Sometimes, when I am trying to cross the street in front of my house, I count the cars that whiz past. Forty-eight is my all-time high. Mostly it’s about 30 before someone lets me cross. I live on what used to be a country road but is now a busy cut-through. By the time I get from my front yard to the sidewalk across the street, I’m generally sour on the human race. That’s one reality. Here is another…
Read More‘Why are we here?” I used to know. I used to be so certain.
“We are here to know, love, and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.” That’s what the Sisters of St. Joseph drummed into my 6-year-old head. That’s what I read in “The New Baltimore Catechism.” That’s what I recited day after day after day. So that’s what I believed. This life is temporary. The next is eternal. Sister said. Father Finn said. My mother said. So who could doubt…
Read MoreIf you look at statistics, you can convince yourself it isn’t so bad. What’s the chance of a child getting shot and killed at school? It’s less than getting hit by lightning. It’s less than being kidnapped. It’s less than dying in a car crash. So the numbers are with us, right? But it doesn’t feel right. And every time there’s another shooting, every time another child is murdered, it feels terribly, terribly wrong…
Read MoreI don’t know if, when you’re in second grade, you can actually want to be someone else, erase who you are and become that other. Maybe what’s truer is that you want to stay who you are, but embellish yourself somehow, like store-wrapped chicken pounded and garnished, chicken still, but fancy now, dressed up as chicken piccata. Rosemary Jablonski was my chicken piccata…
Read MoreWhat I want to believe is that people are good, that when push comes to shove, even strangers have your back. Because, really, they do. How many times has each of us been helped by someone else?
“Have a seat.” “What can I get you?” A hug. A ride…
Read MoreThere is no cure for Rett syndrome. Nor is there an A, followed by B, followed by C, predictable, sequential decline. The genetic neurodevelopmental disorder is unpredictable and fierce. Bella Rutko is one of its victims. She’s 9 years old…
Read MoreI'm starting with Jenny Wolicki because she is the reason I began to notice all the good and selfless things that young people do…
Read MoreElizabeth Dawe is a beautiful little girl who doesn't realize how much she's been through, that life's been harder for her than it's been for her siblings and cousins and friends. The soon-to-be 9-year-old — her birthday is Feb. 12 — was born with…
Read MoreI never called her Carmela. She was always Mrs. Denneno to me. "Hi, Mrs. Denneno?" "How are you, Mrs. Denneno?" "What's new?" "How are the kids?" These are the questions you ask people you know, but don't really know…
Read MoreThe clear, glass jar sat on her kitchen island for days last January before I said anything. At first there was just a single piece of folded yellow paper inside. But then, come February, there were more pieces of yellow. That's when I got curious.
"What is this?" I asked my daughter, Lauren.
Read MoreWhen my granddaughter Lucy, who has Down syndrome, was born almost 13 years ago, only my daughter's friend, Kerry, without missing a beat, congratulated us.
Everyone else, including me, was full of sorrow and sighs.
This was before the Internet began spreading good news…
Read MoreThis is what haunts me. That Bella Bond's horrific murder was not a single act of violence, an aberration in an up-to-then perfect, storybook life. But that this little girl suffered every day. Conceived in a drug-induced haze in an Occupy Boston tent, she never met her father. Prosecutors say she was murdered on a mattress on a cluttered floor…
Read MoreI am looking at my grandson Adam's picture as I write this. His mother snapped it with her iPhone, an old iPhone so the picture is pixelated and a little out of focus. Still, you can see the joy in his face, a child's joy; unmasked is the word, I think. But it's the wrong word because Adam is only 11 and has nothing yet to hide…
Read MoreHarper Lee kept the text of her first novel under lock and key for 58 years…It has as much drama and as many characters as a Russian novel and is almost as hard to follow, with all its twists and turns. An elderly woman with diminished capacity. A dead sister. A fired agent. A new agent. An old friend. A disgruntled author. A should-she-be-trusted trustee.
Read MoreI have known for months that she is moving. Late October, early November, that's what she told me all spring and all summer long. She's been fine with it. And I've been fine. Still, when November dawned and there was a moving truck in her driveway across the street and movers carrying out boxes of her things, my heart felt like…
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreCharlotte, who is six, caught her foot on a mat a few weeks ago, tripped, and went head first into a glass door at her dancing school. The glass shattered, Charlotte fell through it, and hit the ground bleeding.
Her mother (my daughter) was right behind her and froze. Other mothers came running. Someone called an ambulance.
By the time I got to the hospital. Charlotte was lying on her back on one of those roll away beds behind a curtain in the emergency room. Her mom was calm and talking to her. Staff was calm. Even Charlotte, pale and bloody, was calm.
Read MoreEvery 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…
Read MoreThere 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 MorePlanting bulbs is an act of faith. You dig holes, take some dry, scaly ugly things out of a paper bag, place them right side up in the holes, cover them with dirt, watch rain and snow and ice entomb them. And you wait and wait and wait, believing they will transform themselves into things of beauty. When I was a kid, one of my favorite ``Superman'' episodes - the old black-and-white half-hour show starring George Reeves - showed the Man of Steel holding a piece of coal in his hand and squeezing it, turning the coal, in seconds, into a diamond. That's what the Earth does, Superman explained, only it takes the Earth a million years. This was magic to me…
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