I have never seen him, the child who lives upstairs. I heard him for the first time the morning after we moved in. Elephant hooves awakened me at 6:45 a.m. I anticipated that the beast overhead would crash through the ceiling and fall in my lap. But apartment floors are apparently constructed of sturdy wood. Good thing. It is only a floor that separates us from him.
Read MoreThe 16-year-old says I stole her idea. She has been keeping what she calls a "common place book," for half a year now, since her English teacher, Mr. Schauble, introduced the concept to her class.
It's really a very UNcommon book, a journal augmented by other things, more like a scrapbook than a diary.
Read MoreYou don't have to come to New York to see "Blood Brothers," the hit London musical about twins separated at birth, one raised with money, one raised without. The story's an old, familiar one. It has been playing for centuries in cities and towns all over the world. The chasm between the haves and the have nots has always been the Great Divide.
And the chasm is getting wider.
Read MoreI don't know if an ambassador can do this. Probably not. It will probably take divine intervention on a grand scale. An edict by the pope or something. But maybe Ray Flynn can get the ball rolling. Or put a bug in the pope's ear, to coin a cliche or two.
"Here ye, here ye, Catholic Americans. Get your act together. Learn how to open your mouths, raise your voices to Heaven and praise the Lord."
We're bad at this, you know. Catholics do not sing. Protestants belt out hymns with the passion of converts, but we Catholics don't even bother to mouth the words. We stand silent in our churches and let the organists and the one vocalist who substitutes for a choir do all the work.
Read MoreListen up, folks. Have I got a hot tip for you. Forget about those lottery tickets. Forget about Suffolk Downs. You want to strike it rich? Here's how.
Go to the library, borrow "Gone With the Wind" or "The Firm" - pick a book, any book you choose, but make sure it's popular - copy the words in a notebook and then move them around a little. Change a verb here, a noun there, embellish, enhance. Invert a couple sentences, but don't deviate too much. You don't want to mess with a winner.
And you don't have to. Plagiarism isn't a bad word anymore. It's a way to fame and fortune.
Read MoreThere is something burning in my office. I smell it. Wires. Computer chips. Something electrical.
This is Day 3 of Trying To Get The Printer To Print. It's supposed to be a simple thing. Plug it in. Turn it on. Feed it some paper. Tell it what to print and sit back and relax.
This is not what has been happening.
Read MoreThis is a note-in-a-bottle-story with a new twist.
Instead of taking a group of kids to the ocean and floating their letters around the world in the hope that a few might reach some people who would write back, a teacher in Irvine, Calif., updated this age-old game.
Read MoreFerdinand Mahfood makes me uncomfortable. He is too earnest, too intense. I look into his eyes and want to turn away. I listen to his words and want to block my ears.
He tells me things I don't want to hear, about people I don't want to know, about a situation I cannot change.
Read MoreMy favorite Bible story when I was growing up was the Tower of Babel. The tale intrigued me. Here were all these people working together, co-operating, pooling their talents and energy to build a stairway to Heaven, which I thought, was a brilliant idea.
I still remember what the page looked like in the book we used: people of all different shapes and sizes and colors were stirring mortar, gathering bricks and smiling.
Read MoreCeleste House is quiet these days. The old convent, converted four years ago into a home for recovering homeless substance-abusing women and their children, is closing shop.
Most of the beds on the second floor have been stripped clean. Photographs that once covered the walls are gone. In the playroom there is just one child, for only one mother remains here. All the others have been transferred to other homes for substance-abusing women throughout the state.
Read MoreIt happened again a few weeks ago.
I saw him in a crowd, at a graduation, a boy I used to date in high school. I recognized him right away: the dark blond hair, just a little too long to be a crew cut; the thin face; the high cheekbones; the wide-set eyes. Even his clothes looked familiar: blue sportscoat, white shirt, striped tie. I started to wave to him and almost shouted, "Tom? How are you? How've you been?"
But then I realized it couldn't be Tom because Tom would be 49 or maybe even 50 by now and this Tom was just a boy, not even 18.
Read MoreIt isn't news anymore, because it isn't new. It's a fact of life. Bad service is standard. Good service is rare. And it's getting rarer every day.
You walk into a store in search of a particular item and you see salespeople, but they're talking to one another. They ignore you. You wander from rack to rack - it's obvious you're looking for something - but no one comes near you. The salespeople continue to talk.
eopSo you leave. You go to another store. But it's the same there. Salespeople standing around neglecting customers.p
Read MoreI read a few weeks ago that the hottest home videos these days are the X-rated kind. Absolutely normal Americans are setting up cameras and performing all kinds of sex acts for the not-so-private eye, then selling these feats of fancy so that others can observe and maybe get in the act, too.
There was no hint, of course, that this behavior might be slightly abhorrent. There was not a single syllable of moral wrestling in the piece. It was straight news. This is what people are doing.
Read MoreI was going 75 mph in a 65 mph zone. It doesn't matter that other motorists passed me at faster speeds and didn't get caught. It doesn't matter that millions of people drive more than 10 mph over the speed limit every day. I was breaking the law and the police officer who stopped me was doing his job.
I didn't beg or cry or plead when he pulled me over, though I would have if I'd know what was going to happen. I didn't even tell him that my father had been a police officer.
"You want to hear my excuse?" I said.
Read MoreSome are piled in a box on a table. Some sit in a black plastic tray on my desk.
I divided them when they arrived. The to-be-answered-immediately, I placed in the tray. The to-be-answered-later, I stacked in the box.
I shouldn't have put them in either place. I should have stopped what I was doing and written back right then, but I didn't for a million reasons. I was in the middle of something. I was walking out the door. I wanted to think about what to say. I wanted to write more than a quick note. Something or someone else needed my attention.
Read MoreA friend, a newspaper reporter who'd retired to write books, set up the interview. It was a long time ago and a long drive away. I hadn't thought about that interview for years. I’d buried it in the place where hurts and humiliations get locked up.
I don't even remember the interviewer's name. But his words live in granite.
Read MoreLove thy neighbor. This is what we're called to do. Every day of our lives. But most especially this week, Holy Week.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. This is what we pray. But how do you forgive? How do you let go of hurt and anger and hate?
Petty things cause such wide rifts. A neighbor invites a dozen kids to a birthday party, but excludes your son. How could she be so insensitive?
"Why doesn't anybody like me, Mommy?" the child asks. And anger hardens and becomes cement around the heart.
Read MoreI wanted her to put it in writing. I asked her, but she thought I was joking. I wasn't. She was remembering a me I no longer am. She was remembering a me my children have never even known.
"You made the best clothes in the class," she told me at the gym the other day. In my new incarnation, I work out. In my other life, I sewed.
"I was making a bathrobe and you were making a plaid jacket. I was impressed," she said.
Read MoreCross-dressing, men dressing as women, is the in thing these days, the media's newest obsession.
It's on all the talk shows; it's the linchpin of the hottest movie; it's even the theme of the Institute of Contemporary Art's new show "Dress Codes."
From androgyny to hodgepodgegyny, it's just a great, big, anything-goes, totally Mardi Gras world.
Read MoreNew to this city, to this country, he wanted to know about suburbs. What they are, exactly? What they are like?
"They're safer than cities, are they not?" he asked. And though I said, yes, they are, I didn't explain that this is not their essence; that suburbs weren't born out of a need for safety. Suburbs, after all, have their roots, not in today's fears, but in yesterday's dreams.
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