Beware of evil, but be aware of the good in life

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There it is. On my bulletin board. Someone sent it to me. The rules for life. "Share everything. Play fair. Put things back where you found them. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. Flush."

I always smile when I read this. Most days I marvel at the wisdom in such brevity. But today I think they were rules for a gentler time.

A woman tells me that her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11 years old.

"Do you mind?" he asked her.

"You're my father," she said.

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American dream needs a new look

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The Boston Herald

February 28, 1992

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Newsweek's cover story this week is titled "America's Lost Dream" yet it isn't about a lost dream at all.

It's about a dream come true, about a country that grabbed for the gold ring and got it, that got everything it ever wanted, and then some, and now must decide what it wants next.

Since the end of World War II, life in America has improved in countless ways. Jet travel, air conditioning, interstate highways, direct long-distance dialing, television, automatic washers and dryers, antibiotics - all these things have made our lives more comfortable.

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Gun lovers blind to consequences

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Nine days ago, Jim Brady, the former White House press secretary who was shot in the head and left permanently disabled by an assassin's bullet intended for President Reagan, was booed off the stage at the University of Nevada by opponents of gun control.

He and his wife, Sarah, had traveled to the school to give a speech in support of gun control. The pair have dedicated their lives to this effort, trying to talk sense into people who look at Jim Brady and think, "poor guy; but that could never happen to me."

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Judge teaches kids some slay victims deserve their fate

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In the movies you root for the underdog. You enjoy seeing the bully put down. When Superman comes back to the diner after he has regained his super strength, and punches the man who pummeled and humiliated him when he was just a man, not Superman, you cheer. When the hobbled and shackled writer Paul Sheldon calls his No. 1 torturer Annie Wilkes "sick' and "twisted," then stuffs paper in her mouth and drops a typewriter on her head, you applaud.

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Real life won't let you `get organized'

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An article that ran in this paper last Sunday confirmed what I have long suspected: that it is impossible to keep up with life. That in the end the dust motes, empty soda cans and old newspapers win and all the sweeping, filing, sorting, labeling and chronicling we do in the name of order are a total waste of time. The headline stated just the opposite, of course: "Getting Organized Isn't Impossible." But after reading the stuff underneath, I'm convinced that…

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Race: It still divides people

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There's Michael Jackson doing his best, singing his heart out, spreading the message that skin color is superfluous, that people are people and "it don't matter if you're black or white."

And it doesn't. That's what most of us start out believing. There are exceptions, of course. Some people teach their children from the day they are born to hate anyone who's different from them. But this isn't about these people. This is about people whose hate is new, whose hate makes them uncomfortable, but whose feelings are born of frustration, anger and fear.

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Once, getting-to-know-you came first

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They told me I wouldn't like the movie. Too corny, the 21-year-old said. Too predictable, the 15-year-old added.

They had been disappointed so I assumed I would be, too. But I wasn't. I loved "Forever Young." It was a trip into yesterday, a love story, not a sex story, corny and predictable, yes, but who cares? It was tender instead of lewd. Imagine that in the 1990s!

Prior to the movie, I'd overheard a conversation. A girl, no more than 20, home from college for Christmas, was telling some friends about a guy she'd picked up at a New Year's Eve party. They were strangers who met around 11 p.m. and were bed partners a few hours later.

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Senseless hate is the saddest irony of all

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She used to live with them. They took her in when no one else would. She'd been staying with her mother, but the mother, one morning, looked across the kitchen table at this pregnant daughter and her young husband and said, "Go. I don't want you here anymore. Find someplace else to live." And so the couple packed their belongings, left the house, bought a newspaper, sat in the library and pored over the apartment-for-rent ads. They phoned a few, but got no results. They didn't have money for a down-payment; they had no collateral except themselves.

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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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