Dancing to Remember the Music of the Past

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Dancing to Remember the Music of the Past

Mrs. X is lovely, a fellow passenger tells my husband and me. But she doesn’t speak much. When asked a question, her husband always answers. Even if it’s a simple question. We are seated with them one night at dinner and I meet her eyes. “Are you enjoying yourself?” I ask. And she smiles and nods and then turns to him to answer. Where are you from? And he says England. Is this your first cruise? And he tells us, no. It is one of many…

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With Each Paper Crane, a Child’s Love Takes Flight

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With Each Paper Crane, a Child’s Love Takes Flight

I keep looking at them. They arrived in a 12-by-16-inch manila envelope, addressed to my husband. So, technically they are not mine.

“I hope 73 brings you joy and happiness!” Megan, who is 11 and our son’s oldest child, wrote on a card she made for her grandfather. “For your birthday,” she continued, “I made you 73 paper cranes. Each one represents one year of your life.” My husband spreads them out on the couch. They are colorful things…

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From My Best Friend, for My Mother, a 'Dorothy' Tree

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From My Best Friend, for My Mother, a 'Dorothy' Tree

I was there when it arrived — Kismet? Coincidence? — visiting my old best friend, whom I hadn't seen in years. She had ordered it before she knew I was coming, a "Dorothy" tree she called it, homage to my mother, whose name was Dorothy.

My visit was all impulse. I met Rosemary in second grade. Throughout grade school we were inseparable. Then, little by little, we grew apart…

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Little white lies, with love

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Sometimes we lie to spare ourselves. Sometimes we lie to spare others. I like the sparing others lie.

Decades ago, when my husband was in Arizona with his work buddies, on a reward trip, a building-partnership trip, a "get out of Dodge it's winter here and perpetual summer there" trip, he called home the first night and announced, "It's raining."

"It's raining?" I said back. It hardly ever rains in Phoenix. Nearly 300 days of sun and only 20 days of any kind of precipitation, boasts the Chamber of Commerce.

"It's just a fluke. I'm sure the sun will be shining by tomorrow," my husband said confidently.

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Show respect for the ones you love

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I took it out on him, the person I love most. We do this sometimes. It was over the silliest thing: wreath hangers that went missing.

"Did you move those wreath hangers that were in Julie's room?" he asked, poking his head into my office. "I thought I left them there." I should have stopped what I was doing right then. Got up from my chair and helped him. If a friend had lost something, if a stranger had knocked on my door and said, "I had wreath hangers tied to the Christmas tree I have on my roof and they must have come undone because they're not there now," I would have put on my shoes, grabbed my coat, and joined him in his search…

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Every family loss is a part of yourself

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Every family loss is a part of yourself

My Uncle Frank died last week. He was 82, but he looked 70. He had thick gray hair and not a wrinkle on his face and he stood straight and he smelled good and he was solid and sturdy, inside and out, and I felt that strength every time I hugged him. I believed, I hoped, he would live forever. Decades ago, when he was in his 40s, doctors gave him six months to live. They told my Aunt Lorraine and she told her children and me. But she never told him.

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Stop, look closely, and you will see beauty

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Stop, look closely, and you will see beauty

It is a perfect little tree, the kind a first-grader would draw and be proud of, with a skinny trunk leading up to skinnier branches raised like a music director's skinny arms when she is beckoning an audience to sing. It's a minimalist tree. Not a stunner like the dogwood in front of the Canton Public Library or the magnolias that line Boston's Marlborough Street. Or the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., or California's redwoods. Nobody would ever stop and gape at it. Or take its picture. But I do.

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In music and lyrics, a link from her childhood to theirs

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"Tammy" was the favorite song of my best friend, Rosemary, and me. But after singing it at the Policeman's Ball in 1957, I set it aside for over 40 years. Then one night, it reappeared out of the blue when I couldn't get my granddaughter to sleep.

They fall asleep to "Tammy." It's their lullaby of choice.

"Want me to sing you a song?" I ask whenever they are mine for a night and every one of them, every time, says, "Yes, Mimi. Will you sing 'Tammy?' "

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On first school day, a flood of memories

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'It's one of those days you talk about when they are babies. . . . "She will be in 1st grade when he is in 4th.' "

This is what my daughter Julie wrote on her Facebook page last week under the pictures of her children, Adam and Charlotte, posing in their front yard on the first day of school.

Facebook was full of pictures of big and little kids shyly grinning and of moms and dads writing "Look who's excited to start her first day of school!" and "Yes, that is a tie!" and "Where does it go? Feeling old!"

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It takes a face to change a heart

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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.

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In Holiday Rush, Slow Down to Preserve the Love

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Every Wednesday night, at 11 o'clock, sometimes a little after, in a little room in a little club on Columbus Avenue in Boston, pianist Michael Kreutz plays his closing number, "What I Did for Love," a song from the hit musical "A Chorus Line." Wednesday is show-tune night at the Napoleon Room at Club Cafe, and for three hours…

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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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Here's To Love That Lasts a Lifetime

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Here's To Love That Lasts a Lifetime

t's young love that songwriters go on about and that filmmakers explore, young love that propels poetry and novels and myths and fairy tales. Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra. Lancelot and Guinevere. Jack and Rose (Remember ``Titanic''?). And, of course, today's most popular young couple, “Twilight’s”  Edward and Bella.

Young love, just out of the gate with its longings…

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Beloved Children Both, and Losses Beyond Measure

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Beloved Children Both, and Losses Beyond Measure

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not after all they have been through. Not after all the hope and prayers and therapies and people storming the heavens. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed nothing will be impossible to you. That’s what we’re told. They had faith. And they didn’t want to move anything as big as a mountain.  All they wanted was to save a child, their child, to make their child well…

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Hope Propels the Kellys

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Hope Propels the Kellys

Charlotte’s Run, which begins on April 10 at 10 AM at the Granite Grill in Braintree,(cq)  is all because of Charlotte Rose Kelly. But it is not for her. It’s to raise money to annihilate a disease that this brave but tired four-year-old has been battling for nearly two years. Charlotte was two-and-a half, when five doctors walked into a room at Children’s Hospital Boston and gave her parents, Patrice and Greg Kelly (cq) the incomprehensible news that their beautiful little girl had Stage IV Neuroblastoma, (cq) a rare and deadly form of childhood cancer...

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