and see the giant spider's web, which had filled half the front yard, hanging in pieces. He/she/they didn't totally destroy it this time around. Two weeks ago, on a Sunday morning I opened my front door and the web was gone, just yarn on the ground. My husband wove it again. He took more white yarn and cut two more stakes and strung the wool as a spider would do, carefully, methodically.

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How does the meanness grow?

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They were walking down the street coming toward each other from opposite directions, carrying books, obviously on their way home from school.

She wore a cotton skirt and a navy blue sweater and a white headband in her dark brown hair. He wore pants and a green-and-white windbreaker and a Little League baseball cap. Both were about 9 or 10 years old and strangers, you could tell, because they didn't hurry toward one another, or wave, or roll their eyes, or smile. But they didn't study the ground or turn away, either.

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Government has no legitimate role in abortion issue

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Here I am in the middle of the road, a solid yellow line going in both directions.

What do I think about abortion?

I try not to think about abortion. It's too complicated, too controversial. I back away from the issue. You don't know a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. Who am I to tell anyone else what she should do? Judge not lest ye be judged. And yet, and yet ...

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Believable Hill ruins good man's solid rep

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All the time Anita Hill was speaking, all the hours she sat calmly, politely answering what I considered to be vicious, personal attacks on her word, I believed her. I believed her because she was unflappable. I believed her because she was well-educated and well-spoken. I believed her becausethere was no apparent reason for her to lie. What did she have to gain? Why would she expose herself to humiliation and inquisition, if she were not telling the truth? Mostly I believed her because I put myself in her place.

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A drunken driver claims another life

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I write words and the words mean nothing, because I write about what's here and not what isn't here. And it's the void, the emptiness, that is the story. A man and a woman sit in the living room of their immaculate suburban home. On a table there are ceramic sneakers. On the couch there is a stuffed dog. Underneath the coffee table there is a real dog, a basset hound. On the walls there are pictures, and on the credenza more pictures. None of these things matters. They are weights which keep the people from floating away. They are props from a play long closed.

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Promises are just words, and court orders mean zip

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She called last week, upset, frustrated, furious. Her husband walked out on her 12 years ago leaving her with four children, 10, 9, 6 and 5. He still loved her, he told her then. He was just tired of being married. "But don't worry," he said. "They're my children and I intend to provide for them. Don't you think for a minute that I'm deserting you." Yet that's exactly what he did.

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TV sends kids wrong message on sex

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He was a clean-cut, bright, on-his-way to Annapolis kind of guy. She was his female counterpart: pretty, smart, studying to be a reporter. They were just high school kids, but they were mature, sensible kids. No need to worry about them. They were in control. They knew what they were doing. Before they made love, he told her that she was the first girl he had ever been with. He was the first for her, too, and so they weren't worried about something like AIDS. Pregnancy was their only fear and since they were mature and sensible, they were careful - eventually.

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Spiritual poverty & disrespect for life are causes of violence

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I used to think it was congestion that made people mean. People living too close to one another. People squeezed into tiny apartments. People made to share small rooms. But it isn't that at all. People huddle together in tents and rooms and apartments all over the world, and most don't wind up killing one another with guns or with knives, or the way many of us do in small, hurtful ways.

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