There is not even an attempt to keep them quiet. They swarm into Concord's Alcott School auditorium, at 10 o'clock on a Friday morning, all of them happy because they're missing something - arithmetic or social studies or science; most of them chatting, a few of them shouting. The din is festive, chirpy, happy, full of kids' sounds.
Read MoreThe phrase has taken a beating in the last few weeks.
Say the words, "family values" and your commercial value plummets. It's safer to be snide, easier to drag out Ozzie and Harriet and sneer, "Yah, but look what happened to them!" It's far more fashionable to denigrate the notion of family than to think about what family really is.
Family is not Ozzie and Harriet.
Read MoreIt isn't a cloud over her head. Nothing so buoyant, so graceful, so small. It's a weight that she carries. But not like stone. Stone doesn't wrap itself around you; stone doesn't bleed. She carries the weight of a child, her child, 25 pounds, 36 inches, 22 months old.
He had blond hair and a tinkly laugh, and he grew in her womb and even when she was nine months pregnant and heavy, her stomach huge, she felt light compared to how she feels now. Now even her fingernails feel heavy on her hands.
Read More"Life in the Ghetto" is a non-fiction children's book, written and illustrated by 13-year-old Anika D. Thomas. You read it and you think it's horror fiction. It can't be true. You don't want it to be true.
On the front cover against a background of coloring-book red bricks, is a child's drawing of a girl's face. The girl in the drawing is crying.
On the back cover is a photograph of the author standing in front of her red-brick home. The windows behind her are boarded up. Trash litters the ground. But the steps to her apartment are clean.
Anika is smiling in the picture, but it is fake, a smile-for-the-camera pose. Her arms are folded and her eyes avoid the camera's lens.
Read MoreNewsweek's cover story this week is about the riots in Los Angeles. There's a two-page picture-spread of the city's destroyed buildings. A couple of pages are dedicated to political analysis. There's a section on race and crime, a page about the ethnic diversity of L.A., a page about welfare, a page highlighting George Bush, another homing in on Peter Ueberroth and three pages which, in Newsweek's own words, offer a "close-up look at life and death on one city block."
Ending the piece, on the final page, is a list of the names and the races of the 54 men, women and children killed in the riots. At the top right corner there's a color photo of DeAndre Harrison, 17, dressed in a white suit, his hands folded in front of him, lying in his coffin.
Read MoreWilliam Safire, the New York Times' resident expert in the use of the English language, made a mistake last week. He wrote: "The last time a dying man ran for president of the U.S. was in 1944." This is not true. Franklin Roosevelt WAS dying when he ran in 1944, but so is every man who is running for president now. We are all dying from the moment we are born. We don't like to think about this, but death is our destiny. None of us knows when or how or where we'll die. We don't come with guarantees or promises. We simply are until we are not. To quote an Elton John’s song, we are all "candles in the wind."
Read MoreIt was just another breakfast. I didn't want to go.
Eight a.m. is too early for small talk and smiles. I enjoy sitting at my kitchen table, reading the paper in silence, then facing the day.
But Karen Schwartzman from the Bank of Boston called and lured me. She said I'd get a chance to meet Margot Stern Strom, who is not only the executive director of Facing History and Ourselves but one of its two founders.
Read MoreI have accepted his words and his love, the way an infant accepts food. I've never wondered at them before. His letters have arrived sometimes in clusters, sometimes separated by weeks. I've relished them all. They are breezy, newsy, funny, warm, full of joy and wonder and life. I've shared them with my husband and children and answered some, but not all.
Read MoreYour column in Wednesday's Globe was impassioned and well-written. You know how to squeeze the most emotion from every word. You're good at what you do. But you don't do much good.
You hate too much. Your words divide. They make the chasm between whites and blacks grow just a little wider. They deviate and they deceive.
Read More"Some of you are saying to yourselves that there is not much that one person can do. But I tell you that together, we can prevail." - Jerry Brown, Oct. 21, 1991, announcement speech.
Politicians dismissed him. The press disparaged him. The pundits - the self-acclaimed experts who make their living telling us what we've just heard and what we should think - totally disregarded him.
Read MoreThere is no warning. The earth doesn't tremble. The sky doesn't darken. A siren doesn't sound so that you can run for cover, so that you can steel yourself for pain.
It's a direct hit every time and the pain is like nothing you've ever felt before. It burns, rips, chokes, suffocates and inundates every limb,every muscle, every cell, every thought, every breath.
It strikes the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children, family and friends of 23,000 Americans every year.
The pain doesn't pause. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't abate.
And it never goes away.
Read MoreA man phones and says, "What's with this Jerry Brown, anyway? I'd never vote for a man who wears a turtleneck."
Truth. What can I say? There's nothing wrong with wearing a turtleneck? He looks great in a turtleneck? What's the hang-up with the turtleneck anyway?
I say all these things. The man insists the tur-tleneck looks stupid. "Don't you care about the issues?" I ask.
"I care about how the president of the United States looks. That guy looks like a dippy hippy."
Read MoreI embarrassed her the other evening. I didn't mean to. The problem with me is that I look at her and see a child, a little girl, although she is 15 now and hardly a little girl at all.
I walk into a restaurant and there she is, somewhere I don't expect her to be and I give her the third-degree. I say she should have phoned and told me where she was going. I say I don't want her in a car with a driver I don't know. I overreact. I behave like my mother.
Read MoreHe looms for me in death larger than he did in life. He was just my neighbor, after all, a man I saw only once in a while; a man whose company I enjoyed, but more of an acquaintance than a friend. I shouldn't miss him. Entire seasons would pass and I wouldn't see him. And yet now, just a week after his death, his absence feels huge, and my heart is strangely sore.
Read MoreShe is 17 and beautiful, not just on the outside, with her dark hair and Snow White complexion and her perfect teeth, which never needed braces; but on the inside where it counts.
She has always been beautiful: interested in other people, careful about their feelings, warm, considerate, a smiling, sweet, loving, gentle, wonderful girl.
Read MoreIn the middle of exams she called from school to tell me that I am the only mother she knows who didn't send a survival package to her overworked, over-stressed, over-programmed daughter, that I am the only mother who never sends packages.
Why don't I bake brownies and rush with them to the post office, she demanded to know. Why don't I stock up on candy and granola bars and Advil and Nyquil and wrap them in tissue and pack them in a box and send them air mail, special delivery to the away-from-home daughter I say I love.
Read MoreI wasn't all that eager to meet him. His reputation preceded him. He is Mr. Southern California, Mr. Moonbeam, not a person to be taken seriously.
Not that many of the presidential candidates should be taken seriously. With the exception of Paul Tsongas, they are all the same. Same suits. Same smiles. Same empty promises.
Read MoreI don't think I'm biased. Well, maybe a little, but not much. I love her, that's a fact. But it's not the kind of love that blurs reality. I don't think she's perfect. She's just a typical 14-year-old kid.
But on the balance beam and on bars and on the floor when she's doing her routine, when her hair is in a pony-tail and her back is arched and her toes are pointed and her legs are straight, she isn't 14 at all. She is ageless; she is art, all liquid and grace with movements that are cool and smooth and satisfying.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreTheir eyes are dry when they talk about him. Father, mother, brother, all are composed. In 21 years, you learn composure. You learn to tell what happened in a voice that doesn't betray your soul. You learn polite phrases that put strangers at ease. "He was always a happy-go-lucky kind of kid." "He never gave up."
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